Tornieria caudals
March 23, 2010
For various arcane reasons, the SV-POW!sketeers are all neck-deep in work, so the blog may actually become somewhat more of the APOD-style picture-n-paragraph thing we originally envisioned, and less of the TetZoo-style monograph-of-the-week thing it’s often leaned toward, at least for a while.
I like it when people decorate their papers with megapixels of vertebral goodness, so here are some caudal vertebrae of the African diplodocine Tornieria, from Remes (2006:fig. 5). Click through to see the figure at its massive native resolution. And check out that pneumaticity! Really, the only question about this image is whether you can settle for just using it as your desktop background, or if you need to print out a wall-sized poster for your bedroom. So the next time you see Kristian Remes, buy him a beer for doing solid work here, on the Humbolt sauropod remount, and on pretty much everything else (including this).
Reference
Remes, K. 2006. Revision of the Tendaguru sauropod Tornieria africana (Fraas) and its relevance for sauropod paleobiogeography. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 26 (3): 651–669.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
March 23, 2010 at 9:04 pm
Nice verts, dude!
Was just skimming through a kids sci mag at lunch and came across a crayonesque masterpiece by a Kaitlynn, age 8, of a palm-tailed ‘pod, Jamboriesaurus, with a unique “tree for a tail”. So that’s what those spiked club tails were all about, disguises as club ferns & spike palms! No wonder they were pneumatically operated, being held way up in the air to fake out (and whack) the big predators. A future paleo scientist-artist is surely in the works.
March 24, 2010 at 3:07 am
I went ahead and desktopped this, only to be called serial killer. Twice. So I changed it back.
March 27, 2010 at 8:44 pm
I wish there were actually a skeletal or two done of Tornieria. In all discussions about diplodocids, the Morrison taxa seem to get most of the press while Tornieria is rather badly neglected. As I recall, though, there is a decent amount of material referred to Tornieria, so it’s not like it’s THAT poorly-known.
March 27, 2010 at 11:08 pm
:-D Very nice.. but to make it hyper-cool, they should all move sideways to and fro, with a sort of humming crunching marching sound, slowly advancing down the screen, with occasionally a higher-pitched warbling noise heralding a sauropod skull crossing more rapidly at top of screen.. and a little cannon at foot of screen with which to blast them all to pieces!
March 28, 2010 at 3:10 am
>>In all discussions about diplodocids, the Morrison taxa seem to get most of the press while Tornieria is rather badly neglected.
Definitely. I had never heard of Tornieria before.
March 30, 2010 at 10:09 pm
Sadly, I think I have a good idea why Tornieria keeps being ignored: It’s long been referred to Barosaurus and thus they tend to be treated the same (the North American material is more complete and is thus figured all the time, while the rest is unimportant; you’ve seen one Barosaurus, you’ve seen them all)
It’s just like why Brachiosaurus was rarely figured ever since “B.” brancai was discovered.
March 30, 2010 at 10:30 pm
>>It’s long been referred to Barosaurus
Ah, OK. Is this referral still accepted by some workers, or is it pretty much always on its own now?
March 31, 2010 at 12:42 am
I don’t know of anyone who’s proposed returning it to Barosaurus at this point.
March 31, 2010 at 9:38 am
Kristian’s referral of “Barosaurus” africanus to its own new(*) genus Tornieria has not been challenged in print; so far as I know, no-one’s even whined about it on the Internet, which is a bit of a first. So, yes, consider it secure.
(*) Actually the genus name Tornieria is pretty old — it goes back to Sternfeld (1911) — but for complex nomenclatural reasons was abandoned until Remes resurrected it.
April 4, 2010 at 7:33 pm
>>so far as I know, no-one’s even whined about it on the Internet, which is a bit of a first.
Probably because Barosaurus is more obscure than “Brontosaurus”, and that the “iconic” specimens of Barosaurus (AMNH, ROM) weren’t referred to Tornieria as was the case with HMN SII.
June 21, 2019 at 5:53 pm
I see no cervicals and that makes me really mad!
Would you possibly have precise measurements of Tornieria’s cervicals? And maybe the rest of the skeleton? Cause I have found the paper but I don’t trust scalebars a lot. Especially since my recent experience in architectural school taught me why digital editing can easily make scalebars wrong.
June 21, 2019 at 8:00 pm
Sorry, Dimitris, no — we have no unpublished measurements.