Thanks to the kind offices of the folks at the Field Museum, especially Fossil Vertebrates collection manager Bill Simpson, on Wednesday I got to hop the fence and spend some quality time with FMNH PR 2209, the mounted holotype specimen of Rapetosaurus krausei . I took a tape measure with me, to get some dimensions from the mounted skeleton.

I’m just back from a three-day conference in Bonn, Germany, which I unhesitatingly nominate as the best I’ve ever been to.  To begin with, the subject was a guaranteed winner: sauropod gigantism.  I can hardly overstate how awesome it was to hear 43 talks about or relevant to sauropod gigantism (sixteen on the first day, fifteen on the second and twelve on the third).

As previously reported, the lot of us are in Bonn for the sauropod biology workshop. Last night we met up at the welcome reception at the Goldfuss Museum.

I’ve been travelling rather a LOT in the last 6 weeks or so; Rhossili Bay, London, Edinburgh, Leicester, Barcelona, Cambridge. It’s so nice to be back in Bath for a bit again.

What makes America great? The Constitution, the Grand Canyon, and the Statue of Liberty would probably make most peoples’ short lists. I’d also nominate chili cheeseburgers, the fact that we occasionally elect lunatics to high office just to keep the rest of the world from relaxing too much, and, of course, roadside dinosaurs. Now, I know that there are dinosaur parks in other countries. Hell, dinosaur parks were invented in other countries.

Every year the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis in Teruel, Spain, gives out the International Award in Palaeontology Research, a.k.a. Paleonturology. ‘Paleonturology’ is a bit of a pun–it’s actually Paleon Turol ogy; Turol is the old Roman name for the area, from which the Turia river, Turiasaurus , and the city and province of Teruel are all derived.

So far we’ve had a fun week. Jean-Claude arrived in the UK on Thursday last, followed up with a talk at Bath University to people at UKOLN on Friday. The talk kicked off an extended conversation which meant we were very late to lunch but it was great to follow up on issues from a different perspective to that. Jean-Claude will be making a screencast of the talk available on his Drexel-CoAs Podcast blog.

Image via Wikipedia For anyone who is interested I thought it might be helpful to say where I am going to be at meetings and conferences over the next few months.