On Thursday, I took the family to the Cotswolds Wildlife Park, a rather lovely zoo just over an hour away from us in Burford, Oxfordshire. Somehow I’d never even heard of this place until we passed a sign for it on the A417 a few weeks ago.

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Last year about this time I wrote: Here’s a stupid thing: roughly 2-3 times a year I go to the field or to a museum and get hundreds of SV-POW!-able photos. Then I get back to the world and catch up on all of the work that piled up while I was away.

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I imagine that by now, everyone who reads this blog is familiar with Mark Witton’s painting of a giant azhdarchid pterosaur alongside a big giraffe.

I’ve been reading The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (Wood 1982) again. Here’s what he says on pages 98-99 about the strength of crocodiles, and what happens when they bite off more than they can chew.

Just a quick post to link to all six (so far) installments of the “necks lie” series. I need this because I want to cite all the “necks lie” posts in a paper that I’ll shortly submit, and it seems better to cite a single page than four of them.

Folks, You may know that the inaugral TetZooCon is set to take place next Saturday (12 July) at the London Wetland Centre. It’s an informal convention that’s condensed around occasional SV-POW!sketeer Darren Naish’s absurdly informative blog Tetrapod Zoology, and features a day of talks, a palaeoart workshop and a quiz. At £40 for the day, it’s a bit of a bargain.

Order up! Sauroposeidon is stitched together from orthographic views of the 3D photogrammetric models rendered in MeshLab. Greyed out bits of the vertebrae are actually missing–I used C8 to patch C7, C7 to patch C6, and so on forward. The cervical ribs as reconstructed here were all recovered and they are in collections, but they’re in several jackets and boxes and therefore not easily photographed.

The cervical series of Giraffa camelopardalis angolensis FMNH 34426, articulated by Mike and me and photographed by Mike back in the summer of 2005, cropped and composited by me recently, not previously posted because there’s just too much cool stuff, man.