Prologue: Why We Hatin’? Between the first DinoMorph post and this one, it may seem like we have it in for DinoMorph, like we’re trying to discredit the method or bury it. We’re not anti-DinoMorph at all. We really want it to work, because 3D modeling is probably going to be the only way to explore some problems we care about

[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.

Welcome to another episode of the ground-breaking and wonderful Sauropods of 2008 series. Yay! As I’m fond of pointing out, new dinosaurs do not only come from China, or South America: Europe continues to yield surprises.

Do you want to know how stupid my co-blogger Matt Wedel is?  Having already discussed the ostrich Struthio camelus in Wedel et al. (2000b), that total idiot went on to misspell the trivial name as “ camellus ” in Wedel and Cifelli (2005:52).  What a doofus. And do you want to know how dumb my other co-blogger Darren Naish is?

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A while back, Matt speculated on the size of the allegedly giant mamenchisaurid Hudiesaurus .  At the time, all he had to go on was Glut’s (2000) reproduction of half of Dong (1997:fig. 3), and a scalebar whose length was given incorrectly.