Nostr notes by Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Speculative sauropods If you travel in the same circles I do, you ...

2026-10-02T07:34:34Z

Speculative sauropods

If you travel in the same circles I do, you probably know that my friend and colleague Mark Witton is working on a speculative biology book, Dinosaurs Evolved, that takes a fresh look at what life on Earth might be like now had the asteroid missed and the K-Pg extinction never happened. As a lifelong spec-bio fan, I’m stoked for that project. Speculative sauropods have given me a lot to think about, especially in the past few years, so I thought it would be fun to revisit some in this post. Maybe all? There aren’t a ton of examples. If you know of any I missed here, sing out in the comments. (I’m not including any from the Speculative Dinosaur Project out of lack of familiarity — the project was basically dead by the time I would have started following it — and I’m not sure any are currently accessible anyway.)

Rather than proceeding chronologically, I’m going to start with my favorites and proceed in the direction of the most-loathed, for reasons that will become apparent later on. Back in 2010, Memo Kösemen kindly let us — Mike, Darren, and me — debut his Brontosapiens here on SV-POW!, and give our thoughts on it. I’m not going to say much about this critter in this post, mostly because I think our ideas from 16 years ago hold up pretty well, and you can just go read the original post if you’re curious.

Pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.

Of course the OG speculative sauropods are the ones dreamt up by Dougal Dixon for The New Dinosaurs (1988), the recent reprint of which I reviewed here. In addition to the ones shown above, there are a couple more in the book: a dwarf island sauropod, which we now know actually happened more than once, and the Rajaphant, which is basically an unremarkable large titanosaur. Of the ones in the above spread, the Lumber has a trunk and is actually built for it, unlike any real-world sauropods discovered so far, and the Turtosaur takes titanosaur osteoderms to their logical conclusion. I like ’em both. The box on the far left shows the skeleton of a group of slender-bodied running sauropods that flourished only briefly during Dixon’s alternate Cenozoic.

I’m not going to say much about the brontosaurs in Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), because they’re not really attempts at spec bio, but rather deliberately old-fashioned Charles R. Knight/Rudolph Zallinger-esque productions realized in CG. I’ll say of the movie that it has a lot of dinosaurs but not particularly interesting ones; if you thought that the Jurassic Park/World movies were too realistic and you’d prefer your dinosaurs to look like cliches from decades past and act like voracious monsters, King Kong has you covered. That said, as monster fights go, King Kong vs. three V. rexes is a banger.

Much more interesting from a spec bio perspective is a book that accompanied the movie, The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island. It explains the fictional evolutionary backstory of the Skull Island critters from the movie, both the ones that made it to the screen, and many others that did not. Among those never realized on screen are two sauropods. The first, shown above, is Asperdorsus (“rough back”), which has spines on its back and hanging from its neck. This is pretty much just a spiny Diplodocus and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone dug one of these up in Montana while I was writing this post.

Then there’s this thing, Diablosaurus, which I have an almost visceral dislike of, for many reasons. First off, it’s boring. It’s just a dinosaur squeezed into the shape of a rhinoceros. In a world with the full-tilt wackiness of actual ceratopsians (f’rinstance) — of which there were also fictional examples on Skull Island! — a rhino-alike with horns but no frill is both uninspired and unexciting. Also, hello, Iguanodon from the 1830s is calling.

But it gets worse. Although the skeletal diagram shows that this dumb thing was clearly an ornithischian, or at least had an ornithischian pelvis, the text says that it’s an aberrant sauropod. Er, wut? I guess some Camarasaurus finally got drunk enough to evolve into an ornithischian and then into a mammal-shaped ornithischian. Of course it would.

I should give some credit to Diablosaurus, though, because it forced me to think about why I hated it so much. That got me thinking about what actual sauropods did, evolutionarily (be large-bodied, long-necked and long-tailed, graviportal, non-oral-processing oviparous quadrupedal herbivores), and what they did not do (er, pretty much everything else, including being Diablosaurus-like).

My “nontosaurs”: the gazelleopod, antlertitan, and poseidonposeidon.

And that led to my “Sauropod Heresies” mini-paper and talk for the Tate 2024 conference (link), which I tuned up with another year’s worth of thoughts for DinoCon 2025. The image above is a doodle I did for those talks, illustrating some of the paths not taken in sauropod evolution. If real sauropods were brontosaurs, I call the ‘forbidden’ experiments, including Diablosaurus, the nontosaurs.

To bring this full circle, Mark Witton has been kind enough to share some behind-the-scenes thinking for Dinosaurs Evolved, and he’s thought of some ways out of what we might call “brontosaur lock-in” that hadn’t occurred to me, but which I think are eminently plausible. One of them is the subject of a recent post on his Patreon. I’ll say no more for now, but let’s circle back after the book is out, to revisit both speculative sauropods and the real and imagined limits on the sauropod body plan.

Horrible Megalosaurus larva tears its way out of Matt’s stomach ...

2026-08-12T21:57:29Z

Horrible Megalosaurus larva tears its way out of Matt’s stomach

Historical note: Matt and I were idly going through some of the 276 unfinished draft posts on this blog (don’t judge us!) when we stumbled on this — written on 3 March 2011, but inexplicably not published. Here is is, as written.

Yeah, I get it, I’m fat.

Here’s a picture from the Leicester City Museum from my visit in the spring of 2004. In the foreground is a cast skeleton of the prosauropod Plateosaurus, and in the background is the mounted Cetiosaurus. The only mounted Cetiosaurus, anywhere.

The point of the photo is not me looking goofy, it’s that sauropods have really wacked out derived dorsal vertebrae, relative to practically everything else, but especially relative to prosauropods. In prosauropods, the cervicals look like slightly stretched dorsals, the caudals look like slightly smaller and simpler dorsals, but basically everything looks About The Same. In sauropods it’s sometimes hard to believe that the anterior and posterior dorsals belong to the same animal, they’re so different.

Which is old news, really. If sauropod vertebrae weren’t chock-full of architectural exotica, this blog wouldn’t have a reason to exist. But it’s cool that from so simple a beginning we get endless forms most beautiful (hat tip to Chuck D).

doi:10.59350/2e5f1-6t556

Current status Mike insisted that I (deep breath) stop the ...

2026-07-30T14:31:13Z

Current status

Mike insisted that I (deep breath) stop the process of resubmitting one of our collaborative manuscripts to post this, which is the clearest example of recursion I’ve ever seen or heard of.

Wildlife on the Planet Furaha by Gert van Dijk We’re not in ...

2026-07-23T19:59:26Z

Wildlife on the Planet Furaha by Gert van Dijk

We’re not in Kansas anymore. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.

A long time ago, bored with painting exploding spacecraft for others, I started painting alien creatures for my own pleasure.

— Gert van Dijk, from the Appendix

I’m distinctly late to this party, only having learned last year of the existence of Gert van Dijk’s Furaha project. Furaha is a magnificent work of worldbuilding, by an MD-PhD neurologist and professional artist, spanning decades of paintings, years of blog posts and articles across two websites, a YouTube channel, and now a physical book. I also somehow completely missed the opportunity to meet Gert van Dijk at DinoCon last year — a mistake I will be correctly as early as possible this year.

Furaha and Earth and their moons compared. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.

Gert’s* new book, Wildlife on the Planet Furaha: A Speculative Biology Guide to Alien Lifeforms, distills, refines, and in some cases expands the pre-existing Furahan material into an attractive, eminently digestible package, with a dizzying density of ideas packed into its 160 pages. There are short chapters up front about the Furahan solar system and the geography and plate tectonics of Furaha. Physically, Furaha is sufficiently Earth-like, in its gravity, topography, tectonics, and axial tilt and resulting seasonality, as to make no practical difference. The book is not an exploration of how Earth-like life might have evolved on a substantially different planet — say, a heavy-gravity world or a water world — but rather a tour of a profoundly Earth-like planet with multicellular life that nevertheless evolved into rather un-Earth-like plants and animals. Stephen Jay Gould argued that if we replaid the tape of the evolution of life on Earth, we might end up with substantially different organisms, with different body plans based on different historical contingencies. Wildlife on the Planet Furaha could be seen as an attempt to do that sort of tape-replaying, although that is my interpretation and nothing explicitly forced in the book.

*One could argue that I should adopt a more professional tone and refer to the author as van Dijk. But we’ve corresponded enough that doing so strikes me as unhelpfully standoffish, and one of the joys of blogging is the freedom to set my own rules. So: Gert.

Cloakfish. I can’t help but see these things as biological missiles. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.

After the introductory chapters, the bulk of the book covers the major clades of life on Furaha, including plants and fungus-analogues. Most of the chapters are 5-10 pages long. The exception, the 35-page chapter on hexapods, can be forgiven because hexapods are the dominant terrestrial vertebrate analogs on Furaha. As with Terran vertebrates, ‘terrestrial’ here is broad and loose, and includes flying and secondarily aquatic lineages.

If the environment asks how best to shape an animal leg bone or a plant stem, blind evolution is likely to come up with a tube to combine strength with low weight. Countless other examples show that evolution always attempts to solve mechanical problems while balancing energy demands. It is this evolutionary energy sieve that warrants the axiom ‘Darwinian evolution honours Newtonian mechanics’.

— Chapter 7, Rusps

The project seems motivated in large part by an honest attempt to imagine plausible organisms on an Earth-like world that break the geometric and bauplan constraints imposed by the unique history of life on Earth. What if trees could remodel their wood the same way that animals remodel their bones? What if some fish had necks? What if big animals had skeletons based on ladders instead of single notochords? What if fish and spiders were radially symmetrical? What if birds evolved from animals with more than four limbs?

A variety of radially-symmetrical spidrids… (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.

These questions are not posed as mere flights of fancy — they are investigated with genuine intellectual rigor. The book has cutaway anatomy illustrations, and diagrams explaining how the alien animals of Furaha locomote. An Appendix at the back has the author’s notes on how the project itself has evolved over the years, and how some organisms were voted off the planet, as it were, for being insufficiently plausible.

…and how they get around. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.

The book is lavishly and generously illustrated. I don’t think there’s a single spread without color art, and the dominant mode of presentation is to have a full-page painting married to explanatory text and an inset with a range map and a silhouette. Almost all of the artwork is beautiful and evocative, as I think the preview images I’m posting here demonstrate. Some of it is slyly clever as well — many of the silhouettes of Furahan critters will repay close attention. There are also textual and artistic callouts to other works by other creators. Memo Koseman’s Snaiad gets a mention, for example. Any question of whether the white-skinned, four-winged Dipeau is an homage to the white pterodactyl-creature in Jean Giraud’s Arzach (and the related Taarna sequence in the 1981 Heavy Metal movie) is put to rest by its scientific name, Velivolator moebii arzachi, and by the human in its silhouette diagram.

Terraforming (E,F) Large-scale action to change the overall environmental features of a planet, such as increasing global temperature and changing the composition of the atmosphere. The term was originally meant to indicate intentional actions to make a planet more Earth-like. Making a planet less Earth-like unintentionally proved equally feasible.

— from the Glossary

Although the book is played straight, and is by no means a comedy, it is laced with dry humor. This mostly takes the form of a keen but sympathetic cognizance that biology, like all sciences, is a human enterprise, and will therefore always be colored by human foibles — arrogance, overreach, parochialism, and simple lapses in self-awareness. In this way, the book rings true, at least to this mid-career biologist, and the occasion humorous barb lightens and adds interest to the reading experience. Like virtually everything about the book, the humor is right in the Goldilocks zone of being welcome, nicely judged, and not overdone.

Do I have any complaints? Hardly any worth mentioning, and each could be flipped over and turned into a compliment. A few pieces of art are merely serviceable, which is only noticeable because so much of the art in the book is outstanding. (Also, with no disrespect to either book, the worst piece of art in Furaha is still better than about half the art in The New Dinosaurs.) As others have noted in their reviews, the book introduces so much interesting stuff that it left me wanting more about almost everything. I want to know the whole phylogenetic and evolutionary history of the Furahan biota, I want to know about Furaha’s paleobiogeography, its mass extinctions, how food webs differ on the landmasses that have been isolated for 160-200 million years. And yet — the book is already an embarrassment of riches. It embodies so much creativity and imagination, intellectual rigor and artistic virtuosity, invested by a single person, that to ask for more seems greedy in the extreme. And on the positive side, with its short chapters and numerous illustrations, the book does not overstay its welcome. It never feels rushed or incomplete, but it also does not fall into the trap of over-explaining each topic — a too-easy pitfall for a passion project such as this.

I am charmed by both the silhouette of the Lausfresser, and by the story of its scientific naming. (c) Gert van Dijk (2025), used with permission.

If there are more Furaha books in the future, I’ll buy them the second they become available. If this one is all we get, well, it’s a pretty darned great book, sitting comfortably on the shelf next to Dougal Dixon’s After Man and Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s Expedition. I suspect that most readers of this blog will find the book an absorbing read, and if you’re into hard science fiction or speculative evolution, you probably have a copy in your hands or pre-ordered already. That’s a smart play, because it’s a triumph.

Want a second and third opinion? See the thoughtful reviews by Davide Gioia at Weird Anatomy, and by Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology.

Wildlife on the Planet Furaha is already available in the UK and Europe, and it is being published in the United States on July 28 — next Tuesday. If you’re coming to DinoCon this weekend, you can buy a copy from Gert in the vendor hall, at least until he sells out, which I think is quite likely. Go do the right thing.

Andy Frazer’s Aquilops, and DinoCon 2026 Life restoration of ...

2026-07-20T23:16:29Z

Andy Frazer’s Aquilops, and DinoCon 2026

Life restoration of Aquilops by Andy Frazer. Andy is the creator and rightsholder, and I’m posting this small version with his permission. Go see his Instagram feed for more.

One of the highlights of DinoCon 2025 for me was getting to meet Andy Frazer, who you may know from Dragons of Wales, Novosaurs, and his numerous and mind-blowing life restorations of dinosaurs. We had a few minutes for an unhurried, one-on-one conversation, and I bought some prints, a no-AI-in-paleoart button, and his book EX|TINCT, a hardcover omnibus of his EX|TERRA art books.

My three-toed box turtle, Easty, modeling kertain in direct sunlight. Sadly this photo does not do her justice.

Here’s why Andy’s art sings to me: I’m kind of a keratin junky. F’rinstance, I have been around turtles all my life. Caring for turtles, watching turtles, thinking about turtles. Turtle shells are made of bony plates, including enlarged and expanded ribs, covered by thick scutes of keratin (except for softshells, leatherbacks, and a few other random perverts, who are still clad in keratin, but not the hard, glowy kind). Especially when it’s clean and wet, the keratin of turtle scutes has a degree of translucency, and at certain angles it can appear softly luminous. That interplay of light and keratin is a subtle thing to notice, and from everything I know (and don’t know) about art, a real challenge to achieve artistically.

Are you freaking kidding me? What a flex!

I already had some degree of familiarity with Andy’s work, but flipping through EX|TINCT I kept thinking, “Dang, this is a guy who knows his keratin!” I was also riding high on the 2025 Aquilaissance, and I saw in Andy’s Etsy shop that he accepted commissions. So, bing bang boom, I commissioned Andy to draw Aquilops, and he shipped me the original of this lovely pencil drawing:

But that’s not all! Andy told me that in the process of doing the drawing, he got a little obsessed with Aquilops, and decided on his own steam to make the full-color photorealistic rendering you see at the top of the post. I can certainly understand the phenomenon of becoming obsessed with Aquilops, and if that obsession leads to more gorgeous artwork, even better.

And furthermore, if you like either or both of Andy’s Aquilops restorations then I have good news for you: both of them appear in his new book, Ab Antiquo, along with a shedload more new, amazing art. I don’t have a copy yet, but I aim to correct that in the very near future.

I bring all this up in part because DinoCon 2026 is this coming weekend, July 25 and 26. Mike and I will be there, yapping about our very atypical careers in the Careers Panel Saturday afternoon, and otherwise catching up with old friends, making new ones, prrrrobably lightening our wallets in the vendor hall, and generally soaking up all the dinorifficosity. I’d say go buy your DinoCon tickets, but my understanding is that they’re all sold out for this year. Man, do I have good timing or what? EDIT by Mike: Go buy your DinoCon tickets at https://www.dinocon.co.uk/tickets — they are close to being sold out, but there are still some left.

Anyway, Andy Frazer will also be at DinoCon, selling and signing books and prints and, I feel quite certain, being smart and interesting and fun with talk with. You can also find Andy on Instagram, Etsy, and at his own site, andyfrazer.com.

My adventures with Tri-bear-atops One month ago this weekend, I ...

2026-06-07T04:34:26Z

My adventures with Tri-bear-atops

One month ago this weekend, I was at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to yap about horned dinosaurs, a tie-in to the new Bizarre Headgear exhibit. Some utter genius in the gift shop had set up what you see above: a Triceratops mask on a stuffed polar bear. This charmed me immensely, in part because it reminded me of one of my favorite memes:

That image lives rent-free in my head forever.

Tri-bear-atops also reminded me of Natalie Metzger’s squirrel wearing an Aquilops skull, a signed print of which lives rent-free in my office. (BTW this print and many other awesome things are available in Natalie’s shop at The Fuzzy Slug. Incidentally, I got to meet Natalie at NorWesCon 2018 and she is just as awesome and hilarious in person as you’d expect from her art. I myself am just as forgetful and procrastinatory as you’d expect from an 8-year-overdue endorsement.)

I loved Tri-bear-atops so much I put it in my talk, at the end when I was encouraging folks to see the whole museum and patronize the gift shop. I said in the talk — truthfully! — that I would have bought it but it wouldn’t fit in my carry-on, so someone else should do the right thing.

That advice landed closer than I expected — my brother Ryan and his family surprised me with it for my birthday! Not a recreation, not “inspired by”, they just went back to the museum and bought the OG Tri-bear-atops and socked it away for a month. A special shout-out to my nephew Eli, who bought the Triceratops mask with his own money, and who (in classic older brother fashion) assures me that his siblings Jewel and Isaac had nothing to do with it.

I feel like the genre of dinosaur-masks-on-things-that-aren’t-dinosaurs has legs. Chances are good that you’ll see more here in time.

Curiousiday at the Sam Noble Museum: Sauroposeidon, Apatosaurus, ...

2026-05-16T15:39:17Z

Curiousiday at the Sam Noble Museum: Sauroposeidon, Apatosaurus, Aquilops, and more

Last Friday night I was at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to talk about horned dinosaurs, for the launch of the “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit. But last Saturday I was there for “Curiousiday”, to talk about Sauroposeidon.

I was set up at the south end of the museum’s main hall, with a table and some specimens to show off. On the left here is a 1/8 scale 3D print of OMNH 53062, the holotype cervical vertebrae of Sauroposeidon. On the right is OMNH 1094, a cervical vertebra of Apatosaurus (or the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine) that was the first thing that Kent Sanders and I CT scanned back in the spring of 1998 after the vertebrae of what would become Sauroposeidon. And on the far right is a monitor showing the three best slices, a version of an image that I’ve used in many papers and blog posts. Good old OMNH 1094 must surely rival OMNH 53062 as my most-figured specimen. I should tally up the occurrences and see who’s ahead.

Anyway: back to Sauroposeidon! Just outside the frame of the previous photo, the two larger jackets were on display, holding what I thought back when were cervicals 6, 7, and 8. That was based on a brachiosaurid identification, and a conservative estimate of 13 cervicals. Now it seems much more likely that Sauroposeidon is some kind of somphospondyl, and possibly a basal titanosaur. If so, it could have had anywhere from 13 to 17 cervicals, and there’s really no telling which four we have, other than they are probably from near the middle of the neck.

I believe that this is the first time that the original fossil material of Sauroposeidon has been on public display. Pretty darned cool! I got to show them off to a lot of visitors, and point out all kinds of neat anatomical details, like the numerous pneumatic fossae and subfossae and the overlapping cervical ribs.

And here I am yapping about Sauroposeidon, in a photo by curator Jacqueline Lungmus. Sauroposeidon-philes will recognize the slide as the quarry map, which appeared as figure 7 in Wedel & Cifelli (2005).

I love the composition of this photo, also by Jac Lungmus, in which the reconstructed neck and skull of Sauroposeidon loom overhead while I talk about the discovery of Sauroposeidon next to the actual fossils of Sauroposeidon and a 3D print of the Sauroposeidon vertebrae. More Sauroposeidon, anyone?

No? Okay, here’s a bunch of Aquilops stuff at the vertebrate paleontology table, including a cast of the actual fossil and a reconstructed skull, alongside the by-now-classic Brian Engh art and a couple of stills from Jurassic World Rebirth. There were many more goodies on display on the VP table, including casts of bones from Allosaurus anax (formerly Saurophaganax) and the Oklahoma Deinonychus.

I have skipped a ton of stuff that happened at Curiousiday. I believe every department in the museum had a table set up, except maybe genomics. The place was packed with cool stuff and interested visitors. Many thanks to Jac Lungmus, Jen Larsen, Kyle Davies, Greg Wilbert, Anne Seagren, and everyone else who made my fun day possible!

In a comment on the previous post, llewelly asked about a dinoceratan on display in the Bizarre Headgear exhibit. Here you go. Unfortunately I didn’t get a pic of the signage, so I’m not sure which taxon this is (Uintatherium? Eobasileus?), or which artist made the sculpture. Most of the sculptures in the exhibit are by Shane Foulkes. If anyone knows, sing out in the comments and I’ll update the post accordingly.

Finally, for the first time in nearly a decade, Giant Irish Matt has been spotted in its natural habitat (= inside a museum, natch). This pathetic freak is clearly bound for extinction.

The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is ...

2026-05-15T16:36:11Z

The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is incredible

An imposing view of a juvenile Utahceratops.

As threatened, I was in Oklahoma at the tail end of last week and over the weekend, mostly to give talks. My Friday evening public lecture was on horned dinosaurs, and it was tied in with the launch of a temporary exhibit called “Bizarre Headgear: Ceratopsians and the Evolution of Extraordinary Skulls”. I’ll cover the talks in another post; this one is about that exhibit.

