Preparing a talk is a time-consuming process, and there’s no question that getting the slides ready is where the bulk of that time goes.  But unless you understand exactly what it is that you’re going to talk about, even the best slides won’t rescue your talk from mediocrity, so before you fire up PowerPoint, go and read part 1 of this tutorial, on finding the narrative.  Seriously.

Matt, Darren and I were all in Lyme Regis last week for SVPCA 2011, the Symposium of Vertebrate Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy — an excellent technical conference similar in some ways to SVP, but much nicer because it’s small enough that you can see all the talks and meet all the people.

With our baby’s appearance in National Geographic this week, she’s now been in four mainstream magazines: That’s National Geographic at top left, Macleans next to it; The Scientist at bottom left, and National Geographic Kids next to that.

The October 2011 issue of National Geographic is out, and in the ‘Now’ section near the front there is a one-page feature on Brontomerus (in the US version anyway).  The whole thing is can be viewed online here.  It’s page 30 in the hardcopy, but NG seems pretty cavalier about printing page numbers.

Okay, special dissection post, coming to you live from the Symposium  of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy in Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic coast of England, well past my bedtime. First, check out this comment from Neil and see the linked image of some neck muscles in the anhinga. Here’s a small version I’m swiping.

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.

In a recent post I showed photos of the trachea in a rhea, running not along the ventral surface of the neck but along the right side. I promised to show that this is not uncommon, that the trachea and esophagus of birds are usually free to slide around under the skin and are not constrained to like along the ventral midline of the neck, as they usually are in mammals. Here goes.

A quick note to let you all know that George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist has been published in The Guardian, one of the four respected “broadsheet” national daily newspapers of the UK.  (It was online yesterday, and is in today’s print edition.) A few key quotes: I encourage you to read the whole thing. None of this will be news to long-time SV-POW!

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Last month, over at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs , David Orr wrote about the dinosaur conflicts he’d like to see, in place of the ubiquitous T . rex -vs.- Triceratops .  Among the fights he wanted to see was: 2. Four strategically placed Incisivosaurus vs. Giraffatitan : Two words: beaver style.