Momentous news: we SV-POW!sketeers have finally gotten off our collective duff and published something together. Here are the goods:
The Paper
Freely available to the world right now, thanks to the wonder of Open Access:
Unofficial Supplementary Information Online
The short short version plus some pretty pictures here, hi-resolution colour versions of the figures here.
SV-POW! Posts About the Paper
- Sauropods held their necks erect … just like rabbits
- Sauropod neck posture: the world responds
- What heads tell us about necks
- Range of motion in intervertebral joints: why we don’t trust DinoMorph
- Necks lie
- Choosing a journal for the neck-posture paper: why open access is important
- Unstated precision and undemonstrated accuracy: two more reasons why we don’t trust DinoMorph
- Neck posture, yet again: T. rex’s neck is pathetic
- Necks, the big picture: because there are other animals besides sauropods
- What heads tell us about necks, redux
… and, well over a year later …
(The sequence of neck-posture posts led into a a broader discussion of the interaction between blog posts such as these and format publications: there’s an overview at The Shiny Digital Future.)
Television
Mike was interviewed live on Channel 4 News at 12.20pm. At the time of writing, the video is freely available on the Channel 4 web-site, though it may not last long: anyone who can help me to download a permanent copy will earn my gratitude. Here is a larger version — though still not downloadable, only streamable.
Radio
Darren was interviewed on Radio 5 Live at 3.30pm, as part of the Simon Mayo Show, with stand-in host Richard Bacon. Listen to an MP3 of Darren [2:30].
Mike was interviewed for several BBC stations:
- BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme at 8:50am [3:07]
- BBC Radio Solent’s Jon Cuthill Show at 11.40am [7:33]
- BBC Radio Solent’s Steve Harris Show at 4:20pm [3:29]
- BBC Radio Scotland’s Newsdrive at 4:50pm [4:14] (recorded earlier)
- BBC Radio Wales’s Good Evening Wales at 4:50pm [5:57]
And two days later (28th May) by:
Online News Coverage
Anything we missed below is probably available through Google News.
- BBC News: Giant dinosaurs ‘held heads high’
- Telegraph.co.uk: Natural History Museum’s sauropod exhibit ‘anatomically wrong’
- Times Online: Long-necked dinosaurs were not the slouches we thoughts, says study
- The Independent: Dinosaurs, the giraffes of their day
- Daily Mail Online: Why dinosaurs can hold their heads high after scientists say classic portrayal is wrong
- Metro.co.uk: Dinosaurs’ posture ‘could be wrong’
- Irish Times: Proud dinosaur may have held its head high
- The Australian: Dinosaur walked with head held high
- New Zealand Herald: Experts stick necks out with dinosaur heads-up
- Science Daily: Giant dinosaur posture is all wrong
- Guardian.co.uk: Museums and TV have dinosaurs’ posture all wrong, claim scientists
- Guardian.co.uk: Experts clash in battle of posture
- RedOrbit.com: Giant sauropods held heads high and upright
- Taipei Times: Researchers say dinosaurs held heads up, not forward
- forskning.no: Holdt hodet hoyt (in Norwegian)
- Guardian.co.uk: We can’t tell whether the dinosaurs had necks like mine – they’re all dead. And that’s the beauty of it
- Rzeczpospolita (one of the biggest Polish daily newspapers): Wyciągnięte szyje wielkich dinozaurów
- Membrana: Длинношеие динозавры держали головы как жирафы (in Russian: these guys even took the trouble to re-label our cladogram in Russian.)
- Corriere della Sera (the top Italian daily newspaper): Le «giraffe» del Giurassico
- Der Spiegel (Germany’s largest weekly magazine): Riesen-Saurier könnten Schwanenhals besessen haben (includes a direct link to the paper itself: no dumbing down for the German audience!)
- The Sunday Sun (North of England): Bone of contention at Great North Museum (about the implications for the pose of their Tyrannosaurus)
- Leicester Mercury: Dinosaur finally sits up after 168 million years
- Cosmos Online (Brisbane): Dinosaur posture still wrong, says study
- Slashdot (news for nerds): Dinosaur Posture Still Wrong, Says Study —and— Mike’s response
- New Scientist: Giant dinosaurs kept heads held high
- KhoaHoc: Tư thế của khủng long cổ dài hoàn toàn sai (Vietnamese)
- The Mirror: Dinosaurs ‘misrepresented in top museums’
- The Sun: Dino soars
- Softpedia: Sauropods Held Their Heads Up High, contrary to popular theories among anthropologists (?!)
- Physorg.com: Did dinosaurs hold their heads up?
