Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

I asked Perplexity (Pro, if it matters). Seems pretty solid to me. I'm not sure this article is making any point other than "the knowledge back of static artificial intelligence systems is finite and they don't express uncertainty well". Amusingly it links to this blog post, but you'll see the sources it uses are largely not this post.

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The reassignment of Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus occurred through a series of steps by different paleontologists:

## Initial Classification In 1914, Werner Janensch first described the African species as Brachiosaurus brancai, considering it part of the existing Brachiosaurus genus[4].

## Path to Reclassification Gregory S. Paul made the first step toward separation in 1988 by proposing a subgenus classification, Brachiosaurus (Giraffatitan) brancai, after noticing significant skeletal differences[4][10].

George Olshevsky then elevated Giraffatitan to full genus status in 1991, though this change was largely disregarded by the scientific community at the time[4][10].

## Formal Establishment The definitive separation came in 2009 when Michael P. Taylor published a detailed study demonstrating 26 distinct osteological differences between the African and American species. This comprehensive analysis firmly established Giraffatitan as a separate genus, creating the combination Giraffatitan brancai[3][4]. From 2012 onward, most researchers have accepted this classification[10].

Citations: [1] https://svpow.com [2]…

You shouldn't be 100% convinced: obviously there are some non-trivial typesetting costs.

But general typesetting is very obviously a largely solved problem in 2025, regardless of the submission format, so since academic journals have weirdly specific input format requirements that are not demanded in other similar domains, it is clear they are doing dated / junk / minimal typesetting / formatting.

Also see what the costs are anywhere else, typesetting is a triviality:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/52009

https://www.lode.de/blog/the-cost-effective-revolution-automated-latex-typesetting-for-modern-publishers

https://svpow.com/2015/06/11/how-much-does-typesetting-cost/

https://old.reddit.com/r/publishing/comments/1cdx1jq/author_paying_for_typesetting/

I'm trying to access the source paper for this study, and am finding that despite NBER and SSRN, both generally open-access sites, as hosts, the PDF itself is paywalled on SSRN.

The backstory here is that SSRN, a site for open dissemination of largely pre-publication papers, was bought by Elsevier in 2013, to the loud dismay of the open-access community.

It seems that the predictions of what would transpire are being fully born out.

https://svpow.com/2016/07/18/elsevier-has-started-destroying-ssrn/

The Sci-Hub workaround is to chase the NBER PDF download link:

http://www.nber.org.sci-hub.cc/papers/w21788.pdf

The classic answer is that commenters on a blog become a community, and that much of the value of a blog-post is in the discussion. No doubt that if often not true; but on both of my own main blogs it absolutely is. I'll point you at one of them: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week is a palaeontology blog with a knowledgeable and thoughtful readership that often thinks of things that I and my co-author did not. See for example https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-800m-sauropod-would-look-like/#comment-223988

An interesting post I read recently about why we haven't: https://svpow.com/2024/09/07/were-not-going-to-run-out-of-new-anatomy-anytime-soon/

Of course, that's specifically about human anatomy. In this case we're talking about a feature that I'd bet is present in other animals too, so the factors discussed here don't all apply. In this case though there seems to be a straightforward answer -- the structures involved are very small! The post I linked is largely talking about larger structures we failed to find...