We really should have covered this ages ago …  Here we are, blithering on about brachiosaurids and diplodocoids and all, and we’ve never really spelled out what these terms mean.  Sorry! The family tree of a group of animals (or plants, or fungi, or what have you) is called its phylogeny.  The science of figuring out a phylogeny is called systematics.

Seems obvious in retrospect, but on of the great things about putting stuff online is that it may be useful to other people. What seems like ages ago I developed the Glasgow Taxonomic Name Server to experiment with searching for and display taxonomic names and classifications. As part of that work I developed a SOAP web service, and wrote a tutorial on how to use SOAP from within Microsoft Excel.

For the first time in SV-POW! history, a full week has passed between successive posts — well, at least we didn’t actually fail with the “of the week” part, even if it was a close thing. It’s been a busy week, for reasons that will soon be apparent;

It’s come up here a few times already–it’s hard to talk about sauropod vertebrae without bringing it up–but now it’s time to get it out in the open. In almost all sauropods, and certainly in all the ones you learned about as a kid, at least some of the vertebrae were pneumatic (air-filled). Now, this is a very strange thing.

At the risk of turning this blog into Brachiosaurus brancai 8th Cervical Picture of the Day, here’s a quick tutorial on your basic sauropod vertebral anatomy, using everyone’s favourite cervical vertebra. This picture shows the same vertebra as was photographed in the very first SV-POW! entry.

Howdy, Matt Wedel here. This is the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week (or SV-POW! as we like to call it), and you just got a post yesterday, so what are we doing back here already? Mike and Darren and I are trying to get SV-POW! up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible, and the best way to do that is to post. And as long as we’re posting, we might as well get a little work done, too.