By now BMNH R2095 must be the best described, most pored-over 2/3 of a vertebra on the planet. What more can we possibly have to show you? How about this dandy poster for your living room wall, or the entrance to your corporate headquarters? And of course the obligatory rotating “3D” reconstruction… And a heretofore unpublicized life restoration, courtesy of Mike Taylor.

OK, so it’s actually day 7: I missed my deadline yesterday due to that unfortunate necessity, the day-job, which had me in meetings for half of the day and travelling for the other half. Yes, I could have written this post on the trains and planes, but I had my reasons. So here we are, at last.

So… you’re publishing a new, dead exciting and all round outstanding paper on a new dinosaur – like, let’s say, the new Hastings Beds Group neosauropod Xenoposeidon proneneukos Taylor & Naish, 2007 – what now?

[Sorry about the late posting today: I had to leave the house at 7:15 to fly to Copenhagen for Christmas lunch — long story — and I am completing today’s post from my hotel room.] There’s no getting away from it: everyone wants to know how big dinosaurs are. Xenoposeidon is based on a single partial vertebra, so there is no way to be at all sure about the size and shape of the whole animal;

Welcome to our continuing coverage of the wackiness that is Xenoposeidon . I drew the ‘pneumaticity’ straw, not surprisingly, so I get to introduce the anterior and posterior views of the vertebra, which reveal some of the internal structure. But they also reveal another bit of weirdness, which is the neural canal, so let’s start there.

So, by now, most people in the known universe have heard about Xenoposeidon , know what a big deal it is, and understand its immense value and significance.

I knew that Xenoposeidon is awesome. But I wasn’t prepared for the fact that the rest of the world seems to realise this, too. I got up at 4:45 this morning to get a train into London to do, as I thought, a brief bit of film for ITN about the new dinosaur.

Today is an exciting day here at SV-POW! Towers, with the publication of the new dinosaur Xenoposeidon proneneukos , based on — you guessed it — a sauropod vertebra. The reference is: And what a vertebra it is! Let’s take a look: Here we see the vertebra from both sides: on the left side, we see it in left lateral aspect, and on the right, in right lateral.