Here’s a bunch of cool stuff that is either available now or happening soon: Sauropod Dinosaurs book excerpt in Prehistoric Times Been on the fence about the sauropod book Mark Hallett and I wrote?
Having benefitted so hugely from 3D models that Heinrich Mallison made for me — most notably, the Xenoposeidon model that is the supplementary data file for the recent preprint — I realised the time has come for me to learn to do this for myself.
Peter Falkingham and Nick Gardner independently put me onto Sketchfab: a website that provides a way to view and navigate 3D models without needing to download any software beyond the browser that you’re already running. So get yourself over to the live Xenoposeidon model!
In writing the recent preprint “Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur” (Taylor 2017), it was invaluable to have a 3D model of the Xenoposeidon vertebra available. Here’s a short clip of viewing the model in the free MeshLab program.
There’s just time before midnight strikes to wish Xenoposeidon a very happy tenth birthday. It came along just a month and a half after SV-POW! itself — in fact, I can’t even remember now, a decade on, whether part of the reason we started SV-POW!
Out today: a new Turiasaurian sauropod, Mierasaurus bobyoungi, from the Early Cretaceous Cedar Mountain formation in Utah.
This morning, I and the other 156 attendees of SVPCA 2017 received a useful document, SVPCA report_for attendees, which collects and analyses delegates’ feedback on the meeting. It prompted me to mention a few more thoughts of my own.
I can’t even count how many sauropod vertebra pictures we’ve posted here across the last ten years, but I am confident that the total comes to at least a lot. Here’s a picture from each year of the blog’s existence so far — let’s vote on which is the best!
Amazingly (to me, anyway), SV-POW! is ten years old today. It was on 1st October 2007 that we published Hello world!, our first post, featuring a picture of what may still be our favourite single sauropod vertebra: the ?8th cervical of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181.
This was an interesting exercise. It was my first time generating a poster to be delivered at a conference since 2006. Scientific communication has evolved a lot in the intervening decade, which spans a full half of my research career to date.
After my short post on what to leave out of a conference talk, here are few more positive thoughts on what to include, based on some of the SVPCA talks that really stayed with me. First, Graeme Lloyd’s talk in the macroevolution symposium did a great job of explaining very complex concepts well (different ways […]