This one’s mostly a housekeeping post, to keep you abreast of some notable developments with SV-POW!sketeers and friends. Added April 29 – I’m such a tool, forgot to mention that another awesomely niche-y blog has been unleashed on the paleo-blogosphere: March of the Fossil Penguins, by our friend and sometime sauropod-describer Dan Ksepka.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we have often lamented that so much dinosaur research is locked up behind the paywalls of big for-profit commercial publishers, and that even work that’s been funded by public money is often not available to the public.

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Most people think of Janensch’s (1950b) plate VIII as being the first skeletal reconstruction of “ Brachiosaurus ” (although Janensch’s species “ Brachiosaurus ” brancai is now referred to the separate genus Giraffatitan ).  And it certainly is a classic: {.size-full .wp-image-2616 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-2616” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2616”

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Shunosaurus lii is a basal eusauropod from the Middle Jurassic of China.  Outside of palaeontological circles, it’s not at all well known — which is kind of surprising, as it’s one of the best represented of all sauropods.  It’s known from numerous complete skeletons, including skulls, and has been described in detail in Zhang’s (1988) monograph: 89 pages and 15 plates.

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The hot news on the block right now is the description of the new sauropod Abydosaurus mcintoshi , which, amazingly, is known from four more or less complete skulls (Chure et al. 2010).  This is unheard of — absolutely unprecedented.  There are few enough sauropods for which a skull is known at all; but four of them, all in decent nick, is breathtaking.