If you guessed General Petraeus, you are correct! See this great short article from Reuters for more.

The name says it all – Giraffatitan brancai is the most giraffe-like dinosaur known. The name is also Gregory Paul’s favorite, as he admits in the introduction to The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs. Scroll down to learn more about Giraffatitan, and be sure to check out the other daily dinosaurs here.

This image is taken from The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs by Gregory S. Paul. It may not be reproduced elsewhere without permission.

For your viewing pleasure, here is a recent talk given by our author and Princeton physicist Steven Gubser on his new book THE LITTLE BOOK OF STRING THEORY at the prestigious California Academy of Sciences, courtesy of Fora.tv. Enjoy!

You are the first to know about our online book sale. It starts today.
The special online book sale features books that were all well received and reviewed.
Our overstock gives you an opportunity to purchase outstanding titles at enormous savings.

Great Books at Great Prices — save up to 90% off
Limited Time Offer and Limited Stock

The sale is only available in the United States and Canada and ends March 31, 2011.

Visit the sale and find something to read:
http://press.princeton.edu/booksale/

Harry Potter fans will no doubt recognize a reference below. Paul notes that Dracorex hogwartsia is most likely a juvenile of Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis. Wikipedia says Dracorex hogwartsia means “dragon king of Hogwarts“. Note that the smaller skull is a juvenile, while the larger is an adult. Scroll down to learn more about this dinosaur or check out our other daily dinosaurs here.

This image is taken from The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs by Gregory S. Paul. It may not be reproduced elsewhere without permission.

The first of our fall subject catalogs are rolling off the presses. You are invited to browse our new Jewish Studies 2011 catalog online. There are many new and forthcoming titles to check out at:

http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/js11.pdf

Most of us are taught from a young age to be winners and avoid being losers. But what does it mean to win or lose? And why do we care so much? Does winning make us happy? Winning undertakes an unprecedented investigation of winning and losing in American society, what we are really after as we struggle to win, our collective beliefs about winners and losers, and much more.

Francesco Duina argues that victory and loss are not endpoints or final destinations but gateways to something of immense importance to us: the affirmation of our place in the world. But Duina also shows that competition is unlikely to provide us with the answers we need. Winning and losing are artificial and logically flawed concepts that put us at odds with the world around us and, ultimately, ourselves. Duina explores the social and psychological effects of the language of competition in American culture.

Read chapter one online:
Winning:
Reflections on an American Obsession
By Francesco Duina
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9340.html

Hope you can join Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor MI for a discussion of their new book — Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture.

In a recent review in the Times Higher Education, John Harris wrote: “This book is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning study of sport in a global perspective. . . . Markovits and Rensmann’s erudite analysis presents many of the key issues and offers interesting points to consider as the sports world continues to change at a remarkable pace.”

Today we’re trying something different from earlier Daily Dinosaurs. We’re going to explore one part of the dinosaur: its digestive tract. In the introduction to The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, Gregory S. Paul describes how digestive tracts would have varied between dinosaurs based on their anatomy and diet. Here is an illustration of a sauropod’s digestive tract. Scroll down to read a brief, related excerpt from the book.

This image is taken from The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs by Gregory S. Paul. It may not be reproduced elsewhere without permission.

Like herbivorous birds, most sauropods lacked the ability to chew the plant materials they ingested. The fodder was physically broken down in the gizzard, which may have used stones to help stir it up. Sauropods had large rib cages that contained the long, complex digestive tracts needed to ferment and chemically break down leaves and twigs. The system was taken to an extreme in the broad-bellied titanosaurs.

This week we’re giving away Seeds of Amazonian Plants by Fernando Cornejo & John Janovec.

This stunningly illustrated guide features an easy-to-use whole-plant approach to seed identification that provides detailed descriptions not only of the seeds but also of the habit, trunk, bark, leaves, infructescence, and fruit of Amazonian plants, as well as information about the known uses and distribution of each genus.

Want to know more? Explore the beauty of Seeds of Amazonian Plants and/or check out the sample pages.

All PUP Facebook fans are automatically entered to win our weekly book giveaway. To become a follower and have a chance to win our weekly book draw, “LIKE” us on our PUP Facebook Page

Seeds of Amazonian Plants by Fernando Cornejo & John Janovec. The drawing is this Friday.

From the Chronicle Review’s PageView blog:

In a Louisiana classroom, a charismatic middle-aged Romanian-born writer conducts an “Introduction to Poetry Writing” seminar. It’s the first session of the semester, and he wants to assign each student a ghost-companion—a “poet you will study all semester, read deeply, understand well, Google till you’re satisfied, and call on when you feel some difficulty.”

As he goes through this three-hour Sorting Hat exercise, the professor sometimes feels great waves of tenderness for his students’ youth, intelligence, and promise. But those warm sentiments are accompanied by alienation and near-disgust: Who are these callow lazy over-wired 18-year-olds who barely seem to know what World War II was about?

During the course of the class, the professor frets about his inability to operate a CD player, much less an iPod. He scornfully meditates on the university’s emergency-text-alert system, which seems unlikely to do anyone much good in a real crisis.

Also, there are feelings of lust.

Many of you will have recognized that we’re in the world of Andrei Codrescu, who retired last year after 25 years as an English professor at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.

Click over to read a Q&A between Andrei Codrescu and The Chronicle Review’s David Glenn on the subject of his new book The Poetry Lesson.

Melissa Mayntz over at About.com gives high praise to one of our latest bird guides. Read her complete review here. This book is a definite take-along if you are traveling to Jamaica or as Mayntz says, “this book is one that will be treasured for as long as birds are flying in Jamaica’s skies.”