You may remember that when I wrote about Amphicoelias diplobrontobarowassea the other day, I rather ungraciously complained that “I don’t want to talk about that.

In an interesting comment on Matt’s “Amphiocoelias brontodiplodocus” post, an anonymous commenter wrote (among much else): I started to write a reply to this, then realised it was important enough to merit its own post — so here it is. The amateur and commercial palaeontologists alluded to in the comment are wrong, plainly and simply.

I wasn’t going to write about this, partly because it’s so darn depressing, but mostly because in the wake of this comment it seemed like the “Amphicoelias brontodiplodocus” paper was being withdrawn, and to quote something Mike said off-list, I was happier about the retraction than I was sad about the implied revisionism.

Well, this is frustrating.  Over on the VRTPALEO mailing list, all the talk at the moment is of the new paper by Henry Galiano and Raimund Albersdörfer (2010), describing their rather comically named new species Amphicoelias brontodiplodocus .  And to be fair, the material they’re describing is sensational, and the photographs in the paper are pretty good.

Isn’t it funny how often an idea seems to pop up all over the place at about the same time?  The classic example is the independent and more or less simultaneous invention of calculus by both Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Leibniz, but similar kinds of things seem to happen quite often. And there’s something similar going on right now.

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Many thanks to Mark Evans of the New Walk Museum, Leicester, for this photograph of yet another camel skeleton, this one from the MNHN in Paris, France:

Welcome to post four of what seems to be turning out to be Camel Week here on SV-POW!.  As it happens, I spent last Friday and Saturday in Oxford, for a meeting of the Tolkien Society, and I had three hours or so to spend in the wonderful Oxford University Natural History Museum. In a completely ideal world, I would have been able to play with a sequence of camel cervicals;

Suddenly it’s camel season here at SV-POW! In the last post, Mike was having some doubts about how far back camels could get their heads. That got me curious, so here are the results of 45 minutes worth of Google Image Search.

Since I posted my photograph of the Cambridge University Zoology Museum’s dromedary camel in the last entry, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.

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.