As all good SV-POW! regulars will know, Elmer S. Riggs published the name Brachiosaurus altothorax in a short (but not trival) 1903 paper (Riggs 1903) and followed it up with a proper descriptive monograph (Riggs 1904) that had several useful plates.

Last night I took some boxes out to our recycling bin, and as I was walking along the back fence I did a double-take — I’d walked within a couple of feet of this opossum before I knew it was there.

My talk (Taylor et al. 2023) from this year’s SVPCA is up! The talks were not recorded live.

Here’s Mike with the cast dorsal vertebra of Argentinosaurus that’s on display at the LACM. I tried to get myself equidistant from both Mike and the vert when I took the photo, but even I couldn’t quite believe it when I looked at it on my laptop.

Back into 2019, when Matt and I visited the Carnegie Museum, we were struck by how different the necks of juvenile and adult Tyrannosaurus rex individuals are. In particular, the juvenile individual known as Jane has a slender and amost fragile-looking neck compared with the monstrously robust neck of its adult counterpart.

I popped into my local Michaels arts-n-crafts store today to see what Halloween goodies they had. One trend I can definitely get behind is the rise of anatomical oddities and cabinets of curiosities as Halloween decor.

That’s FMNH PR 25107, better known as a the holotype of Brachiosaurus altithorax — the biggest known dinosaur at the time of its description (Riggs 1903) and still for my money one of the most elegant, along with its buddy and one-time genus-mate Giraffatitan brancai.

I have often lamented that there are so very few photos of the Field Museum’s Brachiosaurus mount from that brief six years — 1993 to 1999 — when it was the centrepiece of the main hall.

For reals, tho, Megatherium, why do you even?

Most dinosaurs are elegant animals. Tyrannosaurs are elegant biting machines. Chasmosaurs are elegent. Brachiosaurs are hella elegant. Even ankylosaurs have their own robust elegance. And then there’s Camptosaurus. Why do you have to be so lumpen? What’s your head doing down there? What the heck are your ilia doing up there?

BYU 14063, a left cervical rib of the turiasaur Moabosaurus in medial view. A few sauropods have bifurcated cervical ribs. The most dramatic example that I know of is the turiasaur Moabosaurus (Britt et al. 2017). Mike and I got to see that material on the Sauropocalypse back in 2016, which is how we got the photo above.