From the museum’s central atrium, there are a couple of passages into the special exhibition gallery that houses “Bizarre Headgear”. My preferred way in is the second doorway, farther from the front of the museum, which puts you face-to-face with pterosaurs and hell pigs. This sets up the basic division of the room: mostly Mesozoic and mostly dinos to the left, mostly Cenozoic and mostly mammals to the right (with a few exceptions, like the Synthetoceras visible on the back wall).

From there, turn left and you’ll see horned dinosaurs and many other interesting critters. A lot of them.

Turn right and you’ll see a lot more non-dinosaurs, mostly extinct and extant mammals with a smattering of non-mammals.

I was there to yap about horned dinos, and the exhibit does not slack in this department, starting with this charming side-by-side skeletal reconstruction and lift restoration of Psittacosaurus. The sculpture is by Shane Foulkes, and it looks like a real animal.

A highlight of the exhibit for me is this case of early ceratopsians. From right to left (far to near in this photo) are cast skulls of Liaoceratops, Auroraceratops, Archaeoceratops, and Protoceratops. These are little Aquilops-alikes from Asia. Back in 2014, Farke et al. got this topology:

Psittacosaurus (Liaoceratops (Aquilops (Auroraceratops (Archaeoceratops + all more derived ceratopsians))))

and in 2024, Tanaka recovered these relationships for those same taxa (I’m dropping many others here):

Psittacosaurus (Liaoceratops (Archaeoceratops ((Aquilops + Auroraceratops) + (all more derived ceratopsians))))

I’d never seen so many of these adorable little weirdos in one place. Heck, I’d never even seen casts of Liaoceratops and Auroraceratops in person. So it was nice to get acquainted with the aunts and cousins of Aquilops.

The ceratopsian show continues with a pair of Protoceratops skeletons, followed by skulls of Zuniceratops, Diabloceratops, Kosmoceratops, and a cool Utahceratops with some soft tissue reconstructed. There’s also a mounted skeleton of Torosaurus, and the juvenile Utahceratops shown at the top of the post. This diversity of critters from across the ceratopsian tree was clutch when I helped lead a student tour on Monday. And it was nice to see a lot of animals that weren’t described when I was growing up, and that the average museum-goer might be less familiar with — Diabloceratops instead of Centrosaurus or Styracosaurus, Kosmoceratops and Utahceratops in place of Triceratops and Chasmosaurus.

The exhibit has a lot more than just skulls and skeletons. There are loads of sculptures, both life-sized fleshed-out heads and miniatures showing the whole animal, like this Pachyrhinosaurus. And lots of wall art. I believe all of the sculptures are by Shane Foulkes (and apologies if I missed anyone else). Most of the paintings are by Andrey Atuchin, but there is at least one Mark Hallett piece in the exhibit: Synthetoceras being menaced by an amphicyonid ‘bear-dog’.

The mostly-mammals, mostly-extant side of the exhibit is equally impressive. I’m including fewer photos from that side, because this is already a long post, but I counted at least 65 skulls of non-dinosaurs, including 3 proboscideans and 5 cetaceans. Invertebrates even get a look in, with some of the more baroquely-horned beetles. I nipped into the exhibit while it was still being set up to get some photos for my talk, like this awesome array of African bovids. All of these non-ceratopsians are there to put the evolution of bizarre headgear in dinosaurs into context, and to show that dinos were not incomprehensible monsters, but animals whose anatomy and ecology we can understand, or at least make pretty good inferences about. The signage is uniformly excellent — discreet, informative, and attractively laid out, with a consistent arrangement and color palette.

As long as we’re keeping score, I counted 5 mounted dinosaur skeletons, and 16 other dinosaur skulls. This exhibit is stacked. Every single person I talked to about it, including other paleontologists, staff, security guards, and museum visitors, volunteered something along the lines of “Holy cow, that is a lot of amazing stuff.” The sheer density and diversity of material on display has a qualitative impact, which gave me the feeling of walking through a cabinet of curiosities the size of a basketball court. I think it’s the most impressive temporary exhibit I’ve ever seen, and by far my favorite.

Here’s another thing I’d never seen in person: a cast skull of a hammerhead shark. Just incredible. As the artist and author Ricardo Delgado, creator of the Age of Reptiles comics, often says, “Nature is the best creature designer.”

The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit is the brainchild of Rob Gaston, shown here with some bespectacled doofus for scale. Rob and the crew at Gaston Design do great work — I’ve got a couple of their casts right here in my home office as I type. Because I got to go behind the scenes while they were setting up, I got to say hi to Rob and congratulate him on such a fantastic exhibit. If you’re within striking distance of Norman, Oklahoma, between now and late August, go see it. It’s included with the extremely reasonable museum admission (max $12 for non-senior adults, even less expensive for everyone else), and hey, you get to see the whole rest of the museum, too. See the museum website for details.

Parting shot: some utter genius in the museum gift shop got into the spirit of things by putting a Triceratops mask on this stuffed polar bear. I love this unreasonably and it’s only because of carry-on luggage limitations that I didn’t bring it home with me. Maybe you will succeed where I fell short.

I’ll have more to say about my trip in another post (Sauroposeidon!), so here I’ll just say a quick thanks to the museum director, Dr. Janet Braun, for the kind invitation to come speak; to Assistant Director Laura Moon and all the staff for making my visit successful and enjoyable; and to vert paleo curator Dr. Jacqueline Lungmus and the VP staff and volunteers for letting me come play in their sandbox. It was a heck of a trip, and you’ll be able to read more about it real soon.References

Farke, A.A., Maxwell, W.D., Cifelli, R.L., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. A ceratopsian dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the biogeography of Neoceratopsia. PLoS ONE 9(12): e112055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112055
Tanaka, Tomonori; Chiba, Kentaro; Ikeda, Tadahiro; Ryan, Michael J. 2024. A new neoceratopsian (Ornithischia, Ceratopsia) from the Lower Cretaceous Ohyamashimo Formation (Albian), southwestern Japan. Papers in Palaeontology, 10 (5).

Upcoming public talks about dinosaurs at the Sam Noble Oklahoma ...

2026-04-21T00:15:40Z

Upcoming public talks about dinosaurs at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

Image courtesy of the SNOMNH

I’ll be at OU and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on May 8 and 9.

On Friday, May 8, I’m giving a lunch and learn thing for OU graduate students on how to make new discoveries in anatomy. That evening I’m giving a public talk on horned dinosaurs. Admission is free! Details here.

On Saturday, May 9, I’ll be back at the museum for the “Curiousiday: Collections Celebration”. One of the jackets of the Sauroposeidon holotype specimen will be on display in the museum’s public galleries, and I’ll be giving a couple of short talks about Sauroposeidon. Time for my talks is TBD, but probably something like 11:00 and 2:00. The first 25 visitors get in free, after that it’s regular museum admission ($12 for 18 and up, $10 seniors, $7 kids 4-17, free for babies and toddlers). Details here.

I don’t know yet if there will be a formal book signing, but if you have one of my books and would like it signed, I’ve never turned anyone down.

If you’re within striking distance of Norman, come on out, see the museum’s awesome fossils, and maybe put up with some geek banging on about dinosaurs and/or vandalizing your library.

In honor of the upcoming horned dinosaur talk, here’s a Triceratops I drew. More on that another time.

doi:10.59350/hnkz4-b3d26

In search of rearing mounted sauropod skeletons I’m pretty sure ...

2026-04-11T22:56:28Z

In search of rearing mounted sauropod skeletons

I’m pretty sure that our old friend the AMNH Barosaurus was the first sauropod skeleton even mounted in a rearing pose.

Taylor and Wedel 2016:Figure 1. Mounted cast skeleton of Barosaurus referred specimen AMNH 6341, in the entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History. Homo sapiens (MPT) for scale. Photograph by MJW.

(Does anyone know of an earlier one? That would be fascinating!)

But what other mounted sauropods have been placed in a rearing posture, with both forefeet off the ground? I know of four others. First, the rearing Diplodocus at the Museum of Science and Innovation in Tampa, Florida, that we discussed in detail in Taylor et al. (2023:80–82):

Taylor et al. 2023:Figure 10. Double Diplodocus mount at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), Tampa, Florida. Both individuals are identical, having been cast from the molds made by Dinolab from the concrete Diplodocus of Vernal. Photograph by Anthony Pelaez, taken between 1997 and 2017.

Strangely enough, the other three are all individuals of Camarasaurus, an ugly four-square sauropod whose centre of gravity was well forward of the acetabulum in normal posture, and which would have found rearing much more difficult than in diplodocids. My guess is that’s just because Camarasaurus is so abundant that there are a lot of mounted skeletons out there, and some have been mounted in rearing postures because, well, why not?

Here is one from the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre in Thermopolis:

Camarasaurus skeleton from the BS (Beside Sauropod) quarry, on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Photograph by CryolophosaurusEllioti, CC By.

(I can’t find a good photo of this mount from the front or the side: if anyone can, please let me know in the comments.)

The next is in the US National Museum (USNM), otherwise known as the NMNH, otherwise known as the Smithsonian. It’s on the right of this photo:

Rearing Camarasaurus (right of photo, the smaller of the two sauropods) at the USNM/NMNH/Smithsonian. Photo by Ben Miller. https://sauropods.win/@extinctmonsters/109293854660129716

And finally, as I was putting this post together, I stumbled across this mount at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands:

Yet another rearing Camarasaurus, at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Photo by thedogg, CC By-SA.

I know nothing about this one, and would welcome any details.

In fact, I don’t know much about any of the three rearing camarasaurs. Can anyone tell me, for example, when they went up? And whether the AMNH Barosaurus was a conscious inspiration?

And the $64,000 question: does anyone know of other rearing sauropod mounts?References

Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2016. The neck of Barosaurus: longer, wider and weirder than those of Diplodocus and other diplodocines. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e67v2 doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.67v2
Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91

doi:10.59350/qg664-9be62

The checklist for new zoological genus and species names is ...

2026-02-25T21:35:55Z

The checklist for new zoological genus and species names is published

A little over a month ago, I announced that DRAFT v4 of the the checklist for new zoological genus and species names, incorporating information about electronic publication, was available for critique. Perhaps surprisingly, there were no comments (in contrast to the 127 comments on DRAFT v3). So I have gone ahead and published the checklist. You are free to use this in your own work. If you want to cite it, I recommend:

Taylor, Michael P., 2026. Checklist for new zoological genus and species names. Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 25 February, 2026. doi:10.59350/knt7m-whb54. https://svpow.com/2026/02/25/checklist-for-new-zoological-genus-and-species-names/ archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260225210412/https://svpow.com/2026/02/25/checklist-for-new-zoological-genus-and-species-names/

New paper: Hart et al. 2025 on neural canal ridges in crocsThe ...

2025-12-12T23:23:56Z

New paper: Hart et al. 2025 on neural canal ridges in crocsThe dawn of a new era: AMNH FR 34089, a caudal vertebra of the giant extinct croc Thecachampsa, backlit to show the neural canal ridges. This is not just my favorite specimen with NCRs, it’s one of my favorite images of any fossil ever. Photo by William Jude Hart.

New paper out:Hart, W.J., Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First occurrences of neural canal ridges in Crocodylia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 70(4): 749–753.

This one started last autumn. On October 2, 2024, I got an email from William Jude Hart, then an undergraduate at Hofstra University. At the time he was preparing to present a poster at the upcoming 2024 SVP meeting, on a caudal vertebra of a large extinct croc, Thecachampsa. Thecachampsa was a tomistomine gavialoid, closely related to the extant False Gharial, Tomistoma, which in turn is a member of Gavialidae and therefore a lot less “false” than we used to think. Thecachampsa lived on the east coast of North America in the Miocene, and it was bigger and scarier than any croc alive today. William had seen Atterholt et al. (2024), my paper with Jessie and a gang of other folks on neural canal ridges (NCRs) in non-avian dinosaurs — which we interpreted as bony spinal cord supports, following Skutschas and Baleeva (2012; see this post and this one). He had noted similar structures in his Thecachampsa caudal, and he offered to send photos.OMNH RE 0215, a third dorsal vertebra of an alligator in anterior view showing the bilobed neural canal. Also used in Atterholt et al. (2024: fig. 9).

I was interested to see photos of the Thecachampsa vert, but I was trying to moderate my excitement. A lot of crocs have bilobed neural canals, shaped like a snowman or a numeral 8, with a larger lower passage for the spinal cord and its associated meninges, and a smaller upper passage for the large supraspinal vein (a character shared with many birds — see Atterholt et al. 2025 and this post). The two passages are often divided by longitudinal bony ridges, and these can mimic bony spinal cord supports. Criteria exist to distinguish the two, as we discussed in Atterholt et al. (2024), but it’s not always super clear-cut. I wondered if the structures in the Thecachampsa vert would just be elaborate ridges between the neural and vascular compartments.Thecachampsa caudal AMNH FR 34089, close-up of the right NCR. Photo by William Jude Hart.

As the photo at the top of the post demonstrates, I should have had more faith in William’s perspicacity as a morphologist. When he sent the photos, my jaw hit the floor. These are the thinnest, spikiest, least ambiguous bony spinal cord supports I’ve seen in any amniote, extinct or extant. They’re up there with the rose-thorn-esque bony spikes in tuna vertebrae (see photos in this post).Close-up of the right NCR in AMNH FR 34089. The morphology here is complex — there is a longitudinal ridgeline for the NCR itself (red highlight), but it doesn’t extend vert far at all. More interesting to me is the subtle ridge running dorsoventrally on the lateral wall of the canal (blue highlights).

I’m pretty confident that these have nothing to do with separating the supraspinal vein from the spinal cord. For one thing, this Thecachampsa vert does not have a bilobed neural canal. On the contrary, rather than having a longitudinal ridge on the side of the canal, the Thecachampsa caudal has a very subtle transverse ridge running up each side of the canal — highlighted in blue in the photo above — on which the neural canal ridge sits like a fairly abrupt summit. The photos above are closeups of the right NCR, but the same is true on the left, as you can see in the photo at the top of the post. That morphology looks a lot more consistent with bony spinal cord supports than with physically demarcating the canal into upper and lower halves.My favorite sauropod NCRs, in MWC 10613, a Diplodocus caudal from Bone Cabin Quarry in Wyoming. Nice sharp little ridges about midway along the canal, visible to the naked eye, in CT slices (left), and in a hemisectioned digital model (right).

Also, the Thecachampsa spikes are at about the midpoint of the neural canal, where we tended to find the NCRs in sauropods and other dinosaurs. That makes perfect sense if the bony spinal cord supports are remnants of embryonic myosepta, as hypothesized by Skutschas and Baleeva (2012; see this post for more discussion). The neural arch pedicles form within those myosepta, so if the bony spinal cord supports are also myoseptal remnants, they should be located near the craniocaudal midpoint of each neural arch pedicle, which is just another way of saying “about halfway down the neural canal”. Et voila, so they are, in both Thecachampsa and non-avian dinosaurs.

(Why not just check in extant crocs and see what soft tissues are tethered to these things? We’re working on that. Even if we’re wrong about NCRs being bony spinal cord supports, they’re bony somethings, presumably related to interesting soft tissues, and with anatomical and phylogenetic distributions that are very far from being fully mapped.)Deinosuchus caudal WSC 285.8 in anterior view. The left NCR is the lower of the two prominences visible on the right side of the canal (the upper is taphonomic damage, the edge of a crack).

Armed with the knowledge that NCRs were present in crocs, I drove out to Hemet to visit the Western Science Center. Andrew McDonald has been digging in the Menefee Formation of New Mexico for years, unearthing cool critters like the tyrannosaur Dynamoterror, the armored Invictarx, the hadrosaur Ornatops (which you’ve seen here before), some turtles (McDonald and Wolfe 2018, McDonald et al. 2018, 2021, Adrian et al. 2025) — and, oh yeah, the gigantic and terrifying Cretaceous croc Deinosuchus (Mohler et al. 2021). Thanks to the kind offices of Andrew and Alton Dooley, a good friend and Haplocanthosaurus partner in crime, I got my mitts on the Menefee Deinosuchus caudals. Two of the three vertebrae that I examined had an NCR preserved on at least one side. The third vertebra, by far the most complete externally, ironically had the worst-preserved neural canal. But the others were enough.

We had all the ammo for this paper about a year ago. William had the original discovery, the nicer specimen, and everything he needed to publish on his own, but he kindly invited me to contribute. We put together — well, William put together, with about 95% of the work — a presentation for the 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress this spring. We looped in Jessie Atterholt for the paper, and she made a lot of improvements. And here we are.Where will these things turn up next? Maybe you will be the one to find out. Modified from Hart et al. (2025: fig. 1).

(Incidentally, I created the silhouettes for Figure 1 myself, mostly tracing public domain images but drawing a few on my own. Why not use PhyloPic? Partly my own cussed persnickettiness, and partly because properly crediting 17 people was going to be cumbersome in such a short paper. I should make the originals available for everyone else — watch this space.)

Why do we find NCRs in some taxa but not others? Some animals are prevented from developing them: sharks don’t have a way to ossify their ligament attachments, and the denticulate ligaments of mammals don’t anchor to bone (see this post for more). Also, I suspect that NCRs are like the ossified traces of most muscle, tendon, and ligament attachments, in that they can be present but are not always present, even when the muscle, tendon, or ligament is. But that’s just kicking the can down the road — why do we see prominent NCRs in certain groups, and in certain regions of the vertebral column? We advance a hypothesis in the new paper (p. 752):

NCRs are prevalent in clades with laterally undulating locomotion (e.g., Teleosti; Skutchas and Baleev 2012), tail-driven femur retraction (e.g., Dinosauria; Atterholt et al. 2024), or both (e.g., Urodela; Wake and Lawson 1972), and absent in clades that have more rigid torsos, an absence of tail-driven femur retraction, or both, such as Anura, Aves, and Mammalia (Fig. 1A). This apparent distribution is consistent with the hypothesis that NCRs anchor the spinal cord against lateral undulatory motion.

That’s our best guess right now, but a LOT of work remains to be done. We hint at three fronts in the paper:1. Discovery

NCRs are turning up all over the place. When we published the first NCR paper last year, they were known in salamanders but not in other lissamphibians. Now they’ve been documented in caecilians, by Santos et al. (2025), which we were able to cite in the new paper. The pace of discovery is rapid, but there is a lot of ground not yet covered. At this point, the number of non-sauropod archosaurs with published NCRs is very small — one individual each of Thecachampsa, Deinosuchus, Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Stegosaurus, and an indeterminate hadrosaur — but very suggestive, because Archosauria is a big, diverse clade. Not to mention all the other vertebrates. Someone is going to the be the first to document NCRs in, gosh, all the other things. Tyrannosaurs, anyone?

In particular, you may be thinking that it’s all very well for NCRs to be present in these giant extinct crocs, but what about mortal extant crocs? Stay tuned — we’re working on that, with William leading the charge. He’s a grad student now, pursuing his Master’s at East Tennessee State, and I’m confident you’ll be hearing a lot more about his work in the future.Thecachampsa caudal AMNH FR 34089 in ventral view. This vert is just shy of four inches long, which if you know crocs, is up in *gulp* territory.2. Investigating soft tissues

We think the NCRs in crocs and dinos are bony spinal cord supports, but it would be very nice to have that confirmed via dissection. Also, where do the denticulate ligaments attach in vertebrae with bilobed neural canals? Could some of the longitudinal ridges in croc verts be doing double duty, dividing the vascular and neural compartments and anchoring denticulate ligaments at the same time? These are open questions, which are about one dead alligator away from being answered.

Also, as mentioned above, if the NCRs of crocs aren’t bony spinal cord supports, what the heck are they?3. Biomechanical testing

Assuming NCRs are bony spinal cord supports, is lateral movement of the vertebral column the primary driver in their formation, just one factor among many, or a complete red herring? This is the kind of thing that could easily lend itself to logistically intensive approaches like 3D scanning and modeling, but might also get solved by just, like, pulling on things to see what happens (e.g., Baumel 1985).Conclusion

If you want to get in on this, it’s a pretty straightforward gig: find some vertebrae, peer in the neural canals, document what you find, tell the world. If you don’t find NCRs you might find pneumatic cavities or blood vessel tracks or some totally new thing to add to the neural canal zoo. There are whole big clades of vertebrates about which we know basically nothing, neural-canal-wise, and opportunities for new discoveries abound — as our new paper shows. Come play.References

Adrian, B., Smith, H.F. and McDonald, A.T. 2025. A revised turtle assemblage from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation (New Mexico, North America) with evolutionary and paleobiostratigraphic implications. PeerJ 13: e19340.
Atterholt, J., Wedel, M.J., Tykoski, R., Fiorillo, A.R., Holwerda, F., Nalley, T.K., Lepore, T., and Yasmer, J. 2024. Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of postcranial neuroanatomy in dinosaurs. The Anatomical Record, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25558
Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.
Baumel, J.J. 1985. Suspensory ligaments of nerves: an adaptation for protection of the avian spinal cord. Anatomia, Histologia, Embryologia 14(1): 1-5.
Hart, W.J., Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First occurrences of neural canal ridges in Crocodylia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 70(4): 749–753.
McDonald, A.T. and Wolfe, D.G. 2018. A new nodosaurid ankylosaur (Dinosauria: Thyreophora) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. PeerJ 6: e5435.
McDonald, A.T., Wolfe, D.G. and Dooley Jr, A.C. 2018. A new tyrannosaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. PeerJ 6: e5749.
McDonald, A.T., Wolfe, D.G., Fowler, E.A.F. and Gates, T.A., 2021. A new brachylophosaurin (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. PeerJ, 9, p.e11084.
Mohler, B.F., McDonald, A.T. and Wolfe, D.G. 2021. First remains of the enormous alligatoroid Deinosuchus from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee formation, New Mexico. PeerJ 9: e11302.
Santos, R.O., Wilkinson, M., and Zaher, H. 2025. An overview of the postcranial osteology of caecilians (Gymnophiona, Lissamphibia). The Anatomical Record, 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70000.
Skutschas, P. P., & Baleeva, N. V. 2012. The spinal cord supports of vertebrae in the crown-group salamanders (Caudata, Urodela). Journal of Morphology 273(9): 1031–1041.
Wake, D. B., & Lawson, R. 1973. Developmental and adult morphology of the vertebral column in the plethodontid salamander Eurycea bislineata, with comments on vertebral evolution in the Amphibia. Journal of Morphology 139(3): 251–299.

