There is almost too much coolness going on right now. Here’s a brief rundown. SV-POW!

UPDATE: Oops, I’m a moron. I wrote this post at work (on my lunch hour!) and didn’t realize that I had free access to the Wiley stuff because I was at work. I can’t get them from home either.

It’s been a while since we looked at everybody’s favourite partial dorsal vertebra, and there may be those who feel we’ve said all that can be said about it, but there is one feature of Xenoposeidon that we’ve never really highlighted here and which is well worth a look.

Thanks to all for congrats regarding the baby news. Will this mean a short-term break from blogging? In part, yes, but luckily I’ve had the opportunity lately to prepare quite a lot of stuff in advance, so fear ye not oh fans of SV-POW! and Tet Zoo. And to demonstrate that point: welcome to another article in the ‘sauropods of 2008’ series.

At 9:43 this morning, Darren’s wife Toni gave birth to their daughter Emma. I don’t know much more than that except that everyone is well. Join me in offering Darren, Toni and Emma your congratulations!

So, 2008 has come and gone. Was it a good year for sauropods? In terms of new taxa, it wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t too bad, and (as we’ll see in this and a few following posts) some of the taxa involved had pretty interesting vertebrae.

I’m sure Mike will deride this as sordid linkbait, but what the heck. I’ve been meaning to blog about the sauropods of Star Wars for a while now, and I was finally spurred into action by this comment over at TetZoo.

If you’ve been following SV-POW!

Today, we bring you the long-overdue third installment in everyone’s  favourite Mystery Sauropod Dorsals serial, our trawl through the NHM’s collection of mostly isolated elements from the Wealden Supergroup. Many of these elements are too bashed up to be diagnostic (with the Xenoposeidon holotype R2095 being an honourable exception).

Every year the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis in Teruel, Spain, gives out the International Award in Palaeontology Research, a.k.a. Paleonturology. ‘Paleonturology’ is a bit of a pun–it’s actually Paleon Turol ogy; Turol is the old Roman name for the area, from which the Turia river, Turiasaurus , and the city and province of Teruel are all derived.