By a curious coincidence, today’s Bob The Angry Flower cartoon is all about the Archbishop description. Enjoy. But, hey, at least I got my confession in early — I was officially the first participant to fail the 2010 Paleo Project Challenge. THIS year, for sure!

In most journals, in-line citations are by author and year.  So, for example, if someone writes “ Haplocanthosaurus has been recovered as a non-diplodocimorph diplodocoid (Wilson 2002)”, you know that the paper that recovered Haplo in that position was, well, Wilson 2002.  And everyone who works on sauropods is familiar with Wilson 2002.

I recently stumbled across this rather good photograph of the holotype vertebra of our old buddy “ Ultrasauros ”, thanks to Wikipedia contributor Ninjatacoshell, and thought you’d like to see it: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-2933 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2933” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2010/12/22/the-ultrasauros-holotype-vertebra/supersaurus_vivianae_dorsal_vertebra/”

Over at his truly unique blog Paleo Errata , Jeff Martz is claiming that Stereopairs Are Cool.

Here’s another dual-purpose post (part 1 is here), wherein I use some of Brian Engh’s cool art to riff on a related topic (with kind permission–thanks, Brian!). Back when he was first planning his awesome Sauroposeidon life restoration, Brian sent these head studies: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-3160 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“3160” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2010/12/13/pimp-my-pod-2-haids/benghbrachioreconrough1/”

These are happy times for me. Dinosaur rap god and burgeoning paleoartist Brian Engh, AKA The Historian Himself, has finished a new life restoration of Sauroposeidon . Here’s a smallish view, just to give you a taste; for the high resolution awesomeness, check out Brian’s post here.

For anyone who doesn’t already know, Palaeontologia Electronica is an on-line, open-access palaeontology journal — the only one in the world (unless you count Acta Pal Pol , which is freely available online and also published on paper.) PE is sponsored by the Palaeontological Association, the Paleontological Society and the Society of Vertebrtate Paleontology, the big three professional associations, so you

Just noticed this over on ScienceBlogs: SV-POW!sketeer Darren’s Naish’s other blog Tetrapod Zoology has — rightly — often featured strongly in the Readers’ Picks sidebar; but this is the first time I’ve seen it, or indeed any blog, completely monopolise the list.

Last time around, I referred in passing, rather flippantly, to what I called Tutorial n: how to become a palaeontologist .  Since then, I realised that actually I could write a tutorial on this, and that it could be surprisingly short and sweet — much shorter than it would have needed to be even a few years ago. So here it is: how to be a published palaeontologist.

There’s recently been a rash of requests for PDFs on the VRTPALEO mailing list.  Or maybe “plague” would be a better word.

This post is nearly three weeks late — it’s based on a piece of artwork that appeared on 25 September, and which I wanted to write about immediately.