We’re way late to this party, but better late than never I guess. Wu et al. (2013) described Xinjiangtitan shanshanesis as a new mamenchisaurid from the Middle Jurassic of China.

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There’s a new mamenchisaurid in town!

Over on Facebook, where Darren posted a note about our new paper, most of the discussion has not been about its content but about where it was published. We’re not too surprised by that, even though we’d love to be talking about the science. We did choose arXiv with our eyes open, knowing that there’s no tradition of palaeontology being published there, and wanting to start a new tradition of palaeontology being routinely published there.

Although I’m on record of being no fan of the tabloids, there’s no doubt that they are hugely influential.  So it has to be good news to find that in the last few hours, both Nature and Science have publicly come out against the Research Works Act.

In our recent paper on how the long necks of sauropods did not evolve primarily due to sexual selection (Taylor et al. 2011), one of the ideas we discussed is that sexual dimorphism between the necks of male and female sauropods would be an indicator of sexual selection.  And, rather despairingly, we wrote (page 4): But I wonder if we realise just how true this is, and how blind we are flying?

Why did sauropods have such long necks? It’s the single most obvious and important question about sauropods, so it’s a bit surprising to think that we’ve never really addressed this question directly.

[This is a guest post by frequent commenter Heinrich Mallison .  Heinrich is maybe best known to SV-POW! readers for his work on digital modelling of sauropodomorphs, though that may change now that his paper on sauropod rearing mechanics is out.  Read on …] — Maybe this post should have been titled “How sauropods breathed, ate, and farted”. Or maybe not.

A month ago, I posted an article containing all the examples known to me of that sadly neglected palaeo-art theme, Sauropods Stomping Theropods: Mark Hallet’s Jobaria squishing Afrovenator , Luis Rey’s Astrodon biting/carrying a raptor, Mark Witton’s Camarasaurus grinding juvenile theropods to dust, and of course Francisco Gascó’s and Emily Willoughby’s Brontomerus pieces, both of them showing Bronto

In a comment on an earlier article, What’s the deal with your wacky postparapophyses, Shunosaurus ?, brian engh asked: It seems we’ve never actually featured the famous Shunosaurus tail-club here before — an amazing oversight, and one that I’m going to remedy right now, thanks to Dong et al. (1989).  This short paper is written in Chinese, so I can’t tell you anything beyond what’s in the figures, captions and