Last time, we looked at the bones of the sauropod skeleton, and I mentioned that “thanks to the wonder of homology, it doubles as a primer for dinosaur skeletons in general”.  To prove it, here everyone’s favourite vulgar, overstudied theropod Tyrannosaurus rex , in L. M. Sterling’s reconstruction from Osborn 1906:plate XXIV, published just one year after the big guy’s initial description.

We should have done this long ago.  Back in the early tutorials, we covered skeletal details such as regions of the vertebral column, basic vertebral anatomy, pneumaticity and laminae, but we never started out with an overview of the sauropod skeleton. Time to fix that.  This is numbered as Tutorial 15 but you can think of it as Tutorial Zero if you prefer.

Matt recently told us how to get ideas for papers, but if you’ve not previously published, you may be wondering how you get from idea to actual manuscript.  I’ve written about twenty palaeontology papers now, not counting trivial ones like encyclopaedia entries and corrections (plus a few in computer science).

This tutorial is based on all the things that I stupidly forgot to do along the way of tearing down the juvenile giraffe neck that Darren, John Conway and I recently got to take to pieces.  At half a dozen different points in that process, I found myself thinking “Oh, we should have done X earlier on!”  So it’s not a tutorial founded on the idea that I know how this should be done;

(This is sort of a riff on the recent post, Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on, which you might want to read first if you haven’t already.) Something that has been much on my mind lately is the idea that if you don’t go too far, you don’t know how far you should have gone.

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

We really should have covered this ages ago …  Here we are, blithering on about brachiosaurids and diplodocoids and all, and we’ve never really spelled out what these terms mean.  Sorry! The family tree of a group of animals (or plants, or fungi, or what have you) is called its phylogeny.  The science of figuring out a phylogeny is called systematics.

For the first time in SV-POW! history, a full week has passed between successive posts — well, at least we didn’t actually fail with the “of the week” part, even if it was a close thing. It’s been a busy week, for reasons that will soon be apparent;

It’s come up here a few times already–it’s hard to talk about sauropod vertebrae without bringing it up–but now it’s time to get it out in the open. In almost all sauropods, and certainly in all the ones you learned about as a kid, at least some of the vertebrae were pneumatic (air-filled). Now, this is a very strange thing.

At the risk of turning this blog into Brachiosaurus brancai 8th Cervical Picture of the Day, here’s a quick tutorial on your basic sauropod vertebral anatomy, using everyone’s favourite cervical vertebra. This picture shows the same vertebra as was photographed in the very first SV-POW! entry.