- CBBC Newsround: Dino skeletons could be all wrong
- inthenews: In Focus: Walking With Dinosaurs ‘got it wrong’
Blog Coverage
- Tetrapod Zoology: Sauropod dinosaurs held their necks in high, raised postures
- Theropoda.blogspot.com: W gli SVPoWer Rangers! [in Italian, translation button on right sidebar]
- DinoGoss reports the research.
- DinoGoss discusses separately the media reporting of the research.
- 80beats: The dilemma of the dinosaur stance: how did they hold their heads?
- Gentleman’s Choice: Dino Friday: Hesperonychus elizabethae and sauropod necks
- Stupid Dinosaur Lies: Vertical or horizontal?
- The Dragon’s Tales: Sauropods WERE the Mesozoic giraffes
- Blameless Life: Giant dinosaur posture is all wrong: sauropods held their heads high, research finds (in Korean and English)
- The Dichotomous Trekkie 2.0: Sauropod postures, and low-slung diplodocids (from Philip Kahn, who is currently preparing a paper he wrote as an undergraduate for submission to a peer-reviewed journal–best of luck, Philip!)
- ZME Science: Did sauropods walk with their necks upright?
- Everything Dinosaur: Swan neck posture of sauropods – the great debate
- Dinosaur Tracking: The sauropod posture debate, part eleventy
- Science Buzz: The dinosaur mystique
… and probably more that we’ve not got to yet.
Print Coverage
Scans of printed newspapers that I (Mike) bought on the day. Click through for full-size scans.
The Guardian
The Times
The Independent
The Telegraph; and, no, there really wasn't any other text besides the image caption.
The Mirror
The Sun
Metro (London's free daily)
Glasgow Herald (one of the two Scottish daily newspapers)
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
May 27, 2009 at 5:51 pm
[…] about the paper, including blog and media coverage and the chance to hear Mike on BBC Radio(!), see our page about the paper on the […]
May 29, 2009 at 5:35 am
[…] 29, 2009 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, […]
May 31, 2009 at 4:53 am
[…] 31, 2009 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 […]
June 1, 2009 at 9:08 pm
[…] we started blogging our recent neck-posture paper (Taylor et al. 2009, for those of you who’ve been chatting in the back row and not paying […]
June 3, 2009 at 11:07 pm
[…] we didn’t feel our neck-posture paper was real until it has somehow been tied in with T-Rex. Happily, the Great North Museum came to […]
June 8, 2009 at 7:15 am
[…] 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. And I liked this paper. And […]
June 16, 2009 at 11:39 pm
[…] as positive reputation — there are no negative citations. So a document that says “Taylor, Wedel and Naish 2009 was talking a lot of nonsense about sauropod neck posture” would still be a score in our […]
July 18, 2009 at 6:28 pm
[…] weeks processing images, but every time I’ve gotten a few free weeks there has been something more important demanding my attention, and that may always be the case. Fortunately I’m not the only one […]
August 24, 2009 at 3:22 am
[…] My god, Tasman Booby, the research papers. Unless they happen to be about something cool like Sauropod neck posture, no amount of free alcohol and dessert in the world can make having to hear about the minutae of […]
September 21, 2009 at 3:33 am
[…] Andy (poster #25, on a new theropod from Madagascar) and Matt & Mike (poster #56, on the whole sauropod neck posture thing) will be in Poster Session IV on Saturday, from 4:15-6:15 pm, so come on over and say […]
March 31, 2010 at 5:04 pm
[…] communication with other people. In my spare time I am a dinosaur palaeontologist, and since many of my papers are collaborative, I have to send manuscripts back and forth with my co-authors. Personally I use OpenOffice to […]
September 20, 2010 at 8:38 am
[…] all seriousness, it’s no secret that we SV-POW!sketeers are very much advocates of a raised habitual posture, and so that we strongly disagree with Kent and John. We had a lot of fun talking together, but […]
September 27, 2010 at 6:02 am
[…] necks that we can put in sandboxes and pose, like I did for the chicken and the infamous rabbit way back when. It’s no good taking photos of mounted skeletons and declaring that they’re in ONP. […]
March 6, 2011 at 8:44 pm
[…] I don’t mind too much about this Witton original being whisked away from me, because shortly afterwards Mark went on to provide me with a much better piece — the beautifully wistful Diplodocus herd scene that we used in the publicity for our neck-posture paper. […]
May 11, 2011 at 3:37 pm
[…] has been plenty written about habitual sauropod posture — including by us (Taylor et al.2009). But actually the high-browsing and low-browsing […]
May 16, 2011 at 1:20 am
[…] the neck-posture paper (Taylor et al. 2009), this was a true collaboration — one of those where, for many parts of […]
May 16, 2011 at 7:03 am
[…] necks rather falls by the wayside. Couple that with the existing work by my colleagues on the potential vertical reach of sauropods and another barrier falls by the wayside. Even if sauropods couldn’t reach high into trees […]