Book Week 2025, Day 8: Jurassic West, 2nd edition, by John Foster ...

2025-12-04T02:29:46Z

Book Week 2025, Day 8: Jurassic West, 2nd edition, by John Foster

Ha ha, I lied. Book Week will continue until morale improves.

Mike has made the point to me more than once that there are papers I could and probably should write, but haven’t, because they’re things that I just assume everyone else knows. I’m not alone here, it’s a very common human thing to subconsciously assume that basic, background knowledge for each of us is also basic, background knowledge for most everyone else (a.k.a. the “curse of knowledge”, which Mike has blogged about before) — even when stopping and interrogating that assumption would explode it almost immediately. Similarly, there are books I haven’t blogged about because they are so fundamental to my process that it’s hard to remember that not everyone in the world operates from the same fundamentals.

I’ve given quite a few public talks about dinosaurs, and in the past decade I’ve typically ended with shout-outs to four things: (1) this blog, (2) my book with Mark Hallett, (3) Brian Engh’s website and paleoart channel, and (4) John Foster’s Jurassic West. I realized, admittedly a bit belatedly, that it’s plain loony for people who see my talks to learn about JW, but not people who read this blog. So I’m patching that hole.John Foster in the field near Brachiosaur Gulch. That big rock he’s standing in front of is a preserved stream bed in cross-section.

Here’s my plug for Jurassic West: it’s the closest you can get to carrying the Morrison Formation around in your backpack. I don’t mean a couple of little pieces, I mean the whole damn thing. John covers everything about the Morrison: geology, sedimentology and stratigraphy, paleoenvironments (yes, plural, the Morrison was diverse in every way), plants, inverts, dinosaurs, other vertebrates, history of study, notable quarries (well, really, all the quarries, if you count the incredible appendices), current research, prospects for the future, and, I assume but am too busy to check right now, about 57 other things I’ve forgotten to mention. And it’s well written! And lavishly illustrated! And nicely produced, on good heavy high-gloss paper between sturdy covers. Which is a good thing, because I use this freakin’ book so often that it doesn’t have a space on my bookshelf, it stands cover-out in front of all the lesser books, where I can grab it in less time than it took to type this clause. It’s ridden with me to and from Utah and Colorado more times than I can count. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve picked it up just to review which dinosaurs are known from which quarries, I could afford to buy you a copy.The emotional truth of my relationship to this book.

If Jurassic West was all that John had produced, it would still be a towering achievement, and a humbling one for those of us who toil in its shadow. But he also has a totally separate research thread on Cambrian strata and their biotas, and a whole ‘nother book on that stuff, Cambrian Ocean World. And he continues to do fieldwork and museum research and publish papers on both the Morrison and the Cambrian (jeez, pick a lane, fella!). Oh, and he’s a husband and father with a wonderful family, including his rather accomplished spouse, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, Park Paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument. I assume John either has a Time-Turner or he’s into some deep necromancy, and he’s too good of a friend and colleague for me to want to find out which.

If you like dinosaurs, the Morrison Formation, or just want a truly killer guide to take with you on your museum-and-dinosaur-quarry tour of the American West, this book is a must have. Very Morosaurus-brained of me not to have recommended it sooner. In my defense, it’s only because I assumed you already had a copy.

Now Book Week is over. Probably. Come back tomorrow and we’ll find out together.

Book Week 2025, Day 7: Three favorites by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen I ...

2025-12-03T09:59:35Z

Book Week 2025, Day 7: Three favorites by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen

I have been a fanboy of prominent animal physiologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen for a long time. I first encountered his papers back in the late 90s, working on my MS thesis at OU. I realized that vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods implied, among other things, that I had better get to reading about birds. Probably the first Schmidt-Nielsen paper I read was, “Temperature regulation and respiration in the ostrich” (1969). It’s still a good read, focused, concise, containing much that is useful and interesting for people who care about dinosaurs, and at least right now it’s freely available here.

I believe that Vic Hutchison at OU, himself a pretty legendary animal physiologist, was the first to put me onto Schmidt-Nielsen’s magisterial textbook, Animal Physiology: Adaptation and Environment. I was used to textbooks written by committee, often not by the people leading their respective fields, which did workmanlike duty introducing undergrads to fundamentals, and which serious researchers would soon outgrow. Schmidt-Nielsen’s Animal Physiology was different; it was written by one person, who at the time of its writing was one of the world leaders in animal physiology; it covered so much so well that it seemed to have transcended the category of things that could be outgrown; and most importantly, it was well-written. Really well-written, to the point of being readable for pleasure (if you like learning how animals work). And, I thought then and still think today, a model for good science communication. A copy of the 5th and final edition sits within arm’s reach of my desk, and if the house ever starts sliding into a sinkhole or I see zombies coming down the street, I’ll put it on the stack of things to run out with, between the sauropod monographs and Brown’s Composition of Scientific Words. If you want a taste of the ideas and the writing but don’t want to lug around a 600-page textbook, try How Animals Work, a slim volume based on a lecture series that covers a lot of the same ground in 124 pages.

So what is it about this animal physiologist that made him one of my scientific heroes? I envy people who communicate well, and I find Schmidt-Nielsen’s papers to be models of clarity at every level. Each paper tends to be about a single thing, something you could relay in one sentence. They have short, punchy titles. They’re readable.

I should say right here that the Schmidt-Nielsen style is not the Wedel style. I have friends whose offices are so uncluttered that they look like model rooms in an IKEA store. I have an office at work and another at home, and both of them look like habitable cabinets of curiosities at best, and like hoarder nightmares at worst. I have come to accept that I am a maximalist — in my physical-space-arranging, in my writing, and in my choice of study organisms — and that’s that. But I can admire the minimalist aesthetic, and learn from it. I may never craft anything as elegantly lean as a Schmidt-Nielsen paper, but maybe by studying his writing I can ensure that underneath all the asides and digressions and racing stripes and feathers, my papers will have airworthy frames.

It was that attitude of careful study that led me to pick up Schmidt-Nielsen’s autobiography, The Camel’s Nose. I learned that a lot of the qualities I’d been admiring were not accidental at all, but deliberately chosen and cultivated. Schmidt-Nielsen was born and raised in Norway. English was his adopted language, not his first, and he wrote in simple, direct sentences to reduce the opportunities for being misunderstood. He’d stayed active for so long because he was driven by simple curiosity, about how animals got on in the world. When the time came around for a new edition of Animal Physiology, he basically made that his project for a year or so. He’d gather all the top papers and latest research on each topic, distill what was interesting and important, and write. That’s why the book is so good: one of the world’s top physiologists, who strove for clear communication, basically shelved everything else for a year at a time to make sure he was caught up on the literature, and then wrote.

That level of pure commitment doesn’t sound like a recipe for work-life balance. I’m sure there are exceptions, but in my experience the most driven people are not usually the ones with happy home lives. In The Camel’s Nose, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen relates how his marriage to his spouse, fellow physiologist Bodil Mimi Schmidt-Nielsen (née Krogh — she was descended from physiological royalty on both sides), unraveled because they were both too driven, too close to the work, too competitive. Schmidt-Nielsen relays all this with a tinge of sadness, but otherwise in his typical style — directly, concisely, matter-of-factly. It would be interesting to know Bodil’s side of the story. The dissolution of their marriage was certainly not a career-ender for her — she went on to be a department chair at Case Western Reserve, a full-time researcher at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, and the first woman president of the American Physiological Society. On one hand, having two people at the top of their field — at the top of the same field — in the same household sounds pretty relentlessly intense to me, like trying to force the north poles of two magnets together. On the other hand, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen seems to me to have been pretty relentlessly intense all by himself, and I wonder if anyone’s inherent north-pole-ness (in this metaphor, we all prolly have a little) could have survived near him without being pushed away. As with his writing style, I can look and learn without being tempted to emulate.

Confession time: I’ve never made it to the end of The Camel’s Nose. For me, the ratio of new insights into Schmidt-Nielsen’s process and his discoveries in the field, on one hand, compared to increasingly dense chunks of self-congratulation on the other, becomes unfavorable in the final chapters. I already admired him before I picked up the book; indeed, that’s why I picked it up in the first place. Reading about his honors, however well-deserved and however fairly relayed, doesn’t help me (except maybe as a What Not To Do for Future Matt, and sometimes Present Matt). Possibly in skipping the last couple of chapters I’ve missed some gold nugget of advice or perspective, but I doubt it. I came for insights into Schmidt-Nielsen’s process of research and writing, I got what I was after, and I still recommend the book on that basis. Like the rest of his works, it’s remarkably clear in both vision and execution, and it’s probably the most readable of all his books. If you make it to the end, I’d be curious to hear what I missed.

All of these books are old. How Animals Work was first published in 1972, Animal Physiology 5th ed. in 1997, and The Camel’s Nose in 1998. They’re all still relevant, readable, and worth learning from. Do what I did and find used copies.

That’s it for Book Week 2025. There are of course legions of deserving books that I didn’t cover — feel free to shout ’em out in the comments.Reference

Schmidt-Nielsen, K., Kanwisher, J., Lasiewski, R.C., Cohn, J.E. and Bretz, W.L. 1969. Temperature regulation and respiration in the ostrich. The Condor 71(4):341-352.

Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and ...

2025-12-03T00:29:20Z

Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, by John Muir Laws

Drawing is how I understand things best, and it’s one of the ways I teach myself new subjects. My top advice for anyone wanting to be a paleontologist is “learn how to write” and “learn how to draw”, which really boil down to, “practice writing and drawing”. You only get better by doing. There’s a great saying, that everyone is born with 1000 bad drawings inside them. You get to the good drawings — you get to be good at drawing — by exorcising the 1000 bad drawings. “I can’t draw” is just a shorter way of saying, “I’m unwilling to practice drawing.” (That probably sounds pretty strident. If you don’t want to be good at drawing, that’s fine. The world is big, full, and busy, and not everyone has to be interested in every possible thing. Just don’t mistake “I can’t draw” for a good reason not to try.)

Drawing forces me to be a better observer. If I have to trace every line and contour of a fossil, I have to push my pen along those paths, and that compels me to notice them in the first place, and wonder about them. Why this shape, and not some other? Is this an omnipresent feature, or a variable one? Where have I seen this before? Have I seen this before? Has anyone ever noticed this at all? (Answer: surprisingly often, no.) I think anyone who wants to be a better morphologist could improve their observational skills and anatomical understand through drawing; indeed, I can hardly imagine how it could be otherwise.A slide from my introduction to anatomy lecture, from the section on how to study.

John Muir Laws is all about the practice of observing nature through drawing and writing notes, but the principles he teaches have much broader applications. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes of his:“The first pancakes off the griddle are always funky, but you need to make them to get to the good pancakes. So too with drawing or journaling. Do not judge yourself by your first lines on paper on any given day.”
– from “Sacrificial Pancakes”

When I first read that, I wrote to Mike, “Holy cow, did I need to read these lines, not just about drawing or writing but about LIFE.”

Mike responded, “Whether X is blog-posts, specimen drawings, novels, narrative songs or landscape paintings, the best _and quickest_ way to produce a good X is to produce a lot of bad Xs. Also: “sacrificial pancake” is a good term for the sequence of Bad Xs.”

The thing is, it’s not about the bad Xs, or even the good Xs. It’s about the willingness to keep making Xs at all. To wit:“Drawing with the goal of the drawing itself makes a fetish of the product. […] Each drawing is not an end in itself. It is a vehicle to help you focus your attention.”
– from “Quantity, not Quality”

The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is about doing that — learning to focus your attention by drawing and taking notes. I particularly like Laws’s 3-part structure to taking notes on something, be it a landscape, an organism, or a phenomenon. His guiding prompts are:

“I notice…” What do you notice about the thing? Draw those things, write them down, annotate them — capture them somehow. The more you capture, the more you will likely notice.
“I wonder…” Ask questions. They can be dumb questions, or unanswerable ones. The goal in the moment is not to filter, not to judge, just to let the ideas flow. As with pancakes, you may have to off-gas some dumb ideas into your notebook to get to the good ones.
“I remember…” Make connections. Again, without judgement. They can be far-fetched or goofy. You’ll have the rest of your life to sort the good from the bad — but only if you cast a broad enough net to catch the good ideas in the first place. Which is just another way of saying, lower your inner defenses to looking or feeling stupid. A lot of great ideas looked dumb at first blush.

That second quote resonates with me for another reason. I have the odd privilege of being friends with some of the world’s most accomplished paleoartists. If I started comparing my drawings to theirs, I’d never pick up a pen or pencil again. I’m like a goldfish watching a team of brain surgeons. But I’m not drawing for the same reasons they are. I basically only need to be able to do two things: take notes for my own personal use, and — 0ccasionally — hand-draw something for publication. My first draft of the previous sentence included the formulation, “draw well enough to learn something”, but I realized that’s a nonsensical arrangement of words. I think that anyone at any level of skill or experience can draw well enough to learn something; indeed, a beginner may learn more from their first 10 drawings than a master will learn from their next 50.

And to circle back to the opening of the post, I don’t think aspiring paleontologists need to learn how to draw so that they can draw better. I think aspiring paleontologists need to learn how to draw so that they can see better. As Laws wrote, drawing is a vehicle for focusing attention. But the process of drawing has the handy corollary that it gives off archivable notes as waste.A still from one of Laws’s videos on sketching.

Laws’s chosen field is natural history, but you could apply his ideas on noticing things, asking questions, making connections, and creating iteratively to all kinds of things: baking techniques, physical exercises, lawn mower engines, you name it. So a book with a seemingly specific remit, observing nature, actually is about becoming a better observer, and a better learner, in general.

Of all the books I’ve covered in this book week, if there’s one I could inflict on aspiring scientists — or active ones — and force them to read and engage with, it would be this one. Not from any position of superiority! I am climbing the mountain myself, always, one day and one step at a time. This book is one of my hiking poles. I think you will find it useful as well.

Book Week 2025, Day 5: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, by Riley ...

2025-12-01T08:30:53Z

Book Week 2025, Day 5: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, by Riley Black

I put these Book Week posts into sequence with a level of forethought about one notch above pure randomness, but a felicity emerged. It’s useful for me to cover The Last Days of the Dinosaurs after the previous three books, each for a particular reason. As I did with Steve Brusatte, I’ve tracked Riley Black’s career since its inception, from their old blog, Laelaps (since superseded by the currently active Tooth and Bone), and the book Written in Stone (2010). It’s been a satisfying evolution to follow, as Riley’s voice and range as a writer have developed and deepened. In the same way that my post on Dr. Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs serves as a belated shout-out to Mark Witton, this one is a long-overdue acknowledgement of Riley’s steady, determined, seemingly-inevitable-in-hindsight rise to prominence as a now multiply-award-winning writer. I’ve been following all along, and her current — and well-earned — success stands on the usual pillars: time, patience, grit, and, in Robert McKee’s memorable formulation, “the work, the work, all the work”.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs shares with Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands a stride-through-time structure, but running forward in time where Otherlands dove into the increasingly remote past. The book starts with the Chicxulub impact, and narrates what happened in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation and in the wider world at ever-expanding intervals: an hour post-impact, then a day, a week, a month, a year, and so on, out to one million years into the Paleogene. Like Otherlands, it’s both an exhaustively-researched tour de force, and a compellingly told story. The story here is an imperial drama on the largest possible stage, involving the rapid unmaking of one dynasty — that of the non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles — and the rather more protracted rise of its successor, our familiar world in which mammals, birds, and flowering plants get top billing in most times and places, but reptiles, amphibians, conifers, ferns, and many other forms of life keep on keeping on.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is by turns pitiless and hopeful, showcasing both the terrifying fragility of life, from individuals to species to ecosystems, in a sometimes violent universe, and the resilience of life in the wake of the grimmest and most implacable catastrophes. (It also left me really, really hoping for more civilization-level investment in asteroid defense.) The constant note ringing through the book is that “our familiar world” simply would not exist without the impact and its aftermath. Non-avian dinosaurs were changing and evolving in the latest Cretaceous, as they had been for nearly 180 million years, but the idea, still prevalent in some circles when I was a kid and even in college, that the end-Cretaceous turnover was some kind of intrinsic and inevitable replacement driven by superior biology is now deader than, well, you know. If the asteroid had missed, we might have gotten some elements of Dougal Dixon’s New Dinosaurs, but we most assuredly would not have gotten the world we enjoy today, and “we” would almost certainly be living in trees and holes, eating insects and fruit, and picking nits instead of pecking keys. It’s one thing to know that intellectually — that our very existence hinged on an improbable astronomical event — and another to be led through the horrible, grinding aftermath of the cataclysm by a knowledgeable guide. In Riley Black, this particular inferno has found its Virgil.

Book Week 2025, Day 4: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday Otherlands ...

2025-11-30T09:38:05Z

Book Week 2025, Day 4: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday

Otherlands is unlike any other book I’ve encountered. Starting in the Pleistocene and roving back in time, for each epoch of the Cenozoic and each period of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic, Thomas Halliday takes us to a specific place and time, a particular biota, that illustrates both the global changes taking place at the level of the biosphere (and, frequently, the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere), and the peculiarities of the ecosystem that serves as our temporal window. Each chapter has a narrative section, a sort of you-are-there story in the lives of the organisms concerned, a section of broader outlinks to the global patterns that shaped, and were shaped by, the specific environments and organisms under consideration, and a healthy dose of references to the scientific discoveries that wove the narratives at both scales, presented as detective story rather than homework or dry history lesson.

That’s what the book does, not what it is. What it is: a triumph.

In the foreword to Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art, Robert McKee wrote,

As I looked beneath his seamless prose and sensed the depth of his research, of knowledge of human nature and society, of vividly imagined telling details, I was in awe of the work, the work, all the work that built the foundation of his riveting creations.

That quote starting ringing in my head like a bell by the time I’d left the hot, deep, dry Mediterranean basin. I am equally in awe of the volume and quality of Halliday’s scholarship, and of the deftness of his artistic execution. This seems like the kind of towering achievement that could only be possible after a half-century or more of dedicated study, but Halliday is a generation younger than I am. It would be easy to give myself over to profound professional jealousy, both as a paleobiologist and a writer, if I weren’t swept along by the vital strangeness that he conjures on this fascinating tour.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be a chrononaut. Otherlands is the closest I’ve come in book form. The Mammoth Steppe and the Rhynie Chert were terms I knew before, signposts pointing to vanished worlds — and ones that I don’t study — but now they are places to me, places that I feel like I’ve been to, and have memories of, like Minas Tirith or Sietch Tabr. What a rare gift, to have the past brought to life in both its fundamental reality and its unbridgeable alienness.

As I said: a triumph.

Book Week 2025, Day 2: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by ...

2025-11-28T19:44:28Z

Book Week 2025, Day 2: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte

This one starts with a personal note. I’ve never blogged much about the media whirlwind that accompanied the announcement of Sauroposeidon. Rich Cifelli and I did tons of interviews, separately and together, for local and national television news, newspapers, and magazines. Sauroposeidon got an 1/8th-page box in TIME magazine and a half-page news piece in the journal Science — the latter was especially satisfying, given that Science had rejected our manuscript without review, for having been deemed, ha ha, insufficiently newsworthy.

Of all the interviews I did about Sauroposeidon, by far the best was the one for Dinosaur World, a fanzine published by Allen and Diane Debus from 1997 to 2001. I did the interview over the phone, in the vert paleo library in the then-new OMNH building, now the Sam Noble Museum. I remember talking for close to two hours. In both process — quality, detail, and insight of questions asked — and product, that interview stood head and shoulders above all the others put together. It would have been a standout effort from any interviewer, at any level of professional training or achievement. In point of fact, the interviewer was a 15-year-old kid, who managed to smoke professional science writers with decades of experience.

As you’ve likely figured out, that 15-year-old kid was Steve Brusatte.

Although our circles haven’t intersected very frequently, I’ve watched Steve’s career with great interest, and enjoyed talking with him whenever the opportunities came around. He’s gone from strength to strength, and at each step I’ve thought, “Yep, that tracks.” The same qualities that he showed as a teenage dinosaur afficionado — passionate interest, broad reading, an eye for detail and another for the wider canvas, an adamantine work ethic, and, I think not coincidentally, generally being an agreeable human being — turn out to be a pretty good recipe for success in science.

Nowhere is that better displayed than in Steve’s book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. It was first published in 2018, and I read it during the COVID-19 lockdown, so this blog post is more than little belated. But the book holds up, in no small part because the higher-level picture of dinosaur evolution and biogeography that was emerging when it was published is still more or less intact, nudged here and there by the churn of new discoveries, but not overturned or changed beyond recognition. In the decade after I graduated with my PhD, I mostly had my head down, in the Morrison and in the human anatomy lab, and I’d fallen behind on the big picture of dinosaur paleobiology and evolution. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs helped me get caught up. I can’t think of a single other book that does such a good job of tying what was going on with the dinosaurs at any given time with what was going on with the planet. Steve grounds the global narrative by deftly interweaving his personal experiences in the field and the lab. He really captures the excitement of the hunt, and the occasional disappointments as well. I was especially impressed by his willingness to say “we don’t know yet” at several crucial junctures — hopefully this book inspires some kids to go hit the hills and badlands and find out.

When I was 12, I devoured John Noble Wilford’s The Riddle of the Dinosaur, which at the time was probably the definitive popular science book on dinosaurs and dinosaur paleontology. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is the heir apparent, three decades on, but it surpasses Wilford’s noble effort by dint of Steve’s first-hand experience in field and lab — the story of dinosaurs isn’t one he’s covering from the outside, but one that he’s helping to tell from the inside.

