These animals experienced days less than 23 hours long, and years with close to 400 days.

Last time, we looked at how including intervertebral cartilage changes the neutral pose of a neck — or, more specifically, of the sequence of cervical vertebrae.

For a palaeontology blog, we don’t talk a lot about geology. Time to fix that, courtesy of my middle son Matthew, currently 13 years old, who made this helpful guide to the rock cycle as Geology homework.

Mark Witton, pterosaur-wrangler, Cthulhu-conjurer, globe-trotting paleo playboy and all-around scientific badass, drew this (and blogged about it): I liked it, but I thought it could use some color, so I hacked a crude version in GIMP and sent it to Mark with a, “Hey, please put this on a t-shirt so I can throw money at you” plea. Lo and behold, he did just that. You can get your own from Mark’s Zazzle store.

A quiz. What is this? Here it is in close-up: (Click through the pictures for full resolution.) Anyone know?

Another extraordinary specimen from the wonderful Oxford University Museum of Natural History: the skeleton of a goliath frog Conraua goliath , the largest extant anuran, which comfortably exceeds 30 cm and 3 kg in life: As noted by sometime SV-POW!sketeer Darren Naish over on Tetrapod Zoology , frogs have stupidly weird skeletons — surely the most derived of any tetrapod, despite their lowly, early diverging “amphibian”

Folks, you should all stop reading this blog right now, and get yourselves across to What’s In John’s Freezer? , the awesome new blog of biomechanics wizard and brachiosaur-cervical scan facilitator John Hutchinson.

“Sauropods are basically alien animals . . . What can be said of the habits of an animal with the nose of a Macrauchenia, the neck of a giraffe, the limbs of an elephant, the feet of a chalicothere, the lungs of a bird, and the tail of a lizard?

SV-POW! is, as I’m sure you know, devoted to sauropod vertebrae. But occasionally we look at other stuff… and you might have noticed that, in recent months, we’ve been looking at, well, an awful lot of other stuff. I’m going to continue that theme here and talk about salamanders. Yeah: not sauropods, not sauropodomorphs, not saurischians, and not even dinosaurs or archosaurs. But salamanders. Don’t worry, all will become clear.

Well, not really really. What we have here is of course the bones of all four feet of a lizard (plus the limb bones): “sauropod” means “lizard foot”, so lizard-foot skeletons are sauropod skeletons — right? (Note that the hind limbs are arranged in a weird posture here, with the knees bent forward.