We all remember Upchurch and Martin’s (2002) description of the Rutland Cetiosaurus , which remains by some distance the best British sauropod specimen in the literature; and the same authors’ (2003) survey of the genus Cetiosaurus . They concluded that nearly all of its many named species are either nomen dubia or misassigned, and that only C . oxoniensis is a valid, diagnosable species.

Readers with long memories might recall that, nearly two years ago, we published annotated skeletal reconstructions of Camarasaurus and of Tyrannosaurus , with all the bones labelled. At the time, I said that I’d like to do an ornithischian, too.

It’s been a looong time coming, but I just got this email from  Ellinor Michel, Executive Secretary of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature: Fantastic news.

Last time, we looked at the bones of the sauropod skeleton, and I mentioned that “thanks to the wonder of homology, it doubles as a primer for dinosaur skeletons in general”.  To prove it, here everyone’s favourite vulgar, overstudied theropod Tyrannosaurus rex , in L. M. Sterling’s reconstruction from Osborn 1906:plate XXIV, published just one year after the big guy’s initial description.

We should have done this long ago.  Back in the early tutorials, we covered skeletal details such as regions of the vertebral column, basic vertebral anatomy, pneumaticity and laminae, but we never started out with an overview of the sauropod skeleton. Time to fix that.  This is numbered as Tutorial 15 but you can think of it as Tutorial Zero if you prefer.

This just in, forwarded to the ICZN mailing list by Donat Agosti: In short, this means that if you work on plants, you will be able, starting in January, to name new species in electronic-only publications such as PLoS ONE and Palaeontologia Electronica — publications that are becoming increasingly important due to their openness and easy accessibility. This is great news for botanists.

I have just made a series of fairly major edits to the in-progress Checklist for new zoological genera and species, and wanted to explain what’s changed and why. The important change is that the Checklist no longer attempts to encompass the creation of families, nor of all genus-group and species-group names — only genera and species.

Sorry to bump Matt’s awesome Rhea -neck post off the top of the SV-POW! home page, but I have news of the rapidly developing checklist for new zoological names.  As well as many, many minor and not-so-minor edits — and thanks to everyone who’s participated in this process — I have made a major structural change. The list has been broken into two, first enumerating Requirements and then describing Best Practice.

As we all know, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is a large and intimidating document.  As a result, zoologists naming new animals often do not read it in its entirety (I know I haven’t).  It’s probably because of this that many of the more avoidable nomenclatural mistakes occur.

I wasn’t going to write about this, partly because it’s so darn depressing, but mostly because in the wake of this comment it seemed like the “Amphicoelias brontodiplodocus” paper was being withdrawn, and to quote something Mike said off-list, I was happier about the retraction than I was sad about the implied revisionism.