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Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

SV-POW! ... All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695
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Sorry to keep dumping all these off-topic thoughts on you all, but I got an email from Matt today in which he suggested that there should be some system of giving people credit for particularly insightful blog comments.  (This came up for the obvious reason that SV-POW! readers tend to leave unusually brilliant comments, as well as having excellent reading taste and being remarkably good looking.)

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Author Matt Wedel

I Cannot Brain Today, I Have the Dumb Man, I hate making mistakes. The only thing worse than making mistakes is making them in public, and the only thing worse than that is finding them in published papers when it’s too late to do anything about them. About the only consolation left–if you’re lucky–is getting to be the one to rat yourself out (we have to do this a lot). So here goes.

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Author Matt Wedel

I’ve mentioned my ardent love for the Big Bone Room at BYU before. One of the cool things that you can find there and nowhere else is BYU 9047, the holotype of Cathetosaurus lewisi , referred in 1996 to Camarasaurus . In referring to the beast as Cathetosaurus in the title I’m not casting aspersions on that referral. I’m just wondering.

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Want to see something scary? I mean really scary? OK, here you go: it’s McIntosh et al. (1996:fig. 31), showing the neural arch and spine of dorsal vertebra 6 of Camarasaurus grandis GMNH-PV 101 in anterior and posterior views: I’m sure I need hardly point it out, but this neural spine has two badgering great holes in it! What the heck? This feature is seen on both sides of the vertebra, so it can’t be a simple pathology;

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Author Darren Naish

Here’s a photo that – for several reasons – I find interesting (and I hope you agree). It depicts the neck base and pectoral skeleton of the Camarasaurus mounted in London’s Natural History Museum (and is thus © NHM). I should say to begin with that the specimen is a notorious composite, combining the bits of several different-sized animals (and with some parts duplicated from the same individual). This explains why the more anterior of