The paper

Unofficial Supplementary Information

SV-POW! posts

The eight posts that made up Xenoposeidon Week in November 2007 (nine if you include Day 8, which came fifteens months later)  are:

And subsequent Xenoposeidon posts:

… and see also …

The followup paper, ten years later: “Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur” (Taylor 2018).

23 Responses to “Taylor and Naish (2007) on Xenoposeidon


  1. […] of these elements are too bashed up to be diagnostic (with the Xenoposeidon holotype R2095 being an honourable exception).  But there are one or two that are much better preserved, and […]


  2. […] much more of Xeno, see Xenoposeidon week. Posted by Mike Taylor Filed in Wealden, Xenoposeidon, book review, fame, goofy, […]


  3. […] For anyone who’s not up to speed, a super-brief resumé: Xeno is an indeterminate neosauropod which Darren and I named in 2007 on the basis of a single element, a superbly preserved partial dorsal vertebra loaded with distinctive features that make it very clearly distinct from any other named taxon.  For anyone who wants more background, the original paper is freely available, as is a page summarising the story for the media, some unnofficial supplementary information, and a whole week’s worth of SV-POW! posts. […]


  4. […] there’s been a little less interest than we were able to rustle up for Xenoposeidon, but we nevertheless got a live TV interview on Channel 4 News, plus radio interviews on BBC Radio […]


  5. […] When 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 attention), we expected to make two posts, maybe three.  Yet here we are in post six, and I know Matt has another up the barrel for tomorrow, so it looks like we’re going to end up having written a whole week’s worth of daily posts, just as we did for Xenoposeidon. […]


  6. […] when the Xenoposeidon paper came out, we suggested that Xeno could be the first repesentative of a new sauropod […]


  7. […] as I tried to describe the weird morphology of the as-yet-unpublished vertebra that we now know as Xenoposeidon.  At an advanced age — I don’t know exactly how old he is, but you can get some idea […]


  8. […] Chapter 3. An unusual new neosauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hastings Beds Group of East Sussex, England — published in Palaeontology […]


  9. […] representing about 10% of a skeleton — not much, admittedly, but about 9% more than for Xenoposeidon. Oddly enough, for this blog, the two most informative elements are appendicular: a nearly complete […]


  10. […] a fairly hardcore descriptive paper like the Xenoposeidon description (Taylor and Naish 2007, natch), you’re more limited in how much of a story you can tell, and […]


  11. […] going to say “never”.  For example, suppose someone found a more complete specimen of Xenoposeidon and submitted the description to Cretaceous Research, a non-open Elsevier journal that is actually […]


  12. […] when Darren and I did the Xenoposeidon description, we were young and foolish, and only illustrated the holotype vertebra NHM R2095 in four aspects: […]


  13. […] Society dinosaur-history volume;  chapter 2 (the Brachiosaurus revision) was in JVP; chapter 3 (the Xenoposeidon description) was in Palaeontology; chapter 4 (the Brontomerus description) was in Acta Palaeontologica […]


  14. […] old Brachiosaurus up there at the top: a proper sauropod, and possibly my favourite (not counting the two that I’ve named myself, and which I have an obvious special affection for). But then you […]


  15. […] first met Mike Taylor at the SVP meeting in Bristol in 2009. He had done that paper on that weird vertebra with Darren a couple of years before. We got together over a few pints and discovered that we had a […]


  16. […] since it doesn’t name the new dinosaur (which was of course Xenoposeidon). I was young and stupid back then, and just followed convention. In mitigation, it does at least […]


  17. […] I briefly discussed on Twitter, seeing this made me think of my baby, Xenoposeidon. Now that specimen, beautiful though it is, preserves only the lower one third of the vertebra. But […]


  18. […] Google Scholar, this humble little taxonomic note has racked up 28 citations: only two fewer than the Xenoposeidon description. It’s handily outperforming other papers that I’d have considered much more […]


  19. […] Jack was fascinated by what I was working on. At that time, the Xenoposeidon paper was in press — no-one had seen it but Darren (my co-author), the handling editor and three […]


  20. […] just time before midnight strikes to wish Xenoposeidon a very happy tenth birthday. It came along just a month and a half after SV-POW! itself — in […]


  21. […] slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character was also in the original Xenoposeidon paper (Taylor and Naish 2007), in the slightly more assertive form “neural arch slopes anteriorly […]


  22. […] attention to a bizarre fact: despite 17 separate posts about Xenoposeidon on this blog (linked from here and here), we’ve never shown a decent scan of Lydekker’s (1893) original illustration […]


  23. […] reviewed papers. Thinking back across all my publications, most have been reviewed by two people; the original Xenoposeidon description was reviewed by three; the same was true of my reassessment of Xenoposeidon as a rebbachisaur, and […]


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