ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank the following individuals for providing access to museum collections and assistance to DS during visits of the collections: B. Herkner (Senckenbergmuseum Frankfurt a.M.), W.-D. Heinrich and D. Unwin (Museum für Naturkunde der HU Berlin), W. Joyce and D. Brinkman (Yale Peabody Museum, New Haven), C. Mehling and I. Rutzky (American Museum of Natural History), A. Henrici and D. Berman (Carnegie Museum for Natural History, Pittsburgh), M. Brett-Surman (Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC), J.F. Bonaparte and A. Kramarz (Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, Buenos Aires) and J., Y. and M. Siber (Sauriermuseum Aathal). R. Kastner (SMNK) is thanked for helping us with the chain model, and R. Schumacher (FHNW) kindly provided the 3D models. For discussions on the problems of pneumaticity we thank M. Wedel and M.P. O'Connor. The mechanical aspects of pneumatic neck support in sauropods were discussed with R. Luchsinger (EMPA, Dübendorf). We thank two anonymous reviewers for their hints and comments for improvement of an earlier version of this paper. Two further anonymous reviewers are thanked for their corrections and suggestions concerning the manuscript. We wish to also thank editors D. Polly, M. Purnell and W. Hagadorn for their continued support and suggestions concerning the improvement of the manuscript. This study was part of a project on the role of pneumatization in sauropods funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF No. 200021-101494/1 and No. 200020-109131/1).