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As we all know, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is a large and intimidating document.  As a result, zoologists naming new animals often do not read it in its entirety (I know I haven’t).  It’s probably because of this that many of the more avoidable nomenclatural mistakes occur.

We’ve been running SV-POW! for three and half years now; in all that time we’ve never featured a guest post, because we think it’s better to keep a blog tight and focussed.  In general, that remains our policy. But today, first the first and maybe only time, we present a guest post.

If you’ve been following the past few tutorials, you now know how to get copies of academic papers (learn Google fu and ask politely) and how to become a paleontologist (write and publish papers). But what are you going to write and publish papers about ? My own experience, and my impression from talking with many others, is that when you move into a new field for the first time, it often

Why we do mass estimates Mass estimates are a big deal in paleobiology. If you want to know how much an animal needed in terms of food, water, and oxygen, or how fast it could move, or how many offspring it could produce in a season, or something about its heat balance, or its population density, or the size of its brain relative to its body, then at some point you are going to need a mass estimate.

For reasons that will soon become apparent (yes, that’s a teaser), Matt and I wanted to figure out how heavy Camarasaurus was.  This is the story of how I almost completely badgered up part of that problem.  I am publishing it as a cautionary tale because I am very secure and don’t mind everyone knowing that I’m an idiot.

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/”