I ended the last post with this teaser: There is another sauropod (sort of) in Episode IV (sort of), but I’ll wait a week before I blab about that one. I wonder if anyone will guess what it is in the meantime? The mystery lasted all of a single comment.

I’m sure Mike will deride this as sordid linkbait, but what the heck. I’ve been meaning to blog about the sauropods of Star Wars for a while now, and I was finally spurred into action by this comment over at TetZoo.

But also of Christmas future. Or, perhaps, the spirit (pneuma) of the season. Merry Christmas to all! We’ll see you back here in 2009.

Brachiosaurus: uglier than you think (we’re sorry, but it’s true). UPDATE: Fig. 1 from Witmer (2001) showing hypothesized position of the fleshy nostrils in Brachiosaurus. How awesome was our trip to Germany?

We warned you that the Awesome was coming … now it’s here.  The first installment of Awesome, anyway, and there’s plenty more to come. Matt and I have just returned from a nine-day trip to Germany that was pretty much Heaven-on-Earth for us.  The first three days were spent in Bonn, at the first open workshop of the DFG-funded Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism project.

Happy Xenoposeidon day!  Today, November 15, 2008, is the one-year anniversary of the publication of Xenoposeidon Taylor and Naish 2007. By happy coincidence, I’ve just been sent a courtesy copy of Kids Only , a new guide-book for the Natural History Museum … and there is Xenoposeidon on page 5, exemplifying dinosaur diversity.  Rock! It’s good to see our baby out there educating people!

Just got back from SVP, the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. SVP is always a blast; beyond the inherent coolness of four solid days of intense paleo-everything, I get a chance to catch up with my “SVP friends”–the pool of friends, some of them close, that I only see for a few days each year.

Want to see something scary? I mean really scary? OK, here you go: it’s McIntosh et al. (1996:fig. 31), showing the neural arch and spine of dorsal vertebra 6 of Camarasaurus grandis GMNH-PV 101 in anterior and posterior views: I’m sure I need hardly point it out, but this neural spine has two badgering great holes in it! What the heck?

When we were planning to start this blog, Matt wrote to Darren and me saying “I am thinking that we should keep the text short and sweet” — an aspiration that we have consistently failed to live up to. Not today! Here is Omeisaurus tianfuensis . Even by sauropod standards, that neck is just plain crazy. Omeisaurus tianfuensis skeletal reconstruction, from He et al. (1988:fig.

It’s very rare that all three of us SV-POW!ers get together: in fact, until Tuesday this week, it had only ever happened once, at SVPCA 2005. But as Matt was spending nearly a fortnight with me (Mike) in England, far from his native land — an unholy blend of Oklahoma and California — it would have been stupid not to have all got together.