Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

There is almost too much coolness going on right now. Here’s a brief rundown.

SV-POW! on Tour

Mike and I just got back to our respective homes from the AMNH, where we spent a crazy day in the big bone room and received illumination at the shrine of Barosaurus (above). We came back armed with a gig or so of cool pictures, some of which you’ll see here in the near future and some of which we’ll put off showing you until the relevant papers come out (hopefully!).

Sauropods on TV

When I checked e-mail Thursday night I found out that I had been on TV and not known it. The US-based Discovery Channel spinoff Animal Planet is running an 8 episode series called Animal Armageddon, about the great mass extinctions. I’m in the two episodes devoted to the KT. I expected that they would run the episodes in the same order as the extinctions occurred, but they’re not, which I would have known had I checked the handy-dandy episode guide here (there’s one at the Animal Planet website, too, but all their animated geegaws make both me and my computer nauseated). Why is this relevant here? Because some of my talking-head time was given over to Alamosaurus, which will be on this week’s episode if it survived the cutting room floor. Tune in Thursday, March 5, at 9 PM Eastern/Pacific to find out.

Free Papers That Are Actually Free

Finally, what about the titular free papers? SV-POW! and Tet Zoo regular Ville Sinkkonen turned up some goodies at the Biodiversity Heritage Library and passed them on to me, and now I am passing them on to you:

Holland, W.J. 1915. A new species of Apatosaurus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 10:143-145. [page] [PDF]

Gilmore, C.W. 1932. On a newly mounted skeleton of Diplodocus in the United States National Museum. Proceedings of the United States National Museum 81(18)1-21. [page] [PDF]

Young, D. 1975. Brachiosaurus, the biggest dinosaur of them all. Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 46(1):3-9. [page] [PDF]

Jensen, J.A. 1987. New brachiosaur material from the Late Jurassic of Utah and Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 47:592-608. [page] [PDF]

These are far from the only sauropod papers at the BHL; in fact, they are just the tip of the iceberg. I’m listing these four specific papers because they’re the ones Ville sent and because they exist as stand-alone PDFs. For others that you find, you can either download a PDF of the entire volume in which the paper was published, or use a nifty online PDF generator to make a PDF of just the pages you want. Click the “Download/About this book” tab on the bar above the page viewer and then “Select pages to download”. User-generated PDFs will be hosted by the BHL for a while but not forever. Ville reports that the ones listed above should be good for 30 days (through the end of March 2009); after that you’ll have to make your own. Which is not onerous at all, considering how much literature is being made available for free here. The glass is not just half full, it is running over. Go slake your thirst for obscure sauropod papers, and don’t forget to hoist a metaphorical glass to Ville, or a real one if you get the chance!