If someone asked me, perhaps a bit skeptically, “What’s interesting about dinosaurs? Why would anyone want or need to know about them?”, this is the book I would hand them. That’s about the highest praise I have to offer.

Closing confession: I also own Steve’s following book, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, but haven’t read it yet, mostly because, dinosaur supremacist that I am, I haven’t been able to summon the will to read a whole book about stinkin’ mammals. Watch this space.

Tutorial 48: my museum collections kit I was on the road for most ...

2025-11-26T22:28:09Z

Tutorial 48: my museum collections kit

I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps me get the photos, notes, and measurements that I want. All of this is YMMV — I’m not trying to predict what will work best for you, but to explain what has worked for me, and why. I’m reasonably happy with my current setup, but even after 28 years of museum visits, I’m still finding ways to improve it. Hence this post, which will hopefully serve as a vehicle for sharing tips and tricks.

A word about my program when I visit a collection, because not everyone needs or wants to do things my way. The closest museums with extensive sauropod collections are states away from where I live and work. If I’m in those collections at all, I’m traveling, and therefore on the clock. Time in collections is a zero-sum game: if I have the time to take 20 pages of notes, that could be 4 pages of notes of each of 5 specimens, 2 pages on 10, 1 page on 20, half a page on 40, etc. In practice, I usually make expansive notes early in the visit, one or two spreads per specimen with detailed sketches and exhaustive measurements of the most publication-worthy elements. I grade toward brevity over the course of the visit, and end with a mad desperate rush, throwing in crude sketches and rudimentary notes on as many newly-discovered (by me) specimens as possible. My collections visits are Discovery Time and Gathering Time, trying to get all the measurements and photographs I’ll want for the next year, or five, or forever. And, to the extent that I can suppress them, not Analysis Time or Graphing Time or Writing Time — I can do those things after hours and in my office back home, IF and only if I’ve spent my collections time efficiently gathering all the information I’ll need later.

The very first thing I do in any collection is a walking survey, to make sure I know roughly what specimens the collection contains and where to find them. For a sufficiently large collection — or even a single cabinet with 10 drawers of good stuff — I may draw a map in my notebook, on which I can note things I want to come back and document, and add new things as I find them.

Enough preamble, on to the gear. The first two or three entries here are in strict priority order, and after that things get very fuzzy and approximate.

1. Research Notebook

Seems obvious, right? Write stuff down, make sketches, capture the info that will be difficult or impossible to recapture later from photos. I have encountered people who don’t take a physical notebook, just a laptop or tablet, and take all their notes digitally. If that works for you, may a thousand gardens grow. For me, sketching is a fundamental activity — for fixing morphology in my mind, disciplining myself to see the whole object and its parts, creating a template on which to take further explanatory notes, and capturing the caveats, stray ideas, and odd connections that surround each specimen in a quantum fuzz in my mind (temporarily in my mind, hence the need for external capture). I also write priority lists in advance of specimens to document each day, and then cross them off, add new ones, and strike out duds with wild abandon in the heat of data collection.

I do a few specific things to increase the usefulness of my notebooks:

– Label the spines and covers with the notebook titles and years. These things live on the shelf directly over my desk, and I pull them down and rifle through them constantly. I also have notebooks for university service (committees, student advising, and so on), astronomical observations, and personal journaling, so “Research” is a useful tag for me.

– Number the pages, if they’re not already numbered, use the books chronologically from front to back, and create the table of contents retrospectively as I go — a tip I got from the Bullet Journal method.

– Paste a small envelope inside the back cover, if a pouch is not already built in, to hold all kinds of ephemera — index cards, scale bards, a bandage (just in case), stickers I acquire along the way, etc.

– Affix a section of measuring tape to the outer edge of the front or back cover. I got this tip from the naturalist John Muir Laws, whose Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is wonderfully useful and inspiring. The scale-bar-permanently-affixed-to-research-notebook has been a game-changer for me. Do you know how many times I’ve accidentally left a scale bar on a museum shelf, and then gotten to my next stop and had to borrow or fabricate one? I myself lost count long ago. But never again. If I’m in a hurry, small specimens go straight onto the notebook to be photographed, like the baby apatosaurine tibia above, and the notebook itself goes into the frame with large specimens. (This comes up again — if possible, and it’s almost always possible, put the specimen label in the photo with the specimen. No reason not to, and sometimes a lifesaver later on.)Behold the thinness of the eminently pocketable IKEA paper tape. Folding instructions, because this seems to bedevil some folks: hold up one end, fold in half by grabbing the other end and bring it up in front, then do that three more times. Finished product is 65mm long, 25.4mm wide, and about 1mm thick when folded crisply and left under a heavy book overnight.2. Measuring tapes

I find the flexible kind much more convenient and useful than retractable metal tape measures. I like the 1-2mm thick plastic type used by tailors and fabric sellers, because they have just enough inertia to stay where I put them, or drop in a predictable fashion when draped over something sufficiently large, as when measuring midshaft circumference of a long bone.

I LOVE the little plasticized paper tapes that hang on racks, free for the taking, near the entrances of IKEA stores. I tear them off by the dozen when I go to IKEA, cram them in my pockets, fold them flat when I get home, and stash them everywhere, including in my wallet. A few specific reasons they’re great:

– Folded flat, they’re about the thickness of a credit card, so there’s just no reason to be without one. I usually have one in my wallet, another in the envelope at the back of my research notebook, a couple more stashed in my luggage, a couple more stashed in my car, desk, tookbox, nightstand, etc.

– I can write on them. Especially handy if:

– I’ve torn off a section to serve as an impromptu scale bar. Which I never hesitate to do, because they’re free and I have dozens waiting in my toolbox and desk drawers at any one time. Torn off bits also make good bookmarks, classier, more cerebral, and less implicitly gross than the traditional folded square of toilet paper.

– I give them away to folks I’m traveling with, or that I meet in my travels, and they’re usually well-received.I would NOT have figured out all these laminae if I hadn’t had a way to make them stand out.3. Writing instruments in various colors

Up until about 2018 my notebooks were always monochrome pen or pencil. Then I realized that color is an extremely helpful differentiator for Future Matt, so now I highlight and color-annotate willy-nilly.4. Calipers

I borrowed the digital calipers from Colin Boisvert to get the photo up top, having forgotten my own at home. As a sauropod worker, I don’t need sub-millimeter accuracy all the time. But digital calipers have three exceedingly useful functions: measuring the thickness of very thin laminae and bony septa; measuring the internal dimensions of small fossae and foramina; and measuring the depth of fossae and of concave articular surfaces. I also have a little titanium caliper on a lanyard that goes with me most places.5. Small brush on a carabiner

This is the newest addition to the kit. I got the idea from Matthew Mossbrucker at the Morrison Museum in Morrison, Colorado. Colin and I visited him in September, immediately before our week-long stint in the collections at Dinosaur Journey. Matthew keeps a little brush carabinered to his belt at all times, and the utility was so instantly obvious that when Colin and I rolled into Fruita later that same day, I went to the hardware store and got my own. Cheap, weighs nothing, clips to anything, compact enough to cram in a pocket, good for lab and field alike. Genius!6. Scale bar

Yes, I have my scale-bar-enhanced research notebook and my hoarder stash of IKEA paper tapes, but good old-fashioned scale bars are still useful, and I use them constantly. And lose them constantly, hence my multiple redundant backup mechanisms.

(Aside: I can’t explain why I hold onto some objects like grim death, but let others fall through my fingers like sand grains. I’ve only lost one notebook of any kind in my entire life — set it on top of the car while packing and then drove off [grrrr] — so I have no problem investing in nice notebooks and treating them like permanent fixtures. But I can’t hang onto pens and scale bars to save my life, hence my having gravitated to Bic sticks and IKEA paper tapes.)7. Index cards

I try to get as much information into each photograph as possible. Ideally alongside the specimen I will have:

– a scale bar at the appropriate depth of field;

– the specimen tag with the number, locality, and other pertinent info;

– my notebook open to my sketch of the specimen, for easy correlation later (I don’t do this for every single view, just the ones that I think are particularly publication-worthy, or have info I’m likely to forget later);

– anything else I might want — serial position, anatomical directions, whether the photo is part of an anaglyph pair, and so on — written on an index card, which being a standard size will itself serve as an alternate/backup scale bar.8. Pencil case

To hold all the smaller fiddly bits you see in the photo up top. I can’t now fathom why, but I resisted getting one of these for a loooong time. I was young and foolish then. Pretty useful all the time, absolutely clutch when it’s 4:58 pm and I’m throwing stuff in bags, caught between the Scylla of working as late as possible and the Charybdis of wanting to be polite to whatever kind, patient person is facilitating my visit. That is also when the pocket in the back of the notebook comes in especially handy.Headlamp in action, casting low-angle light on a pneumatic fossa on the tuberculum of this sauropod rib. Note also the scale bar, elevated on a specimen box to be the same depth of field, and the notebook open to my sketch of the specimen.9. Artificial lighting

This was another very late discovery for me — I don’t think I was regularly bringing my own lights prior to 2018. For me, portable, rechargeable lighting is useful in many circumstances and absolutely critical in two: casting low-angle light to pick out subtle pneumatic features, as in the photo above, and lighting up big specimens that I don’t have the time, energy, or space to pull off the shelves, as in the photo below.

I’m particularly taken with the big orange fan/light combo. It charges using a USB-C cable, has four settings for fan speed (handy when it’s hot, humid, or just oppressively still) and three for light intensity, a rotating hook that folds flat, and a USB power-out socket for charging phones, headlamps, fitness trackers, and what have you. I use it practically every day whether I’m on the road or not.Magnetic flashlight hanging from steel shelving to illuminate Camarasaurus cervical vertebrae in the Utah Field House collections.

Whether it’s a hook or a magnet, some kind of mechanism for suspending a light at odd heights and angles is super useful. I usually have a strong flashlight with an integral seat-belt cutter and window-smasher in the door pocket of my car, and its magnetic base makes it omnidirectionally functional in collections spaces, which are usually liberally supplied with steel in the form of shelving and cabinets.Haplocanthosaurus CM 879 caudal 2 in left lateral view, with rolled-up paper neural canal visualizer and scale-bar-stuck-to-flashlight.

Sometimes I use a bit of blue tack to stick a scale bar to a flashlight, to create a free-standing, truly vertical scale bar that I can rapidly place at different distances from the camera. Beats leaning the scale bar against a stack of empty specimen boxes or a block of ethofoam (which in turn beats nothing at all).

What else?USUALLY — Laptop

Not for recording notes or measurements — all of that goes into the notebook, which I scan and upload new stuff from every evening. Mostly for displaying PDFs of descriptive monographs, and hugely useful in that regard.

MAYBE — Monographs

When I have the freedom (= baggage allowance) to do so, I find it handy to bring hardcopies of descriptive monographs, both for quick reference and so I can photograph specimens alongside the illustrations. Doesn’t even have to be the same specimens, just comparable elements. In the photo above, MWC 7257, a partial sacral centrum of Allosaurus from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, is sitting next to a plate from Madsen (1976), illustrating the same vertebra in a specimen from Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. Thanks to Colin Boisvert for bringing the specimen to my attention — I’ve got a longstanding thing for sacrals — and for loaning me his copy of Madsen (1976) for this photo.OUT — Camera and tripod

I suspect that some folks will shake their heads in mute horror, but after a couple of decades of lugging dedicated cameras and tripods everywhere, I stopped. For the past few years I’ve been rolling with just my phone, which is objectively better than any dedicated camera I owned for the first half of my career. Sometimes I brace it in an ad hoc fashion against a chair or shelf or cabinet, but mostly I just shoot freehand. For my purposes, it does fine, and any minor improvements in field curvature or whatever that I’d get from a dedicated camera don’t outweigh the logistical hassle. Again: YMMV!Over to you

So, that’s what I roll with right now. It was different six months ago, and will almost certainly be a little different six months hence, hopefully as a result of people responding to this post. With all that said: what’s in your kit?

P.S. Many thanks to Matthew Mossbrucker and Julia McHugh for their hospitality and assistance in their collections, and to Colin Boisvert for being such a great travel companion, research sounding board, and generous loaner-of-things-I’d-forgotten. The Wedel-Boisvert Morrisonpocalypse 2025 deserves more blogging.

What LLMs are really saving you from I’ve now heard from ...

2025-11-11T10:25:03Z

What LLMs are really saving you from

I’ve now heard from several early-career folks some variant on this statement regarding manuscripts they intend to publish as papers: “I give the AI all my notes and it gives me a draft that isn’t perfect, but it’s easier to massage that draft into publishable shape than it would be to write it myself.” I haven’t found the right time or the right words to tell them that the work the LLM is “saving” them is the very work that would make them better writers for having gone through it. To me, if you’ve already accepted that writing scientific papers (or writing almost anything, really) is going to be a big part of your career, using an LLM to do the dirty work is like taking an automobile jack to the gym to help you lift the weights. It both cases, it’s the hardest work, pushing the limits of what you thought you could do, that makes you stronger.

This is a pretty stark choice for people whose careers involve writing: do you want to train yourself to be an editor of LLM-generated text? Or do you want to learn how to think more clearly and express yourself better through the medium of writing?

Yet more lying necks: Backwards Birds edition Back at the start ...

2025-10-20T09:39:24Z

Yet more lying necks: Backwards Birds edition

Back at the start of October I posted Necks: the lying liars that just keep lying, which included Coy Pearson’s beautiful photo of a Cooper’s hawk from behind, with its neck twisted a full 180 degrees to look at the camera.

Not one but two people emailed me in response, with photos they’ve taken of the same phenomenon. The first is from long-time Friend Of SV-POW!, Jerry Harris, who wrote:

Saw your SV-POW post on bird necks and the Cooper’s hawk photo you shared. I have a similar one taken in our backyard, too (attached), in case it’s at all useful to you!

Here it is.

This one’s interesting because it’s pretty much the complement of the photo in the original post: here we see the front of the bird, but the back of its head. (Unlike the other angle, this one makes it clear which direction the neck is twisting.)

I think (can anyone confirm or deny?) that this is another Cooper’s hawk. Is that just coincidence, or are they known for having particularly flexible necks?

The second email was from Tyler Holmes, a long-time reader but only occasional commenter:

The hawk photo in your last post on the lies of bird necks got me thinking. Our local zoo has a female southern ground hornbill and I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time watching her. One day last month, she walked over to the fence where I was sitting with my kids and spent about 45 minutes staring at us and preening. She was able to reach all the way back to the base of her tail quite easily with her beak. At times she was able to look over 180 degrees behind her, but the whole neck wasn’t used equally. Most of the turn came from the three or four vertebrae at the base of the neck, which already have quite a significant bend to them to incline the rest of the neck into an alert posture. I attached a few photos I took, I thought you might find them interesting.

Here are the photos:

What strange, perverted creatures birds are.

doi:10.59350/fvkyr-6rr98

Video of the 2024 SSP debate: “The open access movement has ...

2025-10-18T13:34:59Z

Video of the 2024 SSP debate: “The open access movement has failed”

Readers with good memories will remember that back in May last year I announced I would be one of the two participants in the plenary debate that closes the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was cast against type, proposing the motion “The open access movement has failed”, with preprint advocate Jessica Polka providing the honorable opposition.

I posted the full text of my opening argument and of Jessica’s argument in opposition — but not of the shorter rebuttals that each of us gave, or of course the unscripted Q&A that followed the formal part of the debate.

Now, only a year and a bit late, comes the video of the debate! My apologies for the delay: it wasn’t available straight after the meeting, and then I forgot to check back a month later.

I’d like to embed the video in this page, but WordPress won’t let me (not unreasonably — I wouldn’t let people embed arbitrary JavaScript in my site, either). So you’ll have to link through to the SSP’s page with the video.

It’s the only way to find out who won the debate, after all!

If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you ...

2025-10-13T21:09:10Z

If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?

A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1].

The subject line was:

Your paper “NEURAL SPINE BIFURCATION…” is now an analogy.

No; no, it’s not.

Our paper Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications (Wedel and Taylor 2013) is not an analogy. It’s a scientific study of whether neural spines bifurcate progressively through ontogeny. (Spoiler: not really. Somehow we stretched that out to 34 pages.)

The email then goes on to say:

Our AI turned your research into an easy to understand analogy

Oh, did it now? Do tell.

The bifurcation of neural spines in sauropods can be likened to the branching patterns of river deltas. Just as a river flows into a delta…

But it really, really can’t. You might just as well say “The bifurcation of neural spines in sauropods can be likened to Marcel Proust’s seven-volume masterwork À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” It would be exactly as meaningful.

To add insult to injury, they want me to pay to upgrade to Premium if I want to see how this nonsense continues. Hard pass.

When I forwarded this exercise in idiocy to Matt, he replied with just two lines:

What is this I can’t even.

If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?

Well, quite.

The current generation of “AI”s do have some uses. I ask ChatGPT questions about the minutiae of programming all the time, like when I wanted to know whether there is a standard pattern for invoking a React hook on behalf of a class-based component. But for every useful application of LLMs, there are ten useless or actively destructive uses. I’m not sure which of those two categories “Your paper is now an analogy” falls into.

Just stop it.Notes

[1] It was academia.edu, and who can possibly explain how they were able to get a domain name in the .edu TLD?References

Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications. Palarch’s Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 10(1):1-34. ISSN 1567-2158.

New paper: pneumatic diverticula and blood vessels in the neural ...

2025-10-11T06:24:33Z

New paper: pneumatic diverticula and blood vessels in the neural canals of the toothed birds Ichthyornis and Janavis

New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free:Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.

If I recall the sequence correctly, Jessie Atterholt met Dan Field at one of the recent Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution (SAPE) meetings. Between them they spun up the idea of looking for evidence of paramedullary diverticula (PMDs) in the neural canals of some fossil birds that Dan and his collaborators and students had been studying, namely Ichthyornis and Janavis, both toothy ichthyornithines from the Late Cretaceous. This was not long after Jessie and I had our paper on PMDs in extant birds published (Atterholt and Wedel 2022), and we were interested in chasing PMDs down the tree. At the same time, Dan and his former student, Juan Benito, had a big war chest of CT scans of Ichthyornis and Janavis. So the actual work for this project was very similar to the work for Atterholt and Wedel (2022): lots of hours in front of a computer, flipping through stacks of CT slices. But I’m getting ahead of myself.Skeletal reconstruction of Ichthyornis from Marsh 1880

Ichthyornis you know, it’s one of the toothed birds that O.C. Marsh described in the 1870s, after basically buying the specimen out from under E.D. Cope, one of the many inciting incidents of the Bone Wars. For most of my career I simply could not keep Ichthyornis and Hesperornis straight. It has always been perversely confusing to me that the flightless swimming bird is not named “fish bird”, and the gull-like flying bird is not named for Hesperus, or Venus, a thing actually up in the sky. The “fish bird” was the flyer and the “Venus bird” was the flightless swimmer. It’s just plain backwards. (Before anyone pushes their glasses up their nose in the comments, yes, I know that Hesperornis is intended as “western bird”. Both taxa are from the West. Still confusing.)The much larger Janavis (right) compared to the more-completely-known Ichthyornis (left). From Benito et al. (2022: fig. 1).

Janavis I was not familiar with prior to this project. It’s the sister taxon of Ichthyornis, only named in 2022 by Benito et al. Janavis was big, too, with an estimated wingspan of 5 feet, about the same as the largest extant gulls (or for me, an Oklahoma farmboy, a really big hawk). The vertebrae of Janavis are cuh-ray-zee pneumatic, totally honeycombed inside and fairly Swiss-cheesy in places on the outside, edging up to the frankly unbelievable anatomy of pelicans. Or shoebill storks, about which more in a sec.Jessie Atterholt, Grace Burton, and me at the LACM in August, 2024. Sorry about the unfortunate non-sauropods in the background.

Grace Burton, one of Dan’s current PhD students, came over to SoCal last year to do some research at the LACM and work with Jessie and me on the IchyJan project (it only took me about half a dozen emails to realize that I was too lazy to type “Ichthyornis and Janavis” the thousand or so times I’d need to). The three of us had an enjoyable visit to the LACM Ornithology collection to find comparative specimens, some of which we ended up figuring in the new paper. And Jessie and Grace spend a LOT of time looking through CT scans. I got in on some of that, but really, Jessie and Grace did almost all the heavy lifting with both the research and the writing, so it’s only just that they’re the first two authors. This was mostly an Atterholt joint from the get-go anyway. If my interest in weird neural canal anatomy is a roaring bonfire, Jessie’s is more like the Sun.One of the cervical vertebrae of the shoebill stork, Balaeniceps rex, LACM 116167. Check out the “bone foam” of pneumatic foramina inside the cervical rib loop and on the side of the centrum.

Of the new coauthors I picked up on this project, one is close to home: Elle Fricano, who works alongside Jessie and me as one of the anatomy faculty at WesternU. We ended up needing to scan some specimens at WesternU with our microCT machine, and Elle did virtually all of the scanning and interp, so we brought her on as an author. Elle’s own research is mostly on the evolution of the cranial base and ear region in humans and other primates, but she’s gotten into pneumaticity with a very nice paper on the human maxillary sinus (Fricano et al. 2025). She also works as a forensic anthropologist, and earlier this year she passed her forensic board exams to became the 176th Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology — the 176th ever (full list here) — and one of only 124 active board-certified forensic anthropologists in the world. That is a heck of an achievement for anyone, but especially for someone on the tenure track, with a heavy teaching load, research, committee service, and a family. Am I bragging on my colleague? Heck yes. When a fire burns down a neighborhood out here, Elle is one of the people who goes and sifts bone shards out of the ashes and does her best to give the survivors some closure (not to mention helping investigate other deaths, ones that Nature had less of a hand in). That work is not without its costs, and I’m a little in awe of anyone who chooses to do it.Hypothesized reconstructions of respiratory, vascular, and neurological structures in the neural canals of Ichthyornis dispar and Janavis finalidens. (a) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) cervical 11 showing likely arrangement of paramedullary diverticula (green) and paired extradural ventral spinal vessels (pink) relative to the spinal cord (yellow). (b) Janavis (NHMM RD 271) indeterminate mid-thoracic vertebra 1 showing likely arrangement of the extradural dorsal spinal vein (blue) relative to the spinal cord (yellow). Atterholt et al. (2025: figure 5).

