UPDATE much later: most of the links in this post are dead, but happily rights to my Cosmos article reverted to me a long time ago, and it’s now freely available here: Click to access wedel-2011-we-are-all-airheads.pdf – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Busy days. I just published a popular article on skeletal pneumaticity as a web feature at the Australian science magazine Cosmos.

UPDATE April 16, 2012: The paper is officially published now. I’ve updated the citation and link below accordingly. More new goodies: Yates, A.M., Wedel, M.J., and Bonnan, M.F. 2012. The early evolution of postcranial skeletal pneumaticity in sauropodomorph dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 57(1):85-100. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4202/app.2010.0075 This is only kinda sorta published.

Over at his truly unique blog Paleo Errata , Jeff Martz is claiming that Stereopairs Are Cool. This assertion he supports with the following figure that he put together, showing a set of five stereopairs of a Longosuchus braincase: Unfortunately, I am one of those who can’t “see” stereopairs, so these images are uninformative to me — or, at least, no more informative than your average inch-wide braincase photo.

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.

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.

The last time we talked about Alamosaurus, I promised to explain what the arrow in the above image is all about. The image above is a section through the cotyle (the bony socket of a ball-and-socket joint) at the end of one of the presacral vertebra.

Last year was good for sauropod pneumaticity.

Last week, for the first time ever, I spent the entire working week on palaeo.  I took a week away from my job, and spent it staying in London, working on the Archbishop at the Natural History Museum.

It’s no secret – at least, not if you’re a regular SV-POW!

[Disclaimer: in this post, I am unavoidably critical of certain aspects of particular journals.