So I finally got to see the Discovery Channel’s new series, Clash of the Dinosaurs . The show follows the common Discovery Channel MO of cutting between CGI critters and talking heads. I’m one of the talking heads, and I get a lot of air time, and I suppose I should be happy about that. But I’m not, for reasons I’ll explain. I need to preface what follows by saying that I thought the other talking heads did a great job.

Broadly speaking, pneumatic sauropod vertebrae come in two flavors. In more primitive, camerate vertebrae, modeled here by Haplocanthosaurus , the centrum is a round-ended I-beam and the neural arch is composed of intersecting flat plates of bone called laminae ( lam above; fos = fossa, nc = neural canal, ncs = neurocentral suture;

Trying two new things this morning: grilling a turkey, and live-blogging on SV-POW! I like to grill. Steak, chicken, kebabs, yams, pineapple, bananas–as long as it’s an edible solid, I’m up for it. But I’ve never grilled a turkey before. Neighbor, colleague, fellow paleontologist and grillmeister Brian Kraatz sent me his recipe, which is also posted on Facebook for the edification of the masses.

I drew a couple of these a while back, and I’m posting them now both to fire discussion and because I’m too lazy to write anything new. Here’s the neck of Apatosaurus , my own reconstruction based on Gilmore (1936), showing the possible paths and dimensions of continuous airways (diverticula) outside the vertebrae.

Last week, for the first time ever, I spent the entire working week on palaeo.  I took a week away from my job, and spent it staying in London, working on the Archbishop at the Natural History Museum.

I’m following up immediately on my last post because I am having so much fun with my wallaby carcass.  As you’ll recall, I was lucky enough to score a subadult male wallaby from a local farm park.  Today, we’re going to look at its feet. Wallabies are macropods;

Earlier this month Daniela Schwarz-Wings and colleagues published the first finite element analysis (FEA) of sauropod vertebrae (Schwarz-Wings et al. 2009). Above is one of the figures showing some of their results. Following standard convention, stresses are shown on a gradient with cooler colors indicating lower stresses and hotter colors indicating higher stresses.

UPDATE December 3, 2009 I screwed up, seriously. Tony Thulborn writes in a comment below to correct several gross errors I made in the original post. He’s right on every count. I have no defense, and I am terribly sorry, both to Tony and to everyone who ever has or ever will read this post.

I made brachiosaur sand-sculptures. (And yes, it’s that Daniel Taylor, the author of Taylor 2005 — a copy of which apparently hangs on the wall of the Padian Lab.) But wait!  Is the brachiosaur truly asleep, as it seems, or is it actually the victim of a mighty hunter?

Just checking: no-one’s bored of brachiosaurs yet, are they? Thought not.  Right, then, here we go! Greg Paul’s (1988) study of the two “ Brachiosaurus ” species — the paper that proposed the subgenus Giraffatitan for the African species — noted that the trunk is proportionally longer in Brachiosaurus than in Giraffatitan due to the greater length of its dorsal centra.