Anyway: neural canals in fossil birds. We were hunting for hard evidence of pneumatic diverticula inside the neural canal, ideally unambiguous foramina opening into clearly pneumatic spaces in the neural arch or centrum. We found those foramina, and lots of other weird stuff besides. Some of the vertebrae of Ichthyornis and Janavis have bilobed neural canals, and from comparisons with extant birds we’re pretty sure the upper lobe held a big venous sinus. Crocs have one, too, in their bilobed neural canals. Most of the critters that fall evolutionarily between crocs and birds don’t have bilobed neural canals, but they may still have had big venous sinuses that simply failed to leave diagnostic traces — the curse of pneumaticity researchers extended to blood vessels.

Some of our CT scans of extant birds show that upper lobe being shared by both a big venous sinus and pneumatic diverticula, and the upper lobe is sometimes expanded into what Jessie and I nicknamed the “pneumatic attic”: a large space of variable geometry that very often has big pneumatic foramina opening into the transverse processes, postzygapophyseal rami, or neural spines. You can see the “pneumatic attic” with the pneumatic diverticula restored in a vertebra of Ichthyornis in Figure 5, above. Virtually everything we found in Ichthyornis and Janavis could be lined up 1-for-1 with an identical geometry or topology in one or another extant bird, which made us feel better about our interpretations.Paired ventrolateral channels in Ichthyornis dispar, and examples of similar structures in extant avians. (a) Ichthyornis (ALMNH 3316) axis; note that the channel on the right has just given rise to a neurovascular foramen. (b) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) vertebra 11. (c) King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus, LACM 99854) thoracic vertebra. (d) Ichthyornis (ALMNH 3316) sacral vertebra. (e) Blue petrel (Halobaena caerulea) sacral vertebra. (f) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) indeterminate caudal vertebra 1. (g) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) indeterminate caudal vertebra 2. (h) Common loon (Gavia immer, LACM 112761) caudal vertebra. (i) Antarctic prion (Pachyptila desolata) caudal vertebra. Atterholt et al. (2025: figure 4).

One thing that needs more work is the frequent occurrence of small, paired troughs at the ventrolateral corners of the neural canal, not only in Ichthyornis and Janavis but in many extant birds as well. These troughs often bud off little vascular foramina that we can trace down into the centrum, so we’re pretty sure the troughs held blood vessels in life. A lot of vertebrates have a ladder-like arrangement of arteries in their neural canals, which could be the source of these troughs, but they might also have been produced by little basivertebral veins, which birds otherwise seem to lack. Why don’t we we just inject some dead birds, dissect them, and find out, you maybe wondering. Well, we’re gonna, at some point, but that’s at least another whole paper’s worth of work, and possibly several. We’d rather just go look up the answer, but as far as we and our reviewers could tell, no-one has ever written about these troughs and their contents before (if you know otherwise, please sing out in the comments!).

So once again, Jessie and I find ourselves needing to do novel anatomical research on living animals, partly because it’s worth doing in its own right, but also so that we can make progress on the paleontological questions that got us into this in the first place. It’s awfully hard to make informed paleobiological inferences when so much basic anatomy remains to be documented for the first time, even in extant critters. As I keep saying, a lot of this is work that anyone with sufficient time and curiosity could do, much of it inexpensively. So if you find this stuff intriguing, we’d love to have more explorers out here where the pneumatosphere intrudes into the neural-canal-iverse.I was up inside the Utah Field House Diplodocus three weeks ago, logging pneumatic structures that no-one had documented in 125 years. More on that another time. Many thanks to John Foster for the ladder and the permission.

As for Jessie and me, this is our fifth neural-canal-related paper (see the evolving list here). We keep kicking them out the rate of one per year, which is nice and sustainable and unlikely to stop anytime soon. According to my to-do list, she and I have at least another 15 collaborative papers planned. Not all of them are about neural canals, but still… I reckon we’d better get to it.REFERENCES

Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves. The Anatomical Record 306(1): 29-50. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24923
Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.
Benito, Juan; Kuo, Pei-Chen; Widrig, Klara E.; Jagt, John W. M.; Field, Daniel J. 2022. Cretaceous ornithurine supports a neognathous crown bird ancestor. Nature. 612 (7938): 100–105. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05445-y.
Fricano, Ellen E.I; Nguyen, Joseph; Hallal, Ryan; and Llera Martín, Catherine J. 2025. Under the surface: Correlates with maxillary sinus shape. Journal of Anatomy. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.14283
Marsh, O.C. 1880. Odontornithes: a monograph on the extinct toothed birds of North America. United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 201 pp.

Talk slides are not fungibleHere’s a new slide that wasn’t in ...

2025-08-09T21:37:37Z

Talk slides are not fungibleHere’s a new slide that wasn’t in my talk last summer.

Mike and I are working on our respective talks for DinoCon 2025 — a timely concern, since Mike presents next Saturday and I’m on next Sunday. My talk will be an adapted and upgraded version of the keynote talk I gave at the Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference last summer. Adapted because I have to shave off about half an hour from my very long Tate talk, and upgraded because I’ve had 13 months of additional thoughts. The required changes led to this exchange:

Matt: The trick — and what I’m dithering over — is what combination of slides will make a talk that will not just be passable, but sing, as its own separate and coherent thing.

Mike: Exactly. It’s always about sequencing, and the narrative that that sequence induces.

Matt: It’s such an interesting problem. Some slides don’t disrupt the narrative much, others are like big rocks in a stream — you can’t put them just anywhere, because they threaten to direct the flow in some new direction, or create awkwardness if you force the flow back onto its original path around them. So in much the same way that paint or graphite interact with the canvas or paper to produce unexpected results that were more than just your artistic intent flowing from your brain through your fingers — they push back, in a way — I find that slides have their own narrative geometry, that makes some transitions natural and others almost impossible. And personally I find it very hard to redo a slide to change that geometry; I’m much more likely to change things upstream and downstream to make that slide seem natural rather than like a dam or impediment. If it’s a sufficiently good slide, which for me is driven by its internal logic. In ecological terms, each slide has an autecology that dictates how it works on its own, and a synecology that describes how it works with other slides.

Mike: Once again, you have accidentally written an SV-POW! post. Seriously. Just post it.

DinoCon 2025 is next weekThe DinoCon brochure — really a ...

2025-08-07T20:52:50Z

DinoCon 2025 is next weekThe DinoCon brochure — really a conference guidebook, with schedule, speaker list, vendor list, maps, etc. — is a free download here. Art by Natalia Jagielska.

DinoCon is right around the corner, the weekend of August 16-17. The speaker lineup looks fantastic, and the vendor lineup looks like it will execute a Chicxulub on my wallet. On the speaker side, I’m happy to see sauropods getting so much representation. In addition to Mike’s talk on the Carnegie Diplodocus and its various offspring, and mine on the sauropod body plan, Tess Gallagher is giving a talk on sauropod skin. I’ve vaguely noodled on that topic (once, twice), but it is far from my realm of expertise, so I’m looking forward to getting the real story from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. A talk on sauropod skin seems extremely fitting for a conference that straddles the science and art of dinosaurs, with lots of presenters and attendees who are interested in the life appearance of extinct animals.DinoCon 2025 schedule (with the Saturday evening quiz and art exhibition cut off). Click to embiggen, or see the full version online at this link.

I’m stoked for every single book signing — Witton! Hennessy! Naish! — but most especially for Dougal Dixon’s event on Sunday afternoon. He’ll be signing copies of the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, which I recently reviewed and am looking forward to acquiring. I’ve been idolizing Dixon from afar since I was 10, so it will be deeply satisfying to finally meet him and tell him in person how much his books have meant to me. There’s a non-zero chance that I will also throw myself on the floor, crying and begging like a spoiled child for him to work with Breakdown Press on new English-language editions of Man After Man and Greenworld. (I gather Dixon doesn’t have fond memories of Man After Man or think highly of it, but it’s still one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution and it would be great to have it in print again, not least so I could get a copy without selling any organs.) If you see me there, have your camera ready, just in case.

I don’t have the time or financial fortitude to cover all the vendors right now, but there’s a list in the DinoCon 2025 Brochure (link) and various vendors have been getting love on the DinoCon Instagram account for weeks. I’m horrifixhilarated at the prospect of my impending bankruptcy.

Hope to see you there!

Lay research on turtles, and the evolution of scholarly ...

2025-08-03T03:53:56Z

Lay research on turtles, and the evolution of scholarly journalsEasty, resident Terrapene carolina triunguis at Casa Adams Wedel, sometime gnawer of rat skulls, whose recent exploits will be detailed in future posts.

In Archie Carr’s encyclopedic “Handbook of Turtles: The Turtles of the United States, Canada, and Baja California”, first published in 1952, he quotes favorably and at length the observations of “Mrs. Knowlton” on the behavior of wood turtles (Clemmys insculpta) and box turtles (Terrapene carolina). The source given in the references is:Knowlton, Josphine Gibson. 1943. My Turtles. Privately printed. Pp. i-xxxvii, 39-222, 22 figs.

Who was Josephine Gibson Knowlton? She was the author of a few other books, including “The Innocent Cause” and “Roma”; the younger sister of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and possibly one of the models for his iconic “Gibson Girl” illustrations around the turn of the 20th century; and she married Daniel Knowlton, who played football for Harvard and was later the legal counsel for the Interstate Commerce Commission. Importantly for our purposes, and for Archie Carr’s, she wrote and privately published a whole book about the turtles in her backyard. At least at the time that Carr was writing in the 1950s, Knowlton had cornered the market on observations of wood turtle mating behavior. For all I know, her observations on the topic are still the most detailed available; lots of people write about where turtles are found, but few take the time to sit like Jane Goodall and watch them go through their stereotypically protracted mating sessions.It sure as heck looks like Josephine’s quite famous older brother illustrated her turtle book; there are interior illustrations in the same style.

Archie Carr was utterly omnivorous in collecting information on the ranges, life history, and behavior of turtles, and his book cites all kinds of sources, from august scientific journals to newspaper clippings. It’s fascinating just to page through the bibliography. Anyone with more than one citation is almost certainly a professional biologist or scientist of some kind, but a lot of the one-hit-wonders, especially from the 1800s, are regular folks. This is directly relevant to a recent comment by Allen Hazen, in which he asked, “Is it worth trying the ‘experiment’ of comparing articles in the same journal published decades apart?” What follows is the example I promised to post.

While reading Carr, I was intrigued by a reference to Fisher (1887) on Muhlenberg’s turtle at a lake in New York, so I tracked it down. The account appears in the Zoology section of the “general notes”, on pp. 672-673 of the 1887 volume of The American Naturalist. Fisher was an MD, not a herpetologist, and he was just reporting on some turtle shells he found stomping around the edges of a lake. Here’s the whole publication (note that nowadays we’d call it Muhlenberg’s turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergii; when I was a kid it was Clemmys muhlenbergii):

I really admire this little paper — in 165 words, Fisher laid out his methods, described his findings, raised a taphonomic mystery, tied in ornithological and botanical observations to make a biogeographic point, and cited a source, and it’s written like it was meant to be read by humans (curious non-specialists, even) and not merely to pass an editorial gauntlet. This reinforces my strong feeling that conference abstracts can and should be fully-fledged miniature papers, in conception, execution, credit received, and citeability. I will aim to hold my future abstracts to the Fisher standard.

Still, it is wild to me that American Naturalist is now one of the most prestigious journals in ecology and evolution, such that publishing one paper in “AmNat” can be a career-maker for an up-and-coming biologist, and this has been true for some decades already. But 140 years ago they were publishing letters from randos on dead varmints they found down at the lake.

More on that shift — which was certainly not unique to AmNat, and has happened at other journals within my lifetime — in a future post.

#1 #2 #3

Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition Let’s ...

2025-07-29T18:36:01Z

Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition

Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic The New Dinosaurs, which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press. Here’s the website, open for pre-orders (link); the book ships on August 11. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this absolute banger.CHRONONAUT

Dougal Dixon’s books After Man (1981) and The New Dinosaurs (1988) both cast very long shadows over my intellectual development. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when I first saw a thumbnail advertisement for After Man in a bookstore flyer. With nothing more than the cover art and a 2-3 sentence description to go on, my mind fizzed. To say that the mere idea of the book fired my imagination is an understatement so gross as to be a lie; more accurately it detonated an atomic bomb under my imagination, Project-Orion-style, and sent it rocketing into the stratosphere. When I finally found a copy at the local public library a couple of years later, I was not disappointed. The Gigantelopes, Raboons, and Porpins were awesomely strange and wonderful and inspiring. At about the same time in my life that The Dinosaurs by William Stout and William Service was making me a chrononaut in the Mesozoic, After Man was giving me a similarly vertiginous sensation of the distant future.My 1988 first edition of The New Dinosaurs and my 2022 40th anniversary edition of After Man.

I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw The New Dinosaurs on the shelf in my local Waldenbooks, a week before my 14th birthday. The book was on a display rack, cover facing out, and the image of the cutlasstooth made my stomach drop. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution, by Dougal Dixon. “OMG it’s the After Man guy he did a dinosaur book OMG OMG OMG!!” crashed through my mind like a railgun projectile. The New Dinosaurs bent my brain no less than After Man, with its flightless pterosaurs, aquatic hypsilophodonts, and tiny, eusocial pachycephalosaurs. I cared for my first edition hardcover like it was a holy relic; even though I reread it countless times as a teenager and have revisited it many times as an adult, it still looks essentially brand new.

Fast forward to the 2020s. When Breakdown Press published the 40th anniversary edition of After Man in 2022, I bought a copy quick-quick. It’s sitting proudly on display across the living room from me as I type this. When the folks at Breakdown asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, I felt like a kid who’d gotten the golden ticket. I’m excited to get to review the book, but even happier to live in a world where the book is in print again, from a publisher who cares about getting it right. I haven’t yet seen the reprinted book in the flesh — this review is based on digital files supplied by Breakdown — but based on the 40th anniversary edition of After Man my confidence is high. The new After Man has a thick, high-gloss cover, pages sewn in signatures, and excellent color reproduction, and I have every reason to expect the same from the 2025 edition of The New Dinosaurs.This book taught me the fundamentals of biogeography. Palaearctic Realm opening spread, pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.CONCEPT

I’m not sure how well-known it is that the conceptual engine of The New Dinosaurs is not merely “Hey whoa weird critters”, but using the idea of imaginary saurians to explain biogeography. In an interview with Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology (link), Dougal Dixon said regarding the success of After Man:

“It made me think… there’s a future in this. That is, in popular-level books that use fictitious examples of factual processes, there’s definitely room for a few more. And that’s why I came up with the idea for The New Dinosaurs. Again, I wanted to do the same sort of thing but, this time, I was aiming to create a popular-level book on zoogeography, using fictitious examples to show what the dinosaurs might perhaps be like if they hadn’t become extinct.”

In the same interview Dixon wonders to what extent the book achieved that aim, rather than being just a gee-whiz spec evo book. It worked for me! When I learned about biogeography in college, the concepts of “Nearctic” North America, “Palearctic” Eurasia, and so on were already familiar to me from The New Dinosaurs. Similarly, I’m pretty sure that I first learned the concept of biomes from After Man.As a lover of both turtles and sauropods, I was pre-adapted to be a Turtosaur stan. Pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.WHAT ABOUT THOSE NEW DINOSAURS?

I’m not the first to point out that The New Dinosaurs was eerily prescient in many ways — Darren has touched on this at Tetrapod Zoology, and Riley Black wrote a nice piece on the topic of 2022, which seems only be available via Wayback Machine now (link; I heap vile curses on Scientific American for being the digital graveyard of so much good science writing). Some things for which we had little to no evidence for the 80s but which are now either well-established or at least up for discussion include:

fuzz
small arboreal dinosaurs, esp. with skin-wings (e.g., the Flurrit)
semi-aquatic dinosaurs
arctic dinosaurs
dwarf island dinosaurs
insect-eating dinosaurs
at least the specter of flightless terrestrial pterosaurs

To that list I’d add morphologically conservative sauropods. The awesome, glyptodont-analogue Turtosaur is an osteoderm-bedecked titanosaur taken to its logical conclusion, and there’s a little sidebar about a short-lived group of sprinting sauropods, but the sauropods in the book are all large-bodied, long-necked, long-tailed, mostly graviportal herbivores. Revisiting The New Dinosaurs for this review after a hiatus of some years, I was pleased to see that among the many radical evolutionary transformations postulated in other clades, the sauropods were all still recognizable sauropods, which nicely fits my ideas about the constraints on their bauplan.

Now, it’s both unrealistic and unreasonable to expect a book written in the mid-1980s to be scientifically up-to-date in 2025, and indeed there are many discoveries and developments in the past four decades that the book did not anticipate. Whole clades of dinosaurs that were known very imperfectly (therizinosaurs, rebbachisaurs) or not at all (alvarezsaurs, scansoriopterygids) when the book was created are now much better known both scientifically and popularly. To this we can add a vast ecological diversity of Mesozoic crocs, birds, squamates, and mammals. The sole mammal featured in the book is the semiaquatic Zwim, a small insectivorous placental, explicitly described as an outlier among the morphologically and ecologically conservative mammals. In the universe of The New Dinosaurs, arboreal, gliding, and digging mammals didn’t evolve in either the Mesozoic or the Cenozoic; in our own timeline, mammals were doing all of those things by the Late Jurassic at least. (Aside: I can’t remember if I’ve said this out loud anywhere, but the ecological diversity of Mesozoic mammals shouldn’t surprise anyone given that our surviving monotremes include an electrosensory swimmer and a spiny digger. The mere existence of platypuses and echidnas implies a whole zoo of ecological experimentation among early mammals.)

Similarly, we know a lot more about the biology of dinosaurs now. One thing that may jar modern dinosaur enthusiasts encountering the book for the first time is so many dinosaurs shown with very mammalian rear ends and skinny tails (depicted in the coelurosaurian arbrosaurs, in multiple hypsilophodonts and hadrosaurs, and even to some extent in the cover-adorning cutlasstooth), as opposed to the thick caudofemoralis-housing tails now known to be present in almost all non-avian dinosaurs. When I first encountered The New Dinosaurs at age 13, the furry dinosaurs blew my mind, and none moreso than the desert-adapted Taranter (see below). I suspect that the only integumentary surprise for readers now opening the book for the first time will be the absence of pennaceous feathers on any of the non-avian dinosaurs.

These observations are not intended as — and, I hope, could not be reasonably interpreted as — criticisms of the book. It is an artifact of the post-Deinonychus but pre-Sinosauropteryx Dinosaur Renaissance, not a forward projection of dinosaurs as we know them today but of dinosaurs as they were known back then. So here in 2025 the book rather mind-bendingly embodies the future (now) of the past (the 1980s) of the future (the Cenozoic) of the past (non-avian dinosaurs).Probably my favorite paintings in the book. Pp. 86-87 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.

I can’t do a review without mentioning the art. My opinion there hasn’t changed much since I was 13. Like After Man, the ideas in The New Dinosaurs sometimes outrun their visual execution. Most of the art is serviceable, some of the pieces really shine — the painterly work on the Paraso in particular has always impressed me — and a few are so flat and indifferently rendered that my eyes tend to slide past them. My initial impression, unchanged almost four decades later, was that the artists either only had experience painting mammals and birds, or the publisher game them the brief to render the alternative dinosaurs in the guise of mammals and birds. Weirdly, I find most of the black-and-white pencil sketches much more consistently well-executed than the full-color paintings; it’s hard for me to tell how much of that is real and how much is just my strong bent towards pencil sketches (about which see more here and here). Given that Dougal Dixon is himself a very gifted artist (see examples of Dixon’s work at his personal website and in various TetZoo posts: one, two, three), I’d love to see a version of the book someday that included his original sketches. Perhaps if there’s sufficient interest, such material could be included in a 40th anniversary edition of The New Dinosaurs, as Dixon and Breakdown Press did for After Man. One can hope. For now, let’s just say that the book runs on the strength of its ideas and the art mostly gets the job done.

I’ll close on a couple of high notes. First, I love the layout of the book, which is unchanged in the new edition. I find it interesting, drawing my eyes omnivorously around each spread, but uncluttered, with just the right amount of negative space to let each image and text block breathe. Also, and very fittingly for a book about zoogeography, the maps at the beginning of each section are fantastic, and would sit comfortably in a top-of-the-line science book today.CH-CH-CH-CHANGESThe reprinted book does have some nods to the passage of human time and the accumulation of scientific knowledge since 1988. There’s a new Author’s Introduction credited to Dougal Dixon, 2024, and on the following page this note:This is a facsimile reproduction of the 1988 first edition
of The New Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon.
Some of the text has been changed at the request
of the author to reflect scientific discoveries
made in the intervening years.
The changes have been made in a slightly
different typeface to make their presence clear.I really like having the updates in a different typeface; it’s the publishing equivalent of making sure that the cast and sculpted bits can be distinguished from real bone in a mounted dinosaur skeleton. Along the same lines, a minor but pleasing thing for anyone comparing both versions of the book is that the pagination hasn’t changed; the ever-contentious Lank is still on page 34, and so on.How do I know when I got the first edition of The New Dinosaurs? Because, bless my geeky little heart, I inscribed each of my dinosaur books with my name and the date of acquisition.

So what’s updated? Mostly the front matter, with a few tweaks elsewhere in the book. The section on “The Great Extinction” (pp. 6-9) has been heavily revised to present the evidence for the impact hypothesis. In the “What is a Dinosaur” section (pp. 10-11), the left-hand page has been overhauled and now features a phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs and their outgroups rather than the hub-and-spokes “bubblegram” of the original book, in which saurischians, ornithischians, pterosaurs, and crocs all arose independently from thecodonts. The following right-hand page hasn’t been edited at all as far as I can tell. This creates a minor disjunct; the passage, “It is possible that warm-blooded dinosaurs may have had fur or down” appears unchanged on page 11, but on the revised page 10 the evolution of feathers in theropods has already been established as observed fact.

