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(When) will we find apatosaurines outside of North America?
My happy place: in the Dinosaur Journey collections, surrounded by Apatosaurus vertebrae. Hot on the heels of the discovery of Diplodocus in Spain (Sánchez-Fenollosa et al. 2026), I am publicly...
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The atlas/axis complex of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018 in dorsal and lateral...
(I wrote this post eleven months ago, but for some reason didn’t get around to posting it. Well, now I have. Not now, when I’m writing this sentence, but now, when you’re reading it.) Back in 2019,...
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Post DinoCon, Matt is staying at my house, and we are trying hard to push out some science. This morning as he tried to innocently drink his coffee, I bombarded him with a passage from Taylor et al....
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Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists
In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form: [NOUN] Learn how this amazing [whatsit] allowed the rise of civilization, informs every aspect of our daily lives, and...
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5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress: a bony lesion in an apatosaur femur
Here’s a short post on another 5PVC presentation: Raber et al. (2025) on a musculoskeletal lesion in an apatosaur femur. At the Utah Field House in Vernal, there’s a partial skeleton of an apatosaur...
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What’s up with your perforated parapophyseal ramus, Apatosaurinae indet. BYU...
I happened to be reading back over Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen, when something caught my eye in the example photo we used of how to capture the label and appropriately positioned scalebar...
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Five questions from Tom Redd
Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total. When I wrote to thank him his reply included “I have thousands of...
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Tate 2024 road update
With my boy Colin Boisvert at BYU. He successfully defended his MS thesis, now he’s bound for OSU-Tulsa for doctoral work. You’ll hear more about his exploits reeeeaaaal soon. Fossil vending machine...
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Variation, a cool glass, and my Tate talk
1. VARIATION You know what’s variable? Apatosaur cervicals. Top: NSMT-PV 20375, cervical 7 in anterior and left lateral views (Upchurch et al. 2005). Middle: YPM 1861, cervical ?13, in posterior and...
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New paper: pneumatic dorsal ribs in Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus
Pneumatic dorsal ribs in a selection of ornithodiran taxa. Clades that lack pneumatic ribs have been omitted, including non-dinosaurian dinosauromorphs, ornithischians, all early diverging...
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Four paths to studying pneumaticity inexpensively, and why you should
Why study pneumatic vertebrae? Becuz I wubs dem. UwU This is one of those things that has been sitting in my brain, gradually heating up and getting denser, until it achieved criticality, melted down...
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A bite-marked Apatosaurus pubis, in bone and in bronze
MWC 861 in bone (left) and in bronze (right). Here’s a cool comparo. I was on the road recently, and since I was passing through Fruita, Colorado, I got some photos of my old friends MWC 861 and MWC...
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Neck-muscle size differentials in diplodocids
Let’s look again at Figure 7 of our recent paper on bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines: Figure 7. Schematic reconstructions of ventral neck musculature in two diplodocid sauropods. A,...
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How sauropods increased the size of ventral neck muscles
Last time I promised you exciting news about sauropod neck-muscle mass. Let none say that I do not fulfil covenents. And, as usual, when talking about sauropod neck muscle mass, I’m going to start by...
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Single-segment neck muscles in diplodocids?
I don’t remember now when I first noticed bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines. I imagine 2016 at the latest, because on our Sauropocalypse that year Mike and I saw examples at both BYU and...
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What dorsal processes on cervical ribs tell us about neck muscles and their...
Bifurcated and incipiently bifurcated cervical ribs of sauropods. A, Moabosaurus utahensis holotype individual, left cervical rib BYU 14063 (not right as stated by Britt et al. 2017), probably...
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A simple, old-school paper about bifurcated cervical ribs
Everybody(*) knows that the turiasaurian sauropod Moabosaurus has bifurcated cervical ribs: it was all anyone was talking about back when that animal was described (Britt et al. 2017). We’ve featured...
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Two thoughts on blogging: thought archives, and bullets dodged
Brian Engh made this and posted it to FaceBook, writing, “Apropos of nothing here’s Mathew Wedel annihilating borderline parasitic theropods with the Bronto-Ischium of Eternal Retribution — a mythic...
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New paper: theropod bite marks on Morrison sauropod bones
Distal end of MWC 4011, an ischium of Apatosaurus louisae that got munched on by a large theropod, probably Allosaurus or Ceratosaurus. On display at Dinosaur Journey in Fruita, Colorado. New paper...
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MWC 5659 is a beautiful Apatosaurus vertebra
…that we have somehow managed to not blog about yet. It’s figured by Foster et al. (2018: fig. 18E-F), which is a free download at the link below. Foster et al. referred it and the other Mygatt-Moore...
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