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A sauropod for you: Gilmore’s baby Cam
Since we’ve been a bit light on sauropods lately, here’s CM 11338, the juvenile Camarasaurus from Dinosaur National Monument, in Plate 15 from Gilmore’s 1925 monograph. It’s probably the nicest single...
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Diplodocus carnegii cervicals, from Hatcher (1901)
Here are cervical vertebrae 2-15 of Diplodocus carnegii in right lateral view, from Hatcher (1901: plate 3). Click to embiggen, and then just gaze in wonder for a while. Wouldn’t that look smashing,...
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PeerJ launches today! (and we’re in it!)
Apatosaurus lousiae 1/12 scale skeleton in left antero-lateral view, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com. Today our paper on sauropod...
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Terrifying hypothetical cervical vertebrae of the Morrison Formation
In our PeerJ neck-anatomy paper, we speculated on how long individual cervical vertebrae might have grown. Here is the relevant section: Mere isometric scaling would of course suffice for larger...
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Terrifying actual cervical vertebrae of the Morrison Formation
If you found the hypothetical Amphicoelias fragillimus cervical in a recent post a bit too much to swallow, I won’t blame you. But how big do we know Morrison diplodocoid cervicals got? The longest...
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What an articulated giraffe neck looks like
The cervical series of Giraffa camelopardalis angolensis FMNH 34426, articulated by Mike and me and photographed by Mike back in the summer of 2005, cropped and composited by me recently, not...
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Specimen photos with desaturated backgrounds
Generally when we present specimen photos in papers, we cut out the backgrounds so that only the bone is visible — as in this photo of dorsal vertebrae A and B of NHM R5937 “The Archbishop”, an as-yet...
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Pacific Rim, a large-animal anatomist’s dream come true
Anyone else see these images and really, REALLY want to go dissect one of these bad boys? From the moment I saw this in the trailer, I was thinking: “WANT!” Click to embiggen, and check out the heavy...
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Plateosaurus is comical
Back in 2008, Matt and I were at the Museum Für Naturkunde Berlin. We spent some time down in the collections, where we were particularly pleased to see the much-admir’d C8 of Giraffatitan‘s...
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The first ever adequately illustrated vertebra of Giraffatitan
Janensch’s (1950) paper on the vertebral column of Giraffatitan (which he called Brachiosaurus brancai, wrongly as it turns out) is in many ways a superb piece of work. Together with a separate paper...
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All right, then, this is the first ever adequately illustrated vertebra of...
I thought I’d done a decent job of illustrating MB.R.2180:C5 last time, but Wedel was not satisfied, demanding ventral and right-lateral views as well as the provided right lateral, anterior, posterior...
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Brian Engh: Stomp time!
Because “here’s that Brian Engh sketch of a sauropod literally stomping the guts out of a theropod you ordered” was a bit ungainly for a post title. Here we have Futalognkosaurus sporting some...
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Sauropods stomping theropods: Bryan Riolo’s Chaos Gigantes
This beauty is by Bryan Riolo, aka Algoroth on DeviantART, who also let me use his giant space Cthulhu for my Collect Call of Cthulhu over on Echo Station 5-7. Update: and here, belatedly, is a link...
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Caudal pneumaticity in sauropods: in praise of actually looking at fossils
“Look at all the things you’ve done for me Opened up my eyes, Taught me how to see, Notice every tree.” So sings Dot in Move On, the climactic number of Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning music...
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Can PeerJ really be only a year old?
Today (12th February) is the one-year anniversary of the first PeerJ papers! As Matt put it in an email this morning: Hard to believe it’s been a year already. On the other hand, it’s also hard to...
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One articulated Sauroposeidon to go, hold the perspective distortion, with a...
Order up! Sauroposeidon is stitched together from orthographic views of the 3D photogrammetric models rendered in MeshLab. Greyed out bits of the vertebrae are actually missing–I used C8 to patch C7,...
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The humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax, part 1: the fossil
In the comments on Matt’s post about the giant new Argentine titanosaur specimens, Ian Corfe wondered why Benson et al. (2014) estimated the circumference of the humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax...
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The humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax, part 2: the museum mount
As we noted yesterday, the humerus of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P25107 is inconveniently embedded in a plaster jacket — but it wasn’t always. That’s very strange. I have an idea about...
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The humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax, part 3: the airport mount
Last time we looked at the humeri in the Field Museum’s mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton — especially the right humerus, which is a cast from the holotype, while the left is a sculpture. But Matt’s and...
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