The following section, “The New Tree of Life” (pp. 12-15), is really, really new. Not only does it follow the fate of various vertebrate groups into a hypothetical mass-extinction-free Cenozoic, as in the original book, but the underlying relationship diagram has been substantially overhauled to somewhat better reflect current thinking on dinosaur evolution. I say “somewhat” because there are some peculiarities: tyrannosaurs and ornithomimids are on a common branch, separated from all other theropods; oviraptorosaurs are allied with a big swath of coelurosaurs that are in turn separate from therizinosaurs, maniraptorans, alvarezsaurs, and birds.

Not only is the phylogenetic arrangement a little odd, the fates of several clades and their surviving representatives (in the alternative Cenozoic) have changed from the original book. The Gourmand was originally a specialized scavenging tyrannosaur, but predatory tyrannosaurs apparently survived as well (according to the bubblegram; none were featured in the original book). In the new edition, all tyrannosaurs died out in the mid-Cenozoic and were replaced by abelisaurs that spread north from Gondwana. The Gourmand art is unchanged, but it is now described as an abelisaur, which is fine. With its long, low body, short hind limbs, and absent forelimbs, the Gourmand arguably reads better as an abelisaur than a tyrannosaur anyway, even if its scavenge-then-snooze biology is pulled from Lawrence Lambe’s sleepy post-prandial Gorgosaurus of the early 20th century.

There are a few other such phylogenetic reassignments, and they don’t all completely cohere. In the original book, Madagascar is a dinosaurian Australia, home to a relictual fauna of titanosaurian sauropods and Megalosaurus (not some generalized megalosaurid or megalosauroid, but good old William-Buckland-approved Megalosaurus, albeit as the new species M. modernus). This is now Megalodontosaurus, a carcharodontosaur; according to the revised text, abelisaurs and carcharodontosaurs both made it to Madagascar, but only the carcharodontosaurs survived. To fictionally wipe out the theropod clade that actually diversified in Madagascar (abelisaurs) and replace it with a clade with zero known Malagasy representatives (carcharodontosaurs) is, to say the least, an odd choice for a book founded in zoogeography.The Mountain Leaper in the 1988 original (left) and the new 2025 edition (right). Note that the hands have been edited out of both the color art and the black and white sketches. I’m pretty sure the two standing Mountain Leapers have had raised feet removed as well. Differences in color and so on are down to my imperfect photography and photo-editing. P. 61 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.

In the original book, the Northclaw and the Mountain Leaper were generalized coelurosaurs, but now they are a therizinosaur and an alvarezsaur, respectively. According to the revised text, some therizinosaurs reverted to carnivory and those are the only ones that have survived. The Mountain Leaper is now described as an alvarezsaur, and its art is changed — the original art showed multi-fingered hands, which wouldn’t do for an alvarezsaurid, so the hands (and I think at least one raised foot) are painted over in the color art and simply erased from the accompanying pencil diagram. As far as I could tell, this is the only animal in the book to have its art revised. The fish-eating Dip, a small theropod (p. 76), is now described as being descended from ornithomimids rather than the Mountain Leaper, its first-edition forebear. But in the Dip’s description the parenthetical reference to page 61 is still to the Mountain Leaper, which is now an alvarezsaur and not an ornithomimosaur (some phylogenies find alvarezsaurs allied with ornithomimosaurs, but in the revised book the two clades are quite separate).

Am I picking nits? Most assuredly, and not because I don’t like the book but precisely because I do. For me the updates to the text fall between two stools; the new edition of the book is not a perfect time capsule reproduction of the first edition, but neither have the minor edits been integrated thoroughly enough to make a cohesive whole. Given that the book was never going to be completely up-to-date without a clean-sheet redesign, I think it would have been more elegant to leave it untouched, in all of its mid-80s glory. But I’m an old, pedantic curmudgeon, and in all honesty the edits are few and minor and unlikely to corrode anyone’s enjoyment of the book. In the interest of doing my due diligence as a reviewer, I may have already given them more attention than anyone else ever will.

In any case, Dougal Dixon himself is quite well-acquainted with the problem of always-advancing science inevitably outrunning any fixed publication. In the Afterword, subtitled “The Survival of Dinosaurs in Literature”, a paragraph has been added about Jurassic Park. It concludes with these lines (p. 111):

“Unfortunately for both the book and the films, dinosaur science moves on so quickly that many of the details have become very dated. The book has hypsilophodonts climbing trees (no longer believed) and the film has Velociraptor without the feathers we now know it to have possessed. Unfortunately, that is the fate faced by all writers who stray into the genre.”The woolly Taranter so surprised me as an adolescent that I still have feelings about it today. Pp. 52-53 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.VERDICT

So should you get the book? Of course! Certainly if you were curious enough to slog through this whole post. The New Dinosaurs is a stone classic, one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution, and almost four decades on it still has the power to delight, astonish, and provoke. I look at some of the new dinosaurs and think, “That’s too conservative” or “That’s too far out”, but then I remember that elephants’ closest living relatives are sirenians and they share their zoogeographic province with big flightless sprint-birds and bone-crushing feliforms and barely-endothermic eusocial rodents and flat tortoises that can inflate their shells to wedge themselves into cracks in the rocks, and I decide that my handle on “too conservative” or “too far out” is extremely poorly calibrated. As Ursula K. Le Guin observed, science fiction is not about the future, it is about the present, viewed “at certain odd times of day in certain weathers”.

Ultimately, The New Dinosaurs has given me things to think about for 36 years. I was born in the 1970s but grew up during what now seems like a golden age of semi-technical dinosaur books in the 1980s. I still have all of those books, and on occasion I dip into one or another for nostalgia. The New Dinosaurs is one of the very few I’ve revisited as a working scientist, to hold up against our ever-evolving understanding of the past and see how well my dinosaurometer is calibrated. The new edition costs £29.99 (about $40 as of this writing), but having this particular time machine on my bookshelf is nearly priceless. Here’s that link again — go do the right thing.CODA: OTHER TIMES AND PLACES

It seems to be speculative evolution season. C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows is being published in an expanded English-language print edition on August 25 (link), and Gert van Dijk’s Wildlife on the Planet Furaha will likely be available later this year (author’s announcement, publisher’s page). If I missed any other developments in this area, sing out in the comments.

Parting shot: you do have a 40th anniversary edition of After Man, right? If not, kindly sort yourself out (link).

Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists In the past ...

2025-07-27T22:52:43Z

Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists

In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form:

[NOUN]

Learn how this amazing [whatsit] allowed the rise of civilization, informs every aspect of our daily lives, and may hold the key to our future.

where the noun in question might be salt or wood or math or clouds or daydreaming or whatever. It’s not enough to write an engaging book on Topic X without somehow, by tortuously overreaching, making it the underpinning of life itself.

If we ever do an SV-POW! book, I’ll be sorely tempted to put on the back cover: “Could understanding diapophyseal laminae improve the health of your spleen? Open this book to find out!”This cast of a juvenile apatosaur femur really does hold the key to your future: get your eyes back on the dang road!

The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus (This was buried in Part 5 of ...

2025-07-04T23:22:20Z

The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus

(This was buried in Part 5 of my 2011 review of the Sideshow Apatosaurus maquette, but it’s long deserved to be a post of its own, and now it is. I’m not adding anything new here, just extracting and reposting the relevant bits, for reasons that will become clear in a future post. — MJW)

The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus is something Heinrich Mallison pointed out in the second of his excellent Plateosaurus papers (Mallison 2010: fig. 3).

Heinrich’s thoughts on articular cartilage in dinosaurs are well worth reading, so once again I’m going to quote extensively (Mallison 2010: p. 439):

Cartilaginous tissues are rarely preserved on fossils, so the thickness of cartilage caps in dinosaurs is unclear. Often, it is claimed that even large dinosaurs had only thin layers of articular cartilage, as seen in extant large mammals, because layers proportional to extant birds would have been too thick to be effectively supplied with nutrients from the synovial fluid. This argument is fallacious, because it assumes that a thick cartilage cap on a dinosaur long bone would have the same internal composition as the thin cap on a mammalian long bone. Mammals have a thin layer of hyaline cartilage only, but in birds the structure is more complex, with the hyaline cartilage underlain by thicker fibrous cartilage pervaded by numerous blood vessels (Graf et al. 1993: 114, fig. 2), so that nutrient transport is effected through blood vessels, not diffusion. This tissue can be scaled up to a thickness of several centimeters without problems.

An impressive example for the size of cartilaginous structures in dinosaurs is the olecranon process in the stegosaur Kentrosaurus aethiopicus Hennig, 1915. In the original description a left ulna (MB.R.4800.33, field number St 461) is figured (Hennig 1915: fig. 5) that shows a large proximal process. However, other ulnae of the same species lack this process, and are thus far less distinct from other dinosaurian ulnae (Fig. 3B, C). The process on MB.R.4800.33 and other parts of its surface have a surface texture that can also be found on other bones of the same individual, and may indicate some form of hyperostosis or another condition that leads to ossification of cartilaginous tissues. Fig. 3B–D compares MB.R.4800.33 and two other ulnae of K. aethiopicus from the IFGT skeletal mount. It is immediately obvious that the normally not fossilized cartilaginous process has a significant influence on the ability to hyperextend the elbow, because it forms a stop to extension. Similarly large cartilaginous structures may have been present on a plethora of bones in any number of dinosaur taxa, so that range of motion analyses like the one presented here are at best cautious approximations.

One of the crucial points to take away from all of this is that thick cartilage caps did not only expand or only limit the ranges of motions of different joints. The mistake is to think that soft tissues always do one or the other. The big olecranon in Kentrosaurus probably limited the ROM of the elbow, by banging into the humerus in extension. In contrast, thick articular cartilage at the wrists [of sauropods] probably expanded the ROM and may have allowed the strong wrist flexion that some artists have restored for sauropods. I’m not arguing that it must have done so, just that I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that it may have.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

To see that chunk in context and read more about cartilage in dinosaurs, see the original post — here’s that link again. Throwing in the references to Bonnan et al. (2010) and Holliday et al. (2010) because they’re still relevant, foundational studies.References

Bonnan, M.F., Sandrik, J.L., Nishiwaki, T., Wilhite, D.R., Elsey, R.M., and Vittore, C. 2010. Calcified cartilage shape in archosaur long bones reflects overlying joint shape in stress-bearing elements: Implications for nonavian dinosaur locomotion. The Anatomical Record 293: 2044-2055.
Holliday, C.M., R.C. Ridgely, J.C. Sedlmayr and L.M. Witmer. 2010. Cartilaginous epiphyses in extant archosaurs and their implications for reconstructing limb function in dinosaurs. PLoS ONE 5(9): e13120. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013120
Mallison, H. 2010. The digital Plateosaurus II: An assessment of the range of motion of the limbs and vertebral column and of previous reconstructions using a digital skeletal mount. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 55 (3): 433–458.

Baffled by diplodocoids? Need a comprehensive introduction? ...

2025-07-01T21:35:43Z

Baffled by diplodocoids? Need a comprehensive introduction? You’re in luck!

It crept out quietly under cover of darkness, but I’m pleased to say that today saw the publication of a new paper:

Van der Linden, Tom T. P., Michael P. Taylor, Amy Campbell, Brian D. Curtice, René Dederichs, Lucas N. Lerzo, John A. Whitlock, D. Cary Woodruff and Emanuel Tschopp. 2025. Introduction to Diplodocoidea. Palaeontologica Electronica 28.2.a27 (49 pages). doi: 10.26879/1518

As you can see, there are nine authors, and this is one of those papers where each one of them earned his or her place by contributing substantially. It’s a paper with many sections: the introduction, an overview of the history of diplodocoid research, a sketch of diplodocoid phylogeny, sections on each major group (Rebbachisauridae, Dicraeosauridae, Apatosaurinae, Diplodocinae, and “other”), a morphological survey, a review of ecology and ontogeny, a biogeographical survey, thoughts on life appearance, and a terrifyingly exhaustive bibliography.Van der Linden et al. 2025: Figure 5. Transformation of the cranial bones in diplodocids with noted trends from Whitlock et al. (2010) and Woodruff et al. (2018). Skulls are modified after Woodruff et al. (2018).

(Figure 5, shown above, is interesting to me. The diplodocid skull shapes shown in the middle and on the right are both hugely familiar to me — wired straight into my hindbrain — but it had simply not occurred to me that they might be growth stages.)

I’m pleased that this paper is at Palaeontologia Electronica — the original open-access palaeontology journal. Despite my annoyance at their low-resolution illustrations (but see the unofficial supplementary information for the full-resolution versions), it’s an important journal not just in our scholarly field but in the history of open access. I’m glad to finally have this notch on my bedpost, after at least one failed attempt.

My main contribution was the historical background section — which will come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with my 2010 paper, or the recent works on the Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023) and the Carnegie Diplodocus (Taylor et al. 2025). I also wrote the overview of apatosaurines, and the bit in the morphology section about cervical vertebrae, and contributed Figures 2 and 3.

This paper is the first chapter in an in-progress special volume about diplodocoids, in which each chapter appears in Palaeontologia Electronica as it’s ready, rather than waiting for all of them to be ready before any are published. I say “first” in the sense that it would appear first in a printed volume because it’s the introduction. But at least one other paper in the collection has already been published: A new diplodocine sauropod from the Morrison Formation, Wyoming, USA (Van der Linden et al. 2024), and a couple more are in review already. (Matt and I had hoped at one point to get our Giant Barosaurus paper into this volume, but we weren’t able to hit the deadline.)

Anyway, this paper is a pretty comprehensive introduction to a very important clade of the most awesome dinosaurs, and I hope much of it is fairly readable to laymen. Enjoy!References

Taylor, Michael P. 2010. Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review. pp. 361-386 in: Richard T. J. Moody, Eric Buffetaut, Darren Naish and David M. Martill (eds.), Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: a Historical Perspective. Geological Society of London, Special Publication 343. doi: 10.1144/SP343.22
Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West 10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi:10.2992/007.091.0104
Van der Linden, Tom T. P., Emanuel Tschopp, Roland B. Sookias, Jonathan J. W. Wallaard, Femke M. Holwerda and Anne S. Schulp. 2024. A new diplodocine sauropod from the Morrison Formation, Wyoming, USA. Palaeontologia Electronica 27.3.a50 (79 pages). doi:10.26879/1380
Van der Linden, Tom T. P., Michael P. Taylor, Amy Campbell, Brian D. Curtice, René Dederichs, Lucas N. Lerzo, John A. Whitlock, D. Cary Woodruff and Emanuel Tschopp. 2025. Introduction to Diplodocoidea. Palaeontologica Electronica 28.2.a27 (49 pages). doi: 10.26879/1518

Super-brief, content-free Aquilops update Gotta say, watching ...

2025-06-26T07:55:27Z

Super-brief, content-free Aquilops update

Gotta say, watching Scarlett Johansson making eyes at Aquilops is not getting old. Screengrab from this clip, the good stuff starts about 6:19. This short clip from the Tonight Show is also pretty great.

Aaaand Halloween costume: sorted. I already have everything I need!

(…except the lifelike Aquilops puppet. Dammit.)

I may get back to posting actual science when I’m not drowning in summer anatomy teaching. Three days to go.

a-QUILL-ops, birthday, Lego sets, etc. First, before the world ...

2025-06-06T02:16:42Z

a-QUILL-ops, birthday, Lego sets, etc.

First, before the world drowns in madness, it’s a-QUILL-ops, like a quill pen. Not AWK-wuh-lops, like Aquafina.

Second, I made good use of my recent birthday and went to the Lego store at the local mall.

Shortly thereafter:

The little custom figure that comes in the 76972 “Raptor Off-Road Escape” set is *tiny*, and I love it:

Speaking of my birthday, a fair few of you out there in the paleosphere contributed to the birthday book that Jenny put together for me. Thank you, sincerely!

I’m ridiculously fortunate to have so many great friends and colleagues.

Best. Birthday. EVAR!!

Jenny also managed to surprise me with this imaginext Aquilops, which I (A) did not know existed, and (B) would have not expected before June 11, which I believe is when most of the non-Lego Jurassic World Rebirth toys are becoming available. It…has some design choices, all right. But I suppose when a dinosaur is known from a partial skull, reconstructed based on relatives from another continent, turned into a movie character, and then toddler-ified in plastic, some latitude is expected. I’m just stoked that there will be little kids who grow up loving this weird little cat-ceratops — and maybe the attention will translate into more fieldwork and more fossils. Fingers firmly crossed.

Parting shot: hearing Scarlett Johansson breathily talk about one of ‘my’ dinosaurs was not on my bingo card for 2025. Or ever. But here we are.

Aquilops-ing intensifies The second trailer for Jurassic World ...

2025-05-21T00:33:10Z

Aquilops-ing intensifies

The second trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth is out today, and there’s my baby at 1:35!

I am completely certain that at some point the tide of Aquilops-themed merch will overwhelm my ability to keep up — not to mention your interest in keeping up with this blog — but for now I am happily in squee-land. Fortunately Mike is keeping the site turning over with some actual science content. Seriously, go read his new Diplodocus paper, it is fascinating and almost absurdly well-written throughout.

Spotted in the wild at my local grocery store.

I didn’t know that Blackberry Dr Pepper existed, and I’m still not 100% convinced that it should, but who am I to turn down sugary soda in such an attractive can? I’m particularly charmed by the silhouette with size facts near the bottom.

What else? There’s a plausibly “life-size” baby Aquilops puppet coming along sometime in June. Still no word on the surely-inevitable-pretty-please actually-life-size plush Aquilops of my dreams, but if it happens, you’ll see it here.

Back to counting the days until the Aquilops Lego sets drop on June 1….

Whatever happened to the Munich Diplododcus? Everybody[1] knows ...

2025-05-15T19:58:22Z

Whatever happened to the Munich Diplododcus?

Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic Diplodocus around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich. The first nine were all mounted, and most still stand in their original museums. (The London cast has moved around a lot and currently resides in Coventry; the Russian cast has a very strange history and is now in Moscow.)

But what happened to the Munich cast? The story is in Taylor et al. 2015:68 — our new paper! — and it’s strange enough that I’m just going to quote verbatim.

The remaining Diplodocus was completed, boxed, and shipped to Munich’s Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie in November and December of 1934, completing an exchange for fossils received from Germany five years previously (Carnegie Institute 1934:40). On arrival, however, the cast was not mounted, but instead stored in the basement of the Alte Akademie, which also housed the rest of the paleontological collections. The replica was long assumed to have been destroyed during World War II, specifically during a British Royal Air Force bombing in April 1944, along with the Spinosaurus aegyptiacus holotype BSP 1912 VIII 19 and other dinosaur remains from Egypt. However, the cast had been removed from the building before the bombing raid, and while the elements themselves were not destroyed, the record of where they had been moved to was lost. It now seems the cast was taken to an abandoned convent on the outskirts of Munich. It is believed that a group of hippies, holding parties in the convent during the 1960s, found some cast bones, took them home, and attracted the attention of authorities who then discovered the crates (sources who wish to remain anonymous, pers. comm. 2022). At any rate, the cast was returned to the Munich museum in 1977 but has remained in storage ever since. Calls for it to be mounted as one of the attractions of a new museum at the Nymphenburg castle came to nothing, partly because the museum authorities favored a lighter and stronger resin cast over the maintenance-intensive plaster one.

In a perfect world, I would like to illustrate this post with photos of the Munich Diplodocus, still in its basement at the time of writing. I do have a few such photos; but the person who sent them to me said that the museum prefers that they not be made public, so I’m going to sit on them. Toss in the fact that much of what we found out for the paper was a personal communication from someone who doesn’t want to be named[2], and the whole thing feels rather mysterious.

I just hope that some day, Louise[3] Carnegie’s final gift will find a home worthy of it, on public display.

[1] Well, OK.Maybe not everyone, but probably most people who read this blog.

[2] I don’t even know myself who that person is: Ilja Nieuwland, one of the co-authors, made the relevant contact.

[3] Yes, Louise. The Munich donation was made in 1934, fifteen years after Andrew Carnegie’s death, and was made possible only by financial assistance from his widow Louise. It was in her honour that Apatosaurus louisae was named. What a great legacy.
References

Carnegie Institute. 1934. Thirty-seventh annual report of the
Carnegie Museum. Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.
Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91.

Everything you always wanted to know about the Carnegie ...

2025-05-08T10:30:15Z

Everything you always wanted to know about the Carnegie Diplodocus (but were afraid to ask)

I’m really delighted today to announce the publication of my, and my co-authors’, new paper on the Carnegie Diplodocus:

Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi: to follow.

Taylor et al. 2025: Figure 13. Skeletal atlas of the Carnegie mount of Diplodocus as originally erected in 1907, with bones color-coded according to the specimen they belonged to or were cast or sculpted from. Modified from a skeletal reconstruction by Scott Hartman, used with permission. Bones are colored as follows: CM 84 (most of the skeleton), yellow; CM 94 (right scapulocoracoid, lower right hindlimb, much of the tail and some chevrons), sculpted left tibia, red; CM 307 (the rest of the tail), not pictured; CM 662 (sculpted braincase, right humerus, radius and ulna), green; AMNH 965 (sculpted forefeet and carpus), purple; CM 21775 (left humerus, radius and ulna), cyan; CM 33985 (left fibula and lateral metatarsals), orange; USNM 2673 (sculpted remainder of skull), gold. White elements were sculpted, but the specimens on which these sculptures were based are not definitively known, though are most likely the corresponding CM 84 elements from the other side. Hyoids, clavicles, interclavicle, sternal ribs, and gastralia were all omitted from the mounted skeleton. Source of chevrons past the first seven is uncertain. See Table 2 and text for details.

“But Mike”, you say, “surely the Carnegie Diplodocus is the single best-known sauropod in the world? Didn’t Ilja Nieuwland (2019) write the definitive book about it only six years ago?”

