I’m pleased to announce that Darren has a new paper out (Naish and Sweetman 2011) in which he and fellow Portsmouth researcher Steve Sweetman describe a maniraptoran theropod from the Wealden Supergroup of southern England.

I have a new paper out: Wedel, M.J. 2012. A monument of inefficiency: the presumed course of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in sauropod dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 57(2):251-256.

In our recent paper on how the long necks of sauropods did not evolve primarily due to sexual selection (Taylor et al. 2011), one of the ideas we discussed is that sexual dimorphism between the necks of male and female sauropods would be an indicator of sexual selection.  And, rather despairingly, we wrote (page 4): But I wonder if we realise just how true this is, and how blind we are flying?

Thanks to everyone who joined in the discussion last time on why sauropods had such long necks.  I’ve discussed this a little with Matt, and we are both amazed that so many different hypotheses have been advanced (even if some of them are tongue-in-cheek).  We’ll probably come back to all these ideas later.

Why did sauropods have such long necks? It’s the single most obvious and important question about sauropods, so it’s a bit surprising to think that we’ve never really addressed this question directly.

People who’ve been paying especially close attention may have noted than on four separate occasions in the last eighteen months, I’ve casually referred to our old buddy HMN SII as the paralectotype specimen of Giraffatitan brancai .

It’s been a couple of months since Brontomerus came out, but new coverage continues to trickle in. For anyone who’s still following, I thought I’d draw attention to a few that I particularly like. A favourite is One Hip Dino in The Scientist .  It’s told largely from Matt’s perspective, and includes quotes by Mike D’Emic, Susie Maidment and Ray Wilhite.

Although we like to stay sauropod-o-centric on SV-POW!, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the most astounding publication I have ever seen, Sterling Nesbitt’s new basal archosaur phylogeny (Nesbitt 2011).  Thanks to the wonder of open access publishing, it is freely available, and I urge everyone to check it out, if only to gaze in open-mouthed astonishment at the scale of the thing.

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[This is a guest post by frequent commenter Heinrich Mallison .  Heinrich is maybe best known to SV-POW! readers for his work on digital modelling of sauropodomorphs, though that may change now that his paper on sauropod rearing mechanics is out.  Read on …] Maybe this post should have been titled “How sauropods breathed, ate, and farted”. Or maybe not.

A few months ago, prosauropod supremo Adam Yates blogged about the Aardonyx cake that the BPI honours class baked in his honour.