Today sees the publication of the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology , and with it my paper on the two best-known brachiosaurs and why they’re not congeneric (Taylor 2009).  This of course is why I have been coyly referring to “Brachiosaurus” brancai in the last few months … I couldn’t bear to make the leap straight to saying Giraffatitan , a name that is going to take me a while to get used to. But before we

I hesitate to inflict these images on SV-POW! readers, but I have to post them somewhere if only so I can point my family to them; and who knows, maybe some of the rest of you will enjoy the amusing hat. Last Friday (17th July), I drove down to Portsmouth, with my wife Fiona, to graduate — the consummation of my Ph.D programme.

Weren’t we just discussing the problem of keeping up with all the good stuff on da intert00bz? The other day Rebecca Hunt-Foster, a.k.a. Dinochick, posted a “mystery photo” that is right up our alley here at SV-POW!, but, lazy sods that we are, we missed it until just now.

For those of you who care about such things, the new issue 66(2) of the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature contains two comments on our petition to the ICZN to fix Cetiosaurus oxoniensis as the type species of the historically important genus Cetiosaurus (Upchurch et al. 2009) — both of them supporting the proposal

Big news today: Australia’s dinosaur fauna just got a little less depauperate. Hocknull et al. (2009) described three new saurischian dinosaurs in PLoS ONE, and two of them are sauropods! I’m just going to hit the highlights in this post. For all 51 pages of awesome, you can download the full paper for free. Here are the new critters (Hocknull et al. 2009:fig.

This is a taco. This is a corn dog. Here’s a cross-section of a human. In the terms of fast food, people are corndogs. Most of us even have an outer ring of yellow adipose ‘breading’. Here’s a cross-section of a cow. In an example of function following form, cows are, and often become, corndogs.

In case you’ve missed it, William Miller has been asking some great questions over in the comment thread for “Brachiosaurus: both bigger and smaller than you think“. Here’s his most recent, which is so good that the answer required a post of its own: …in birds, the air sacs are obviously useful for flight, and […]

A while back, Matt speculated on the size of the allegedly giant mamenchisaurid Hudiesaurus .  At the time, all he had to go on was Glut’s (2000) reproduction of half of Dong (1997:fig. 3), and a scalebar whose length was given incorrectly.  The comments on that article gave some more measurements, but we never got around to showing you the figures of the vertebra in question, so here it is: Hudiesaurus sinojapanorum IVPP V.

Today saw the publication of the most startlingly dull paper I’ve ever been involved in (Upchurch et al. 2009) — and remember, I write this as co-author of a paper on the phylogenetic taxonomy of Diplodocoidea.  Not only that, but one time when I was practising a conference talk with my wife Fiona as audience, she fell asleep actually while I was speaking.  Actually asleep.

Isn’t this a beauty? What is it, you ask?   We will never know.