Every now and then, you come across a sauropod skull so beautiful, it’s almost enough to distract you from the vertebrae that it was attached to.  One such is the Giraffatitan brancai skull HMN T1, which you’ve seen here before if you’ve been around for a while.

Sinclair brontosaur, Hennessey, Oklahoma. This one has cement shoes because some ne’er-do-wells ganked the old one in the middle of the night a couple of years ago.

I’m just back from SVPCA 2010 (the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy), and what an amazing meeting it was.  I think it was the best I’ve been to.  That’s partly because I understand more of the talks these days — it’s the first time I’ve ever listened to every single talk, even all the mammal-tooth and fish-skull talks — and I learned something interesting and new from almost every one of them.

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?

In an email, Vladimir Socha drew my attention to the fact that Tom Holtz’s dinosaur encyclopaedia estimates the maximum height of Sauroposeidon as 20 meters plus, and asked whether that was really possible.  Here’s what Tom actually wrote: “ Sauroposeidon was one of the largest of all dinosaurs.

I hesitate to inflict these images on SV-POW! readers, but I have to post them somewhere if only so I can point my family to them; and who knows, maybe some of the rest of you will enjoy the amusing hat. Last Friday (17th July), I drove down to Portsmouth, with my wife Fiona, to graduate — the consummation of my Ph.D programme.

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.

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.

You’d think that in 100+ posts we’d be starting to exhaust the territory, but there are vast swaths of sauropod vertebral morphology that we haven’t even touched. Like fused vertebrae. Sauropods fused their vertebrae all the time. Some of those fusions are age-related, many are pathological, and some are…hard to classify.

Just got back my supervisor’s comments on my draft dissertation front-matter. Looks like I’m not going to be able to go with my chosen title.