And you’re not wrong. Lots has been written about the history of this specimen, not least my own paper on the concrete cast in Vernal, Utah (Taylor et al. 2013). And yet, surprisingly little has been written about the actual science of this keystone specimen: nothing very substantial, really, since Hatcher’s (1901) original monograph and Holland’s (1906) follow-up.

As I recounted in How the Concrete Diplodocus paper came to be, this new paper initially arose from one seemingly simple question which I wanted to be able to answer in the Concrete Diplodocus paper: what actual bones were the Carnegie casts taken from. And the answer turned out to be complicated. (That answer is summarised in the caption to Figure 13, above.)

As I started trying to figure this out, I got into correspondence with Matt Lamanna, the Carnegie’s very helpful curator of vertebrate palaeontology, and it quickly became apparent that Matt’s substantial contributions warranted co-authorship. Through Matt, I also got in touch with Amy Henrici, then the Carnegie’s collection manager for VP (now retired); and then with Linsly Church, a curatorial assistant in the same department. Both Amy and Linsly also went far beyond the call of duty, so joined the authorship. Meanwhile, as I was working on the brief historical introduction of the paper, I kept finding new rabbit-holes, and got so much help from Ilja Nieuwland that that section grew substantially and he, too, ended up as a co-author. So we ended up with five of us working on this thing, as it grew from a brief note to 27 deliciously detailed pages with 22 illustrations. (Lots of other people helped, too: see the acknowledgements.)Taylor et al. 2015: Figure 16. Right forefeet of the Carnegie Diplodocus and its casts, all in approximately anterior view. A, the feet as originally mounted in 1905 (in the London cast), 1907 (in the first iteration of the Carnegie Museum original-material mount), and subsequent casts, as supervised by Hatcher and Holland and executed by Coggeshall. This photograph shows the right forefoot of the Paris mount, which is unchanged since its original mounting. This forefoot material, sculpted from the camarasaurid specimen AMNH 965, has elongate metacarpals splayed in a semi-plantigrade posture, with multiple phalanges on each of the three medial digit and large unguals on digits I, II, and III. Photograph by Vincent Reneleau (MNHN); B, the right forefoot of the Berlin mount, as remounted in 2006 by Research Casting International, supervised by Kristian Remes. This consists of the original casts mounted in 1908 by Holland and Coggeshall, reposed in a more modern digitigrade posture, with superfluous phalanges and unguals discarded (see text). Photograph by Verónica Díez Díaz (MfN); C, the forefeet of Galeamopus (= “Diplodocus”) hayi HMNS 175 (formerly CM 662), casts of which were used in the Carnegie mount between 1999 and 2007. Note the much shorter metacarpals, the fully digitigrade posture, the reduction in phalangeal count, and the single large manual ungual on digit I. Photograph by Jeremy Huff (TAMU); D, the present forefeet of the Carnegie mount, modelled in 2007 after those of WDC-FS001A, then thought to belong to Diplodocus carnegii (Bedell and Trexler 2005) but currently thought to belong to an as-yet unnamed basal diplodocine (Tschopp et al. 2015:229–230). Note the resemblance to the diplodocine forefoot in part C, with short metacarpals, digitigrade posture, reduced phalangeal count, and a single large manual ungual. Photograph by Matthew C. Lamanna.

It turns out there was still plenty of history to be uncovered, and that some well-known parts of the story aren’t quite right after all. Also, that the composition of the Carnegie mount has changed a lot through the years — something that has not been publicly documented until now. And no-one really knows even how long this dinosaur is.

We dug into all of this, with the hope that the new paper would become a one-stop-shop for anyone who needs to know anything about this keystone specimen. It’s been a joy to work on (and especially to work with Matt L., Amy, Linsly and Ilja), and I hope you will enjoy reading it.

(A note on the venue of publication: I went against my usual policy of open-access venues only because the museum’s in-house journal, Annals of the Carnegie Museum, seemed so historically appropriate for this work. I liked the idea of following the footsteps of Hatcher and Holland — even if their early-1900s monographs were in the now discontinued Memoirs rather than the Annals. In fact, the Annals is not even paywalled: there is no online version at all hosted by the publisher (which is the museum itself). It is a print-only journal. So you can consider the PDF on my own website to be the definitive electronic copy.)

Oh, and we have a sidebar page about the new paper, containing full-resolution copies of all 22 illustrations.References

Hatcher, John Bell. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy, and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63.
Holland, W. J. 1906. Osteology of Diplodocus Marsh with special reference to the restoration of the skeleton of Diplodocus carnegiei Hatcher presented by Mr Andrew Carnegie to the British Museum, May 12 1905. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 2(6):225-278.
Nieuwland, Ilja. 2019. American dinosaur abroad: a cultural history of Carnegie’s plaster Diplodocus. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN:978-0822945574. doi:10.2307/j.ctvh4zh5n
Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West 10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi: to follow.

Being an anatomist probably made me a better person I realize ...

2025-05-02T08:45:38Z

Being an anatomist probably made me a better person

I realize that the titular statement is open to misinterpretation so let me head that off at the pass:

I’m not saying this prescriptively, like you should learn anatomy to become a better person (you should learn anatomy because it’s accessible and it rules), or that knowing anatomy makes people better. I’m also not saying this distributively, like anatomists are better people than non-anatomists. I’m saying it in the narrowest, most literal, and most personal sense: I think I (and possibly no-one else ever) am now at least a slightly better person than I used to be because of my experience with human anatomy.

Here’s my thesis, which only occurred to me for the first time in my life yesterday: marinading in a job where I am forcibly confronted with the fact that humans are physically pretty darned variable under the hood, and thinking a lot about that fact and writing about it, has made it a lot easier for me to accept that humans are probably even more* variable in terms of their personalities and brain chemistries and psychological and emotional drives and preferences and tolerances, and I think that acceptance has made me a little more compassionate.** (Along with educating myself about the various spectra that people fall on, myself included, and finally taking stock of the Godzilla-sized footprints that ADHD has left all over my career and my personal and professional relationships — about which much more another time, probably.)

* More variable than we are physically because our brain chemistries and emotional states are changing all the time, faster than we’re remodeling our bones or making new capillaries.

** This is a relative statement and not a very strong one. I still have plenty of chunks of unexamined and un-remodeled stupidity inside. And plenty of people have upped their compassion without being prodded by data.

This dovetails productively with another of my favorite lines of thinking, which is pondering how little actual evidence we have for almost everything. Galileo’s telescopes had notoriously narrow fields of view. I’ve built replicas (you can get kits online 4 cheap) and such telescopes are pretty frustrating to use, like peering at the night sky through a drinking straw. There’s an obvious analogy with paleontology, where we often have only a handful of bones of one individual of a species that must have included billions or trillions of individuals across its entire temporal range — a particularly haunting thought for someone cursed with an interest in variation. But I think metaphorically that’s how almost all science is: peering at a universe that is effectively endless in its complexity through a series of drinking straws.

That narrowness-of-evidence is applicable to daily life, in terms of making assumptions about other people’s motives and intentions. Probably that person did not cut me off in traffic because they’re a selfish a-hole deliberately trying to show dominance or run me off the road, they were just occupied by thinking about their ailing parent or how they’re going to afford the next little stretch or whether they’ll have any time to spend with their kids by the time they get dinner on the table, and made an innocent mistake. (I’m not saying that excuses their incautiousness whilst directing two tons of steel and glass at 70mph; this is about the calculation going on in my head in the wake of the near miss.) And so on. I can talk with a close friend for hours, and neither of us will express ourselves perfectly, and each of us will interpret the conversation differently, and remember it differently, and that’s just how life is. Maybe the best we can do is become aware that we’re still — always — peering at the world and at each other through drinking straws.

So I think:

People are not just different from each other, but surprisingly so, and probably in more directions than we even have words for yet; and
Individually each of us has very few lines of evidence regarding other people’s internal lives, and the ones we do have are buggy and inaccurate.

…and mashing those two thoughts together makes me want to ask a lot more questions, listen more carefully to the answers, entertain more possibilities, jump to fewer conclusions, default more often to being patient, humble, and forgiving, and maybe above all, to commit fewer failures of kindness. Happily, those also seem like good traits to cultivate as an anatomist and paleontologist.

I’m not saying there aren’t unrepentant jerks in the world. There are plenty, and some of them are having a moment. But most of the folks I interact with aren’t unrepentant jerks, and it’s pretty cool that science gave me a couple of new ways of thinking about that, and of remembering that I probably look like an unrepentant jerk sometimes through other people’s straws.

The photo up top is of a bee in my garden. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I’m willing to venture that it was some variation of “Whoo-hooo, lavender baby!” And incidentally, at least here in southern California lavender is pretty bulletproof if you give it some level of water above ‘complete neglect’, and it’s fun to run your hands through because then they smell nice. So if you take nothing else away from this post, try growing yourself some lavender. Bees love it!

Eleanor reacts to the dire wolves This is our dog Eleanor. ...

2025-04-09T00:50:10Z

Eleanor reacts to the dire wolves

This is our dog Eleanor. She’s a Great Pyrenees/German Shepherd mix, just over one year old. We rescued her last September — some heartless jerkbag had dumped her out out of a moving vehicle in a random neighborhood. Fortunately she was unhurt, but she needed a home, and here we are.

I love her more than I love most people, and it’s only by deliberate exercise of will that I’ve waited this long to put any pictures of her up on this blog. But now I have an excuse!

As you’ve probably heard by now, the company Colossal Biosciences is claiming to have brought back the dire wolf by editing a gray wolf genome. The story made the cover of Time, and you can read that popular article here.

I am not above staging cute pics of Eleanor, but in this case it wasn’t necessary: this is a completely un-staged photo of her watching a video about the dire wolves. Which is pretty crazy, because in six-plus months she’s hardly ever shown any interest in anything on a screen.

Do I have thoughts about the de-extinction of the dire wolf, and the looming de-extinctions of woolly mammoths and thylacines and whatnot? In general I’m all for it. I understand that some folks have principled objections, and that’s fine; like any human enterprise, none of this is going to be perfect, not in planning or execution or outcome; but ultimately these critters are extinct because of us, directly or indirectly, and if we can fix that, even approximately and imperfectly, I’m here for it. Also, I probably couldn’t stop it if I wanted to, so if I’m wrong, not much is gonna break.

Parting shot:

For an animal lover I’ve posted surprisingly little about pets — our box turtle Easty has made it in a couple of times, and our kitty Moe made a cameo appearance in this pig-head post. We’ll see if that holds now that I’m cohabitating with the very photogenic Mademoiselle Floueffeur de Floueff.

The Royal Society is dead A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop ...

2025-04-04T05:57:12Z

The Royal Society is dead

A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand.

Eight weeks ago, Steven Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk’s activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society’s code of conduct. That letter has been co-signed by 3494 other UK academics, but has not to my knowledge received even the courtesy of a reply.

A few days later, a second fellow, Andrew Millar, also resigned his Fellowship.

Around the same time, I also sent my own letter to the Royal Society, which has also no recieved a reply.

A month ago, the Society met to discuss “the principles around public pronouncements and behaviour of fellows”, but the only outcome was an anaemic statement that didn’t even mention Musk. As a result, Kit Yates, associate editor at the Royal Society’s journal Open Science, resigned his post.

Fiona Fox, a fellow of the Royal Society and chief executive of the Science Media Centre was quoted as worrying that “ejecting Musk from the Royal Society would be seen as a political move.” This strikes me as incredibly naive. At a time when the USA is gleefully destroying its own scientific infrastructure, with Musk at the head of the charge, doing nothing is a political move.

It simply isn’t possible for a society to both “recognise, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity” (as its mission statement claims) and enjoy the patronage of someone who is doing the exact opposite.

And that was going to be the final line of this post, until a few days ago, when I saw this: Royal Society decides not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk. The Guardian quotes a cowardly letter from society president Sir Adrian Smith:

The view of council is that making judgments on the acceptability of the views and actions of fellows, particularly those that might be regarded as political, could do more harm than good to the society and the cause of science in general.

This is, of course, complete nonsense. The point is not, and has never been, that Musk is unpleasant or personally disliked. As the careful letters of Bishop, Curry and others have all pointed out, Musk is flagrantly and unambiguously in contravention of the society’s own Code of Conduct.

And it seems quite clear that “do more harm than good to the society” means that the society is scared of not getting any of that delicious Musk money.

So the Society has made its choice. It prefers the fellowship of Musk — who in the last few months has possibly done more to impede the progress of science worldwide that literally any other person in history — over that of actual scientists.

Unsurprisingly, I will not submit any of my papers to Royal Society journals, as I have done in the past, and I urge others to take the same step. Similarly I will no longer be providing peer reviews for Royal Society journals, and I urge every other scientist also to withhold voluntary professional labour. And I will no longer contribute to their conferences, and urge others to join me in this.

I want to be clear: this is not a protest or a boycott. I’m under no illusion that withdrawing my very minor contributions will make the slightest bit of difference to Society policy when the resignation of actual fellows hasn’t affected anything. It’s simply that I’ve given up on the society — I’m not throwing good effort after bad. The Royal Society of 2025 is simply not an organization that I want to have anything to do with in any capacity.

In short, the Royal Society is dead. Three hundred and sixty-five years of history, and it’s ended it as a beard for a fascist. What an utterly utterly shameful end for a once-great society.

doi:10.59350/ndeyh-vq64

Burn it all down Clarivate is the content-hoarding corporation ...

2025-02-18T20:19:08Z

Burn it all down

Clarivate is the content-hoarding corporation that owns ProQuest, the Web of Science and EndNote, among many other services widely used in academia. Plus a ton of content. Today’s announcement, “Introducing ProQuest Digital Collections, a new library subscription offering unparalleled breadth, value and access”, sounds nice, doesn’t it? And the first few paragraphs are certainly full of praise for the changes they’re making.

Those changes amount to: libraries will no longer be able to buy books. Specifically:

Customers can continue to purchase content via perpetual archive license through December 31, 2025, after which this content will be available via subscription only.

You will only be able to rent content, not buy it.

I am quite sure this is not what the authors of books now controlled by Clarivate had in mind.

I think it’s too late for the commercial scholarly publishing sector to turn itself around — in truth it was probably already too late a decade ago, but I and others have fooled ourselves that maybe the good people at these corps can do something. They can’t. Commercial scholarly publishing is owned and controlled by terminal-stage capitalists, and is consequently all about increasing the next quarterly figures — not just ignoring the needs of researchers, but even the medium- and long-term finances of the companies.

In short, the commercial scholarly publishing industry is owned by people who are quite prepared to burn it all down so long as they get rich doing it.

And I think the only response is for us to burn it down first.

The difference is, we’ll replace it with something better.

doi:10.59350/qe20a-7t467

Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk ...

2025-02-11T21:11:35Z

Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk

I’ll be sending this letter to the Royal Society, but I also want it out there in public, because I hope that more people will follow the lead set by Dorothy Bishop and Stephen Curry in putting pressure on the Royal Society to grow a backbone.

Dear Royal Society of London,

You exist to support the advancement of science. Your ability to do this effectively is largely due to the respect your society is held in, due to its long history and numerous eminent Fellows.

In 2018, Elon Musk was elected a Fellow of the Society, not due to any scientific achievements of his own but due to his financial involvement with the achievements of others. At the time, his fellowship was questionable but understandable.

Since then, Musk’s behaviour in every field has been the antithesis of that described by the Society’s Code of Conduct: “selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership”. I surely do not need to outline the ways in which his exploitative and malicious behaviour has egregiously and repeatedly contravened these standards.

Now Musk is an influential member of a US presidential administration that is actively impeding the progress of science on a scale not seen since the darkest days of the USSR, through censorship, catastrophic defunding, dismantling of infrastructure, and withdrawal from international coalitions. Added to this, his vindictive personal behaviour in targeting individuals contravenes every standard of decency.

At present, the Royal Society is seen to be standing behind Musk, its Fellow, effectively cheering him on. This cannot stand. The reputation of the society, carefully built across 365 years, is at stake. No-one can respect a society that retains Musk as a Fellow. The resignation of Dorothy Bishop, in protest at Musk’s continuing fellowship, should have sent waves of shame through the Society. That it has not meaningfully responded to her resignation should be a cause of further shame.

The choice now facing the Society is stark: retain the goodwill of a billionaire; or retain the respect of the scientific community. It is not possible to do both.

Yours with all due respect,

Dr. Michael P. Taylor
University of Bristol, UK.
dino@miketaylor.org.uk

New paper out today: Boisvert et al. (2025) on all the Haplos New ...

2025-01-29T01:15:25Z

New paper out today: Boisvert et al. (2025) on all the Haplos

New paper out today, in Geology of the Intermountain West (free at this link):Boisvert, Colin, Bivens, Gunnar, Curtice, Brian, Wilhite, Ray, and Wedel, Mathew. 2025. Census of currently known specimens of the Late Jurassic sauropod Haplocanthosaurus from the Morrison Formation, USA. Geology of the Intermountain West 12:1-23. doi: 10.31711/giw.v12.pp1-23.

This one was born while the same crew was working on the Dry Mesa Haplo paper (Boisvert et al. 2024). We realized that there were more Haplos out there than any of us had individually realized, and it would sure be handy to have the pertinent information on all of them collected in one place. So the “all the Haplos” project became one of Colin’s talks at NAPC last year. Then last June, Colin, Brian, Ray, and I had a few days in the Salt Lake/Provo area, and Gunnar Bivens joined us. In addition to being a talented artist — he did all the skeletal recons in the new paper — Gunnar also has a fearsome command of the literature and an encyclopedic memory for specimen numbers. Pretty soon he’d contributed enough to the project that it was only fair to bring him on as an author. Jun-Hyeok Jang did the life restoration for the cover.

This one’s pretty straightforward — it does what it says on the tin — but I’m super proud of it and very, very happy to have it done and out. They say to write the stuff you want to read, and I’m going to have a printed and bound copy of this paper sitting on the shelf over my desk as soon as it can be decently arranged. I needed this paper to exist, and now it does. I hope y’all find it useful, too.References

Boisvert, Colin, Curtice, Brian, Wedel, Mathew, & Wilhite, Ray. 2024. Description of a new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry. The Anatomical Record, 1–19. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25520
Boisvert, Colin, Bivens, Gunnar, Curtice, Brian, Wilhite, Ray, and Wedel, Mathew. 2025. Census of currently known specimens of the Late Jurassic sauropod Haplocanthosaurus from the Morrison Formation, USA. Geology of the Intermountain West 12:1-23. doi: 10.31711/giw.v12.pp1-23.

A unique sauropod mount: Haplocanthosaurus delfsi CMNH 10380 ...

2025-01-23T20:34:21Z

A unique sauropod mount: Haplocanthosaurus delfsi CMNH 10380

Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus, basing it and its type species H. priscus on the adult specimen CM 572. Later that year, having been notified that the genus name was preoccupied by a fish, he renamed it Haplocanthosaurus in a single-paragraph note (Hatcher 1903b).

Then in his monographic description later that same year (Hatcher 1903c), he also named a second species, H. utterbacki, based on the subadult specimen CM 879. McIntosh and Williams (1988:22) considered this to be synonymous with H. priscus, the differences noted by Hatcher being due to preparation (absence of hyposphenes) and ontogeny (fusion of sacral spines). This synonymy has been universally followed since.

Eighty-five years after Hatcher’s three papers, McIntosh and Williams (1988) described a new species of Haplocanthosaurus — H. delfsi — and this one has been accepted as valid. Their paper contains a photograph of the mounted skeleton in the Cleveland Museum:

What I didn’t realise until recently is that this is not how the skeleton was first exhibited at the museum. In an article about the new remount of this skeleton (its tail is off the floor at last!), Emily Driehaus writes that “by 1957, the team had fully excavated the dinosaur—and it was on display in the Museum by 1961”. And the article includes this photo:

I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve seen plenty of regular mounts, and I’ve seen panel mounts where the bones are laid out on the ground as they may have been when they were found. And I’ve seen photos of the bizarre everted-elbowed Diplodocus in St. Petersburg. But never an exhibit like this, with the rib-cage complete and articulated, but sitting on the ground with the legs splayed out.

I wonder what the story was here? Did they get as far as building the torso, then run out of time or money? Were they trying for a possible sleeping posture? That doesn’t work at all: the femur would have been disarticulated in that posture, and the torso would need to be higher off the ground to allow space for the guts and gastralia.

Does anyone know any more about this?References

Hatcher, John B. 1903a. A new sauropod dinosaur from the Jurassic of Colorado. Proceedings of the Biology Society of Washington 16:1–2.
Hatcher, John B. 1903b. A new name for the dinosaur Haplocanthus Hatcher. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 16:100.
Hatcher, John B. 1903c. Osteology of Haplocanthosaurus with description of a new species, and remarks on the probable habits of the Sauropoda and the age and origin of the Atlantosaurus beds; additional remarks on Diplodocus. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 2:1–75 and plates I–VI.
McIntosh, John S, and Michael E. Williams. 1988. A new species of sauropod dinosaur, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi sp. nov., from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Fm. of Colorado. Kirtlandia 43:3–26.

My Constant Reader, and staying close to the workA middle caudal ...

2025-01-16T02:13:32Z

My Constant Reader, and staying close to the workA middle caudal vertebra of a diplodocid, presumably Tornieria africana, on display at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, in left lateral view.

Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History led me to this post at Nothing Human, and poking around there led me to another good’un: “Shallow feedback hollows you out”. That post really hit for me, and it made me think about SV-POW! Especially this bit:

Suppose you don’t want to lose your ability to think new thoughts and see new things. What are your options?

The best remedy is to write to the single smartest person you know who cares a lot about your topic of interest.

I have two thoughts about this. The first, which dovetails nicely with the thesis of that post, is that SV-POW! staying relatively small is probably a good thing. We’ve never written with the goal of growing our readership, and I think that’s kept us from being tempted by a lot of bad habits whose deleterious effects you can see play out over and over again across the whole internet. Our habit of posting on a completely irregular schedule on whatever topics we like has been doubly beneficial: it’s kept us sane (for reasons explored in this post), and it’s probably kept our readership low,* which has kept the temptation to write for marginal readers from ever getting off the ground. In case that sounds insulting or dismissive to our readers, let me clarify: we love our readers, and we’d rather have our little community of dedicated weirdos than any other set.

