Brachiosaurus and friends from here (hat tip to Ville Sinkkonen). In an e-mail with explicit permission to quote, our colleague Casey Holliday sent the following thoughts about our new paper and the subsequent ten days of related blogging: I don’t know guys. I like your blogs, and your papers are fine.

I Cannot Brain Today, I Have the Dumb Man, I hate making mistakes. The only thing worse than making mistakes is making them in public, and the only thing worse than that is finding them in published papers when it’s too late to do anything about them. About the only consolation left–if you’re lucky–is getting to be the one to rat yourself out (we have to do this a lot). So here goes.

In case you haven’t heard, Taylor et al . (2009) recently argued that sauropods naturally held their cervico-dorsal junctions in extension, and their cranio-cervical joints in flexion… at least, when they weren’t foraging, feeding or engaged in other such activities [if you need help with those terms please see the Tet Zoo article here]. {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-1590 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“1590”

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we often like to play Spot The T. rex — a simple drinking game that can be played whenever you have supply of palaeontology-related news reports.  Each player in turn takes a report off the stack, and if T. rex is mentioned anywhere in the report, the player drinks.

Because the appearance of accuracy has an irresistible allure, non-specialists frequently treat these estimates as factual.

[Disclaimer: in this post, I am unavoidably critical of certain aspects of particular journals.

Since we’re spending a few days on neck posture, I thought I’d expand on what Mike said about bunnies in the first post: in most cases, it is awfully hard to tell the angle of the cervical column when looking at a live animal. Because necks lie.

Let’s assume for a moment that you accept our contention (Taylor et al. 2009) that, since extant terrestrial tetrapods habitually hold their necks in maximal extension, sauropods did the same.  That still leaves the question of why we have the neck of our Diplodocus reconstruction at a steep 45-degree angle rather than the very gentle elevation that Stevens and Parrish’s (1999) DinoMorph project permits.

So far in our coverage of the new paper (Taylor et al. 2009) we’ve mostly focused on necks, following the discovery by Graf, Vidal, and others that when they are alert and unrestrained, extant tetrapods hold their necks extended and their heads flexed. (Although they turn up with distressing regularity, “ventroflexed” is redundant and “dorsiflexed” is an oxymoron; Darren lays down the law here.) There’s more to the paper;

[I wrote this in the cafe on the ground floor of the BBC’s Millbank studios, where I spent much of yesterday, just before I headed off for Paddington and the train home.  I have lightly edited it since the original composition.] It’s been a day spent doing publicity for the new SV-POW! paper on sauropod neck posture.

Welcome, one and all, to Taylor, Wedel and Naish (2009), Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals .  It’s the first published paper by the SV-POW! team working as a team, published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, and freely available for download here.