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.

I’ve been interested in astronomy my whole life, but I only got serious about it in the past two years. In the internet age, “getting serious” about something usually means “starting a blog”, so I did. My aim is to show people that enjoying the night sky doesn’t have to be time-consuming or expensive.

Back in 1999 or 2000 Jaime Headden sent me his skeletal reconstruction of what was then known as Titanosaurus colberti (Jain and Bandyopadhyay 1997), but which has recently been renamed Isisaurus colberti by Upchurch and Wilson (2004). Jaime’s skeletal reconstruction and life restoration are here. Somebody threw a skin over the recon to produce this life restoration.

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.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-1243 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“1243” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2009/08/02/little-big-the-reveal/wnv-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wnv-1.jpg” orig-size=“480,303” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}” image-title=“WNV-1”

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-1238 attachment-id=“1238” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2009/07/26/little-big/little-big-480/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/little-big-4801.jpg” orig-size=“480,249” comments-opened=“1”

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.

Weren’t we just discussing the problem of keeping up with all the good stuff on da intert00bz? The other day Rebecca Hunt-Foster, a.k.a. Dinochick, posted a “mystery photo” that is right up our alley here at SV-POW!, but, lazy sods that we are, we missed it until just now.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-1871 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“1871” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2009/07/18/nh-46870-strikes-back/condrosteo_scan/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/condrosteo_scan.png” orig-size=“1518,843” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}”

It’s no secret – at least, not if you’re a regular SV-POW!

For those of you who care about such things, the new issue 66(2) of the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature contains two comments on our petition to the ICZN to fix Cetiosaurus oxoniensis as the type species of the historically important genus Cetiosaurus (Upchurch et al. 2009) — both of them supporting the proposal