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:

Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Darren Naish.  2009. Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54(2): 213-220.

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

… 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:

And two days later (28th May) by:

Online News Coverage

Anything we missed below is probably available through Google News.

Blog Coverage

… 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 Guardian

The Times

The Times

The Independent

The Independent

The Telegraph; and, no, there really wasn't any other text besides the image caption.

The Telegraph; and, no, there really wasn't any other text besides the image caption.

The Mirror

The Mirror

The Sun

The Sun

Metro (London's free daily)

Metro (London's free daily)

Glasgow Herald (regional)

Glasgow Herald (one of the two Scottish daily newspapers)

37 Responses to “Taylor, Wedel and Naish (2009) on neck posture”


  1. […] 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 […]


  2. […] 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, […]


  3. […] 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 […]


  4. […] 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 […]


  5. […] 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 […]


  6. […] 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 […]


  7. […] 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 […]


  8. […] 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 […]


  9. […] 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 […]


  10. […] 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 […]


  11. […] 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 […]


  12. […] 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 […]


  13. […] 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. […]


  14. […] 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. […]


  15. […] has been plenty written about habitual sauropod posture — including by us (Taylor et al.2009).  But actually the high-browsing and low-browsing […]


  16. […] the neck-posture paper (Taylor et al. 2009), this was a true collaboration — one of those where, for many parts of […]


  17. […] 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 […]


  18. […] 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 […]


  19. […] 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 […]


  20. […] 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 […]


  21. […] 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 […]


  22. […] 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 […]


  23. […] 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 […]


  24. […] 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 […]


  25. […] 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 […]


  26. […] 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 […]


  27. […] 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. […]


  28. […] 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 […]


  29. […] 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 […]


  30. […] 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”. […]


  31. […] 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.) […]


  32. […] 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 […]


  33. […] 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. […]


  34. […] 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 […]


  35. […] 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 […]


  36. […] 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 […]


  37. […] 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 […]


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