Left lateral view Have we ever posted decent photos of the Brachiosaurus altithorax caudals? Has anyone? I can’t remember either thing ever happening. When I need images of brachiosaur bits, including caudals, I usually go to Taylor (2009). Taylor (2009: fig.

No time right now for me to dig into the interesting and important discussion on how we should orient vertebrae (here and here so far) – that will be coming soon. In the meantime, here’s something else. As printed, in one of WesternU’s 3D printers. Coming off the tray. Cleaned up and in my hand.

Thanks to everyone who’s engaged with yesterday’s apparently trivial question: what does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”? I know Matt has plenty of thoughts to share on this, but before he does I want to clear up a couple of things.

I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that Xenoposeidon is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial disagreement about one of the autapomorphies that I proposed in the revised diagnosis: “Neural arch slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character […]

I first encountered Larry Niven’s story/essay “Down in Flames” in the collection N-Space in high school.

No time for a proper post, so here’s a screenshot from Amira of Diplodocus caudal MWC 8239 (the one you saw being CT scanned last post) about to be digitally hemisected. Trust me, you’ll want to click through for the big version. Many thanks to Thierra Nalley for the Amira help.

John Yasmer, DO (right) and me getting ready to scan MWC 8239, a caudal vertebra of Diplodocus on loan from Dinosaur Journey, at Hemet Valley Imaging yesterday.

Robin N. Kok asked an interesting question on Twitter: Well, Elsevier is part of the RELX group, which has a total market capitalisation of £33.5 billion. We can’t know directly how much of that value is in Elsevier, since it’s not traded independently.

We don’t post on pterosaurs very often, but I’m making an exception for Caelestiventus. Mostly because I had the unusual experience of holding a life-size 3D print of its skull a few days before it was published.

Tired of Haplo caudals yet? No? Good – me neither. Not by a long shot. Above is McIntosh and Williams (1988: fig. 10) showing the rearticulated and partially reconstructed tail of CMNH 10380, the holotype and only known specimen of Haplocanthosaurus delfsi, in right anterolateral oblique view.

Preserved bits of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus , MWC 8028, with me for scale. Modified from Wedel (2009: fig. 10), but not much – MWC 8028 was about the same size as CM 879.