July 6, 2011 at 11:45 am
[…] done it twice, and both times it’s resulted in a huge amount of work. Those two papers are the Taylor et al. (2009) paper on habitual sauropod neck posture and Taylor et al. (2011) on sexual selection of sauropod necks. These were three- and four-way […]
August 6, 2011 at 1:02 am
[…] in me, and I thought it deserved a wider audience: I hate to admit it, but those two papers (i.e., Taylor et al. 2009 and 2011) that had particularly protracted gestations and lots of review time are among the ones I […]
October 31, 2011 at 11:15 am
[…] flattening it down at the last moment. (Happily I’d learned that lesson by the time we did our neck-posture paper: although it was destined for Acta Palaeontologia Polonica, which also prints in greyscale, and […]
November 16, 2011 at 4:11 pm
[…] we’d expect to see more taxa that have broken it. (Both of these arguments also apply to the alert neck posture of tetrapods, by the […]
December 12, 2011 at 11:05 pm
[…] years’ developments in pneumaticity, and considering the way forward) and Darren (presenting our no-necks-for-sex work in a way that was both persuasive and funny). The last slide of Darren's talk; original source […]
March 3, 2012 at 11:08 am
[…] the time the three of us did our neck-posture paper in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, we weren’t quite so dumb. So although the illustrations […]
May 2, 2012 at 8:30 am
[…] initiative will crash and burn. But I do know that I’m more likely to tell people that our neck-posture paper has been cited 37 times than that it was in a journal with impact factor 1.949. Because what a […]
May 29, 2012 at 9:51 pm
[…] good “cited by” feature. But it’s not flawless. For example, it claims that our 2009 sauropod neck posture paper has been cited 38 times, but as you work your way down the list, you find that some of the […]
November 18, 2012 at 9:35 am
[…] Acta Palaeontologia Polonica — this is one of the reasons that I have published there twice (neck posture, Brontomerus) and Matt has three other APP papers as well as being co-author on those two. Another […]
May 29, 2013 at 10:32 am
[…] We jumped the gun a bit in asking How fat was Camarasaurus? a couple of years ago, or indeed How fat was Brontosaurus? last year. As always, we should have started with extant taxa, to get a sense of how to relate bones to live animals — as we did with neck posture. […]
December 13, 2013 at 7:53 pm
[…] most-cited paper, by some distance, is Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals (Taylor et al. 2009, a collaboration between all three SV-POW!sketeers). That appeared in Acta […]
June 22, 2014 at 10:32 am
[…] before too long we’ll be able to discuss the published version. [Note added 22 June 2014: we did, extensively.] But making that submission was a landmark moment for The Three SV-POW!sketeers. Hopefully […]
October 20, 2014 at 1:19 pm
[…] better to choose a title that tells us what the nature of Mauisaurus is. (We’re guilty, too: the only paper co-written by all three of us SV-POW!er Rangers is called “Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals”. […]
December 23, 2014 at 11:22 am
[…] Yes, that posture is ludicrous — but the best data we currently have says that something like this would have been neutral for Diplodocus once cartilage is taken into account. (Remember of course that animals do not hold their necks in neutral posture.) […]
January 13, 2016 at 9:49 am
[…] to say, the matter of neck posture is very relevant to our interests. I don’t want to read too much into a couple of throwaway comments, but the implication does […]
October 18, 2018 at 7:36 pm
[…] A while back — near the start of the year, in fact — Szymon Górnicki interviewed me by email about palaeontology, alternative career paths, open access, palaeoart, PeerJ, scholarly infrastructure, the wonder of blogging, and how to get started learning about palaeo. He also illustrated it with this caricature of me, nicely illustrating our 2009 paper on neck posture. […]
December 13, 2018 at 3:53 pm
[…] further reading on this topic, see the Taylor et al. (2009) paper on sauropod necks, the series of SV-POW posts on the matter, and Mike Taylor’s page on sauropod neck […]
April 22, 2020 at 9:48 pm
[…] neck posture, it’s obviously of interest to me, and to Matt. (See our earlier relevant papers Taylor et al. 2009, Taylor and Wedel 2013 and Taylor […]
March 9, 2021 at 2:06 pm
[…] a citation monster. It’s done OK, but only OK. Conversely, it never occurred to me that “Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals” would be of more than specialist interest, but it’s turned out to be my most cited paper. I […]
April 30, 2021 at 9:43 pm
[…] Diplodocus artwork, an update of an earlier piece that he did for Matt, Darren and me to publicise our 2009 paper on sauropod neck posture. (Details […]