This beautiful image is bird 52659 from Florida Museum, a green heron Butorides virescens , CT scanned and published on Twitter.

On 22nd December 2020, I gave this talk (via Zoom) to Martin Sander’s palaeontology research group at the University of Bonn, Germany. And now I am giving it to you , dear reader, the greatest Christmas present anyone could ever wish for: It’s based on a 2013 paper written with Matt Wedel, which itself goes back through many years slow gestation, originating in a discussion on a car journey in 2008.

As John himsef admits in the tweet that announced this picture, it’s five years late … but I am prepared to forgive that because IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO BRONTOSMASH!

I just stumbled across this tweet from bird photographer Gloria (@Lucent508). Four photos of the same individual, apparently a Green Heron.

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Daniel Vidal et al.’s new paper in Scientific Reports (Vidal et al. 2020) has been out for a couple of days now. Dealing as it does with sauropod neck posture, it’s obviously of interest to me, and to Matt.

Heinrich Mallison sent me this amazing photo, which he found unattributed on Facebook: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-17034 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“17034” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2020/01/27/shoebills-lie-and-its-disgusting/facebook_1579720176756/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/facebook_1579720176756.jpg” orig-size=“1080,1093” comments-opened=“1”

To my shock, I find that we seem never to have posted Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch Hello, ladies! on SV-POW!. His recent tweet reminded me about this piece, so here it is! {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-15878 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15878” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/03/28/hello-ladies/nicholls2013-barosaurus-hello-ladies/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/nicholls2013-barosaurus-hello-ladies.jpeg”

Having spent much of the last few days playing with the cervical vertebrae of a subadult apatosaur, and trying to make sense of those of the mounted adult, neck ontogeny is much on our minds. Here’s an example from the less charismatic half of Saurischia.

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