If you woke up this morning and thought, “Global warming is on the rise, amphibians are in a race to see who can go extinct first, the economy is in the toilet, any day now my boss will discover that I don’t actually do anything at work,  and my blog will never have the eclectic cachet of SV-POW!, but at least Mike Taylor doesn’t have a Ph.D. ,” then it is my happy duty to ruin your day. Mike defended today, successfully.

OMG! WTF? Was I asleep? Had I slept? Did I miss something? Does paleontological training destroy the part of the brain that knows how to use a freakin’ tape measure? Are paleontologists incapable of imagining that others might want to make meaningful comparisons with their taxa?

Because of my work on the recent Cetiosaurus petition, I’m on the ICZN mailing list.  Apart from the brutally technical threads on specific nomenclatural cases, the favourite topics of that mailing list are electronic publication and in particular the long-term preservation on anything not printed onto compressed plant matter.

As Matt frequently reminds me, it’s now nearly five years since I started to work on “The Archbishop”, more formally known as BMNH R5973, the Natural History Museum’s long-neglected Tendaguru brachiosaur.  This is, or at least once was, one of the most complete brachiosaurid specimens ever discovered — although quite a bit of the material has gone missing or remains unprepared.

I made this, just for the heck of it. The critters are, from left to right: OMNH 53062, the holotype of Sauroposeidon proteles , with a reconstructed skeleton grayed in; HM XV2, a fibula of Brachiosaurus brancai , which represents the largest known individual of Brachiosaurus ; HM SII, the nearly complete mounted composite skeleton of Brachiosaurus brancai in Berlin; a 20-foot-tall, world record giraffe;

New hotness out today: Miragaia , a new long-necked stegosaur from the Late Jurassic of Portugal (Mateus et al. 2009). What is “long-necked” for a stegosaur? In this case, well over a meter! That may not sound too impressive for those of you who have gotten complacent about 10-meter-plus sauropod necks, but it’s a big deal.

I ended the last post with this teaser: There is another sauropod (sort of) in Episode IV (sort of), but I’ll wait a week before I blab about that one. I wonder if anyone will guess what it is in the meantime? The mystery lasted all of a single comment.

But also of Christmas future. Or, perhaps, the spirit (pneuma) of the season. Merry Christmas to all! We’ll see you back here in 2009.

Brachiosaurus: uglier than you think (we’re sorry, but it’s true). UPDATE: Fig. 1 from Witmer (2001) showing hypothesized position of the fleshy nostrils in Brachiosaurus. How awesome was our trip to Germany?

If you’ve been following SV-POW!