After we featured Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings yesterday, the titular fellow got in touch with us and suggested an even more bizarrely named blog – Sauropod Vertebra Picture Of The Week (tagline: “All sauropod vertebrae, all the time!”). And, fair play to him, his suggestion was bang on the money.
Once you get past that quite incredible title, you’ll find a wealth of actually-very-entertaining writing about dinosaurs and such, but what hooked me were the post titles themselves.
Some examples:
“How big was Amphicoelias fragillimus? I mean, really?”
“What’s the deal with your wacky postparapophyses, Shunosaurus?”
“Things to Make and Do, part 4: brachiosaurid cervical”
Wonderful stuff, you’ll agree. Even better than that, though, is this quote from an excellent article on the aforementioned Amphicoelias fragillimus:
“Folks — please remember, the punchline is not ‘Amphicoelias fragillimus only weighed 78.5 tonnes rather than 122.4 tonnes’. The punchline is ‘when you extrapolate the mass of an extinct animal of uncertain affinities from a 132-year-old figure of a partial bone which has not been seen in more than a century, you need to recognise that the error-bars are massive and anything resembling certainty is way misplaced.’”
Who are we to argue with that?
