For various arcane reasons, the SV-POW!sketeers are all neck-deep in work, so the blog may actually become somewhat more of the APOD-style picture-n-paragraph thing we originally envisioned, and less of the TetZoo-style monograph-of-the-week thing it’s often leaned toward, at least for a while.

UPDATE December 3, 2009 I screwed up, seriously. Tony Thulborn writes in a comment below to correct several gross errors I made in the original post. He’s right on every count. I have no defense, and I am terribly sorry, both to Tony and to everyone who ever has or ever will read this post.

After a completely barren 2008, this year is turning out to be a good one for me in terms of publications.  Today sees the publication of Taylor (2009b), entitled Electronic publication of nomenclatural acts is inevitable, and will be accepted by the taxonomic community with or without the endorsement of the code — one of those papers where, if you’ve read the title, you can skip the rest of the paper.

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

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.

Welcome to another episode of the ground-breaking and wonderful Sauropods of 2008 series. Yay! As I’m fond of pointing out, new dinosaurs do not only come from China, or South America: Europe continues to yield surprises.

Here’s another article in my ‘sauropods of 2008’ series. Previous entries have looked at Eomamenchisaurus and Dongyangosaurus , both of which are Asian. This time round we look at a new South American taxon: Malarguesaurus florenciae González Riga et al ., 2008. In marked contrast to the majority of recent SV-POW! articles, this article really is going to be short!

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.

We have sometimes neglected tails on SV-POW!, in favour of the more obviously charismatic charms of presacral vertebrae, but every now and then you come across a caudal vertebra so bizarre that it just cries out to be blogged.

I had a new paper come out today. Unofficial supplementary info here, PDF here. I would have had all this ready to go sooner, but the paper came out sooner than I expected. In fact, I didn’t even know that it had been published until Andy Farke (aka the Open Source Paleontologist) wrote me for a PDF. Turnabout’s fair play, I suppose, because last year I congratulated Stuart Sumida on his Gerobatrachus paper before he knew it was out.