I’ll see your face-of-the-blessed-virgin-in-a-waffle and raise you the fourth dorsal vertebra of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype BM.R.2181 (formerly HMN S II) in a dandelion leaf: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-16141 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16141” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/06/30/its-a-miracle/img_20190629_131844/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/img_20190629_131844.jpg” orig-size=“1600,1200”

Next to Charles Knight, the Czech painter Zdeněk Burian was arguably the most influential and important of the early palaeoartists. His dinosaurs tend to have a stately quality that’s very much at odds with our post-Dinosaur Renaissance sensibilities, but which has its own charm.

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Here’s the story of my fascination with supramedullary airways over the last 20 years, and how Jessie Atterholt and I ended up working on them together, culminating with her talk at SVPCA last week. (Just here for the preprint link?

Remember this broken Giraffatitan dorsal vertebra, which Janensch figured in 1950?

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As Matt recently noted, we both have a ton of photos from various expeditions that we’ve never got around to posting — not to mention a ton of specimens that we’ve seen but never got around to working on. Here is one of the most exciting: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-14594 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“14594” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2017/12/31/the-giant-brachiosaur-cervical-of-arches-national-park/2016-05-10-10-39-21-cropped/”

Amazingly (to me, anyway), SV-POW! is ten years old today. It was on 1st October 2007 that we published Hello world! , our first post, featuring a picture of what may still be our favourite single sauropod vertebra: the ?8th cervical of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181.

Suppose that I and Matt were right in our SVPCA talk this year, and the “ Supersaurus ” cervical BYU 9024 really is the C9 of a gigantic Barosaurus . As we noted in our abstract, its total length of 1370 mm is exactly twice that of the C9 in AMNH 6341, which suggests its neck was twice as long over all — not 8.5 m but 17 m. How horrifying is that?