(Don’t get me wrong, I like it when one of our posts goes viral, but I like it in the same sense that I like watching a comet: it’s a cool phenomenon that I feel is beyond my influence. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t affect how I conduct myself.)

*Having written that, I wonder now if our irregular posting schedule has possibly deepened the dedication of those readers who can tolerate it — it could be a form of intermittent reinforcement, which has been implicated in gambling addiction.

That leads to my second thought: at any given time in the 17-year history of this blog, we’ve had a small but dedicated cadre of commenters, but the makeup of that group has changed over time. This has also had a salutary effect: for every post I’ve ever written here, I could be pretty sure that at least some of the regulars would see it and comment, but the one thing of which I could be absolutely certain is that the post would be seen and read by Mike. For most posts, Mike probably cares as much or more about what I’m writing than anyone else in the world, he will absolutely call me to account if he catches any weaknesses of evidence or reasoning, and he’ll do it publicly, in our own comment section. These are all good things! As my Constant Reader, Mike’s helped enforce the good habits of mind and of writing that are the subject of that Nothing Human “Shallow feedback” post.The same Tornieria vertebra in dorsolateral oblique view, showing some pneumatic features on the lateral aspect of the neural spine. The pocks on the centrum are also raising my pneumaticity antennae, but I can’t be sure from my limited set of 16-year-old photos. When Diplodocus caudals have pneumatic features this far back in the tail, they’re more commonly on the centrum than the arch, but diverticula gonna diverticulate.

Speaking of, I also really liked this bit from the first comment on that post, by Mo Nastri:

…the details change but the general pattern is the same. In each case the [once great] intellectual in question is years removed from not just the insights that delivered fame, but *the activities that delivered insight*.

To the extent that this blog has escaped enshittification, it’s probably because Mike and I are not removed from the activities that deliver insight. We care more about sauropod vertebrae (and pig skulls, etc.) than we do about clicks. And at this point, I’m confident that we always will. If we were ever in danger of click-maximizing behavior, it was probably back in the early days, and even then the risk was minimal. We love our weird little niche blog just as it is, weird and niche-y and little.

The possibly-surprising conclusion I’m building toward is that we’ve probably made SV-POW! a better experience for our readers (minimally, in that it still exists to be read) by not caring about our readership, and by not writing to please or impress anyone other than ourselves and each other. And that in turn has kept SV-POW! viable for us as well.

So if you’re here, great! We’re happy to have you — as an interested person, rather than a click. If you like what we’re doing, stay tuned. We’re gonna do a lot more of the same.

About that Saurophaganax paper Newly out in VAMP: Danison, Andy ...

2024-12-22T12:15:25Z

About that Saurophaganax paper

Newly out in VAMP:

Danison, Andy D., Wedel, Mathew J., Barta, Daniel E., Woodward, Holly N., Flora, Holley M., Lee, Andrew H., and Snively, Eric. 2024. Chimerism of specimens referred to Saurophaganax maximus reveals a new species of Allosaurus (Dinosauria, Theropoda). Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology 12:81-114.

Oh man, there is soooo much to say about this paper, which is a free download here. The short, short version is that OMNH 1123, the holotype specimen of the giant allosaurid Saurophaganax maximus, does not definitely belong to a theropod and may actually belong to a sauropod, and the same goes for some of the referred material, namely the atlas and chevrons. Since neither theropod nor sauropod material could be confidently assigned to Saurophaganax, we consider it a nomen dubium. That leaves a big ole pile of fossils from the Oklahoma panhandle that really do belong to a giant allosaurid, which we think is sufficiently distinct from Allosaurus fragilis and Allosaurus jimmadseni to warrant naming a new species, Allosaurus anax. If you want all the evidence and technical details and scientific reasoning, it’s in the paper, and some of it may make it into future blog posts. If you want to know what a weird ride this project has been, read on.

Who even are you?

The first point I want to make is that I myself have had just about every possible conflicting thought about the identity of OMNH 1123, the Saurophaganax holotype. I think chronologically I’ve gone through the following stages in this order:

thinking it belongs to a theropod, for essentially all of my life before Andy Danison contacted me and invited me onto the project;
thinking it belongs to a sauropod, after Andy showed me how similar it is to the vertebrae of known juvenile sauropods;
thinking it belongs to a theropod, more or less in a panic after I published my last post about Saurophaganax and then worried that we were wrong and we were going to make fools of ourselves (or, more flatteringly, I made the strongest case I could for a theropod identity to stress-test our hypothesis, which an accurate description of the outcome but a lie about my motivation);
thinking it could plausibly belong to a sauropod, after Andy countered every point I raised in my “Saurophaganax is a theropod after all” push with photos of the same characters in the vertebrae of juvenile sauropods, which led to me agreeing with Andy and the other authors that designating Saurophaganax as a nomen dubium was the best move — this is the point of view that is crystallized forever in the new paper.

Also, I believe that at various points during the study the author team considered just about every possible scenario for dealing with the name Saurophaganax maximus, from thinking that it was a valid theropod genus and species, to thinking that it might be a valid sauropod genus and species (put a pin in that thought), to thinking that it was potentially valid but not definitively referrable to either Theropoda or Sauropoda, to realizing that if we couldn’t be certain if it was a theropod or sauropod, then no-one would be comfortable referring either theropod or sauropod material to it, which pushed us toward designating it a nomen dubium. We also considered a lot of potential taxonomic acts, including naming a new genus, naming a new species, or not naming the giant Oklahoma allosaurid and leaving it as Allosaurus sp. In the end, we decided a new species best captured our thinking about the material, and was most likely to be stable over the long run.Am I sure about this?

Heck no! I’m the same guy who thought the Saurophaganax holotype was definitely a theropod, and definitely a sauropod. I remember the logic and evidence I used to reach each of those conclusions; I remember the certainty I felt in each one of those states; I remember the confidence that certainty gave me. But I think now that it was false confidence. I’m happy with the work we did in this paper, and I’m proud of it, and I think we came to the least-bad solution. But I’m sure this will not be the last word on Saurophaganax, and future authors may discover things we overlooked, or come back with a new perspective when and if new material of the giant Oklahoma allosaurid comes out of the ground.

Here’s what gives me pause: the accessory laminae in the Saurophaganax holotype are pretty much dead ringers for the spinoprezyg laminae (SPRLs) in the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine. I didn’t figure that out, Andy Danison did, and it’s one of those things that has just kept growing and growing in my mind, even after the paper was finalized. No other allosaurid or allosauroid or theropod of any description that I know of has prominent bars of bone in the same place, but they’d be expected in the neural arch of a juvenile diplodocid. And at this point I think it’s bordering on special pleading to argue that the giant Oklahoma allosaurid just happens to have these bars of bone, unique among theropods, that look identical to the SPRLs of a juvenile diplodocid, in a quarry dominated by diplodocids. So as of this evening/early morning, sitting here writing this post, I’ve about talked myself back around to thinking that the Saurophaganax holotype belongs to a sauropod, and possibly to a juvenile of the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine.

The most obvious argument against is that whatever OMNH 1123 is, it had strongly-up-tilted transverse processes, like Haplocanthosaurus and a lot of theropods (see the Discussion in Boisvert et al. 2024) and very much unlike, say, OMNH 1366 and other dorsals of adult diplodocids. But I now think this is ontogenetically plastic — the juvenile Barosaurus specimens described by Melstrom et al. (2016) and Hanik et al. (2017) also have strongly up-tilted transverse processes. And in case I get hit by a bus before I can explain this more fully, it’s pretty clear that the neural arch telescopes in the dorsoventral direction over the course of ontogeny, and someone should work on that, too.

Anyway, the specter of Saurophaganax as a sauropod is a good segue to the next section.What if we’re wrong?

I wrote up above about the comforting certainty of thinking that the Saurophaganax holotype definitely belonged to a theropod, or definitely belonged to a sauropod. I think that was in part because the intermediate idea, that OMNH 1123 could be either thing, feels inherently unstable to me. Surely someone will come along and point out some feature or combination of features that makes OMNH 1123 either definitely theropod or definitely sauropod. What then? Here are the possibilities I’ve thought of:

OMNH 1123 definitely belongs to a theropod, and it’s diagnostic enough to hang a species name on: then it goes back to being Saurophaganax maximus or Allosaurus maximus depending on how people calibrate their genericometers, Allosaurus anax becomes a junior synonym, and we were just flat wrong (see our discussion of this possibility on p. 107 of the new paper).
OMNH 1123 definitely belongs to a theropod, but it’s not diagnostic enough to hang a species name on: Saurophaganax remains a nomen dubium, just a nomen dubium with a home, and Allosaurus anax remains the valid name for the giant Oklahoma allosaurid.
OMNH 1123 definitely belongs to a sauropod, but it’s not diagnostic enough to hang a species name on: Saurophaganax remains a nomen dubium, just a nomen dubium with a home (in Sauropoda or Neosauropoda this time), Allosaurus anax remains the valid name for the giant Oklahoma allosaurid, and the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine remains unnamed.
OMNH 1123 definitely belongs to a sauropod, and it’s diagnostic enough to hang a species name on: well, Allosaurus anax remains the valid name for the giant Oklahoma allosaurid, and the implications for the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine are…real interesting.

I don’t think #1 is likely, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Option #2 seems the least likely to me: if OMNH 1123 belongs to a theropod, surely the unprecedented accessory laminae would make it highly diagnostic — this was the cornerstone of Dan Chure’s case in his 1995 paper naming Saurophaganax. Option #3 seems the most likely to me, for reasons explained above; instead of accessory laminae that are unique among theropods,* the weird bars of bone in OMNH 1123 would be bog-standard SPRLs, and the specimen could plausibly belong to any of several diplodocids known from Oklahoma Morrison.

* To be clear, the fact of some accessory laminae somewhere would not be unique to OMNH 1123 among theropods, but accessory laminae that mimic sauropod SPRLs would be.It’s not super obvious which of these critters — if either — the name Saurophaganax might apply to. Gotta say, I did not have that on my bingo card before this year. Clash of the Titans exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum (OMNH).

Option #4 doesn’t seem very likely to me, but it is fascinating to consider the implications. I’ve long suspected that the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine represents a new species at least, based on a bunch of characters I’m not going into in this post, but I’ve never done the thesis-equivalent of work that it would take to persuasively demonstrate that. There is a scenario in which OMNH 1123 might be shown to belong to Apatosaurinae, in which case the combination Apatosaurus maximus could be on the table. Or Saurophaganax might become the third genus of apatosaurine alongside Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, which seems insane, but there’s a plausible path to that result. OMNH 1123 wouldn’t be my first pick of holotype for the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine, and it could belong to a non-apatosaurine diplodociod, in which case no issues would arise for Apatosaurinae. Still, by lobbing the specimen vaguely (but not definitively!) sauropod-wards we may have created future headaches for sauropod workers in the Oklahoma Morrison. But we had to slay the dragon in front of us, not all the dragons everywhere forever.

Also, I should note that I’m a firm nominalist: to me names are hypotheses, and we should keep them around as long as they’re useful. I’m betting that Allosaurus anax is going to be a better fit for the giant Oklahoma allosaurid, but time will tell. And speaking of the name… The name

I love the name Allosaurus anax. I didn’t come up with it, Andy did. Here’s why I like it so much:

Most importantly, although we came to different conclusions than Chure (1995) about the identity of OMNH 1123, we like and respect Dan Chure and his work, and we didn’t want the new paper to be seen as a criticism of his work. I always thought Dan showed a lot of generosity of spirit in creating the name Saurophaganax maximus, honoring J. Willis Stovall and salvaging Stovall’s intent with the original, defunct name Saurophagus maximus. Similarly, I thought it was just perfect that Andy wanted to honor Chure’s work and salvage his intent by creating the species name Allosaurus anax.
The species name anax means “king”, and there’s a nice parallel there to Tyrannosaurus rex. Allosaurus rex would sound derivative. I’m hardly unbiased here, but to me Allosaurus anax sounds wicked awesome.Did someone say wicked awesome?Our reviewers

If I could have picked any two peer reviewers in the world for this paper, I would have picked Jerry Harris and Tom Holtz. Jerry because he’s described skeletons of an allosauroid (Acrocanthosaurus, in Harris (1998) and a diplodocoid (Suuwassea, in Harris & Dodson 2004 and numerous subsequent papers), so he has experience with all of the clades where OMNH 1123 might land, and because he consistently gives very careful, constructive reviews. Tom Holtz because he’s extremely sharp on theropod morphology but knows a thing or two about non-theropod dinosaurs, too, and also provides very thoughtful reviews. In the actual event, we got them both, and I couldn’t be happier.My coauthors

Wow, what a great team this was to work with. I went to grad school with Andrew Lee, but we never managed to publish together before this. I’ve admired Eric Snively’s work for years but never published with him before either, ditto for Holly Woodward and Danny Barta. Funny true story: the authorship order of the paper is different from that of the SVP abstract because Holly thought that she hadn’t done enough to earn second author status, and she wanted someone else to take it. But Danny and I both felt that way about our own contributions. In the end I let them persuade me, but I still feel odd about it — so much of what I did on this paper was just get schooled by Andy Danison. At best I think I was the whetstone to his blade, but he did all the cutting.

And that brings me at last to Andy. Good heavens, he worked his butt off on this project, in museum collections and in the literature, finding stuff I’d never noticed and making connections that had escaped me, and then explaining his findings to us with piercing clarity. It was humbling but also exhilarating, because I got to learn new stuff about sauropod vertebrae. I hope to get some of that stuff into a future post, but for now it’s way late and I must sleep. Congratulations, team! It’s been satisfying to work with each of you.

Parting shot: it’s beginning to look a lot like S’naxmas

Jenny and I were talking tonight about some of the big Jurassic Park/Jurassic World dinosaurs we have around the house, and I discovered that the Jurassic World Super Colossal Allosaurus was a thing. What could be better for a dinosaur-obsessed guy who just helped rename the real world super colossal Allosaurus? Jenny got online and found it in stock at the local Target, and I ended up racing through the store in the last five minutes before they closed to score one for myself.

I hope to do some more blogging about this project. We didn’t go into it in a lot of detail in the paper, but some of the stuff Andy found has wild implications for Morrison sauropods. And it would be kinda cool to do a post-mortem on why I was certain that OMNH 1123 was a sauropod, then a theropod, and now maybe sauropod again. And talk about the referred specimens. And about pneumaticity. Just maybe not until after Christmas. Then again, who knows. I’m publishing on stinkin’ theropods now, so anything is possible. Watch this space.

Previous posts on Saurophaganax:

About that Saurophaganax abstract (October 20, 2024)
Friday phalanges: Megaraptor vs. Saurophaganax (April 19, 2013)References

Boisvert, Colin, Curtice, Brian, Wedel, Mathew, & Wilhite, Ray. 2024. Description of a new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry. The Anatomical Record, 1–19. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25520
Danison, Andy D., Wedel, Mathew J., Barta, Daniel E., Woodward, Holly N., Flora, Holley M., Lee, Andrew H., and Snively, Eric. 2024. Chimerism of specimens referred to Saurophaganax maximus reveals a new species of Allosaurus (Dinosauria, Theropoda). Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology 12:81-114.
Hanik, Gina M., Matthew C. Lamanna and John A. Whitlock. 2017. A juvenile specimen of Barosaurus Marsh, 1890 (Sauropoda: Diplodocidae) from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of Dinosaur National Monument, Utah, USA. Annals of Carnegie Museum 84(3):253–263.
Harris, J.D. 1998. A reanalysis of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, its phylogenetic status, and paleobiogeographic implications, based on a new specimen from Texas. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science 13:1−75.
Harris, J.D. and Dodson, P., 2004. A new diplodocoid sauropod dinosaur from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of Montana, USA. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, 49(2):197-210.
Melstrom, Keegan M., Michael D. D’Emic, Daniel Chure and Jeffrey A. Wilson. 2016. A juvenile sauropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of Utah, USA, presents further evidence of an avian style air-sac system. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 36(4):e1111898. doi:10.1080/02724634.2016.1111898

#1 #2 #3 #4

Show your love! ...

2024-06-01T21:51:45Z

Show your love!

https://svpow.com/2024/06/01/its-national-dinosaur-day/

What’s up with your crazy-ass hands, Utahraptor? Utahraptor is ...

2023-10-20T18:39:48Z

What’s up with your crazy-ass hands, Utahraptor?

Utahraptor is a “giant” dromaeosaurid from Utah, described by Kirkland et al. (1993). Famously, its existence was part of the reason that the people making Jurassic Park felt at liberty to make their “Velociraptor” individuals not only much bigger than the turkey-sized Velociraptor proper, but also than than sheep-sized Deinonychus.

Here’s a mounted skeleton, right in the state of Utah — specifically, at the Prehistoric Museum in Price, which you will recall is currently exhibiting the Concrete Diplodocus.

(Photo from the Prehistoric Museum’s own site.)

I didn’t register the skeleton back when Matt and I visited in 2016. Maybe it wasn’t even up back then, or maybe we were too distracted by the Camarasaurus pit. But anyway, when I saw the photo above, my immediate thought was Holy Heck What’s Up With Your Hands??! It looks more like a giant Scansoriopteryx.

So for a few days, I thought, well, that’s just what Utahraptor hands are like, and the word has somehow failed to register how morally wrong that is. But then I saw this photo of another Utahraptor mount, this in from the BYU Museum of Palaeontology (from Wikipedia):

(Yes, Matt and I were also at the BYU Museum in 2016, and Matt has been there on numerous other occasions. Somehow we never noticed the stinkin’ theropod.)

And this one has perfectly cromulent hands.

So what’s the deal here? Is the Price mount Just Plain Wrong?References

Kirkland, James I., Robert Gaston and Donald Burge. 1993. A large Dromaeosaur (Theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of Eastern Utah. Hunteria 2(10), 16 pages.

doi:10.59350/5yxcy-xkn46

There has been an Aquilopsing – have you felt it? Cryptic ...

2017-04-22T08:11:04Z

There has been an Aquilopsing – have you felt it?

Cryptic Aquilops, by Brian Engh. Available as a poster print – see below.

One of the many nice things about getting to help name new taxa is that once you let them out into the world, other people can unleash their considerable talents on ‘your’ critters. Which means that every now and then, something cool pops up that you have a deep personal connection to. Things have been fairly quiet on the Aquilops front for a while, and all of a sudden I have news.

I’m still waiting for a plush Aquilops – c’mon, Homo sapiens, how has this not happened already? – but if you’d like a life-size Aquilops in bronze, sculptor James Herrmann has you covered. James got in touch with me last fall when the project was just in the planning stages. His timing was excellent – I’d just seen the presentation on camouflage in Psittacosaurus at SVPCA, and the paper by Vinther et al. was out a week or two later. I sent James some papers and photos of dead animals, he sent back photos of the work in progress, and now his Aquilops is done.

About the sculpture, James writes:

I am offering the sculpture for sale as a limited edition of 25. The sculpture is life sized, it is approximately 60 lbs and is 33″L x 14”H x 11”W. The price I am asking for it is $4500. I am getting a slab of green soapstone for the base although it does display well without the stone so it will be bolted on from below and not epoxied. […] The gingko leaves and log part of the sculpture were made from molds taken from plants growing locally.

I dig it. If you’re interested in getting one, please visit his website, HerrmannStudio.com.

Aquilops ’14. I was there, man. It was crazy. A Brian Engh joint.

Next item: back in 2014, Brian Engh created the public face of Aquilops with the wonderful graphic art he did for the paper and the press release. Now he’s gone back to the well and reimagined Aquilops, based in part on what we know of its paleoecology – that’s the image at the top of the post. He explains his new view of Aquilops in a thoughtful and wide-ranging video on his paleoart YouTube channel. (If you miss his rap videos set in the Daikaijucene, he also has a YouTube channel for music and monsters. And a blog. And a Patreon page. You get the picture.) You should also check out the two-part interview with Brian at the PLOS Paleo Community blog (part 1, part 2).

Here’s the aforementioned video:

Poster prints of Aquilops Classic and Next Gen can be purchased through Brian’s website, DontMessWithDinosaurs.com.

Finally, a couple of older Aquilops-themed art things that I didn’t cover when they happened. Lead author Andy Farke is also an award-winning homebrewer and he concocted his Eagle Face Oatmeal Stout in honor of our little buddy. He has lots more beer-and-dinosaur crossover goodness on his brewing blog – check it out.

Last fall artist Natalie Metzger did a bunch of drawings of extant animals wearing the skulls of extinct animals for Inktober. In the very first batch was this awesome squirrel looking unexpectedly badass in an Aquilops skull. I don’t know what it means, but I would totally play that D&D campaign. Natalie has a bunch more cool stuff on her blog and Patreon page, and she’ll be at the Rose City Comic Con in Portland this September, so go say hi and buy her art.

Really finally, I am not on Twitter – trust me, I don’t need less of a filter between my occasional stupidity and the world – but for all the rest of you, keep an eye on #Aquilops and, if you’re a heartless jerk, #Aquilopsburrito.

Have more Aquilops stuff I haven’t covered but should? The comment field is open.

References

Farke, A.A., Maxwell, W.D., Cifelli, R.L., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. A ceratopsian dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the biogeography of Neoceratopsia. PLoS ONE 9(12): e112055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112055
Vinther, J., Nicholls, R., Lautenschlager, S., Pittman, M., Kaye, T.G., Rayfield, E., Mayr, G., and Cuthill, I.C. 2016. 3D camouflage in an ornithischian dinosaur. Current Biology 26(18): 2456-2462.

I, for one, welcome our new sauropod overlords Nemo Ramjet, ...

2010-06-17T17:03:39Z

I, for one, welcome our new sauropod overlords

Nemo Ramjet, speculative zoologist extraordinaire and leader in the field of intelligent dinosaurs, recently completed his Brontosapiens and sent it to the SV-POW!sketeers for comment. The ensuing discussion touches on pneumaticity, child slavery, sauropod bipedality, and vomit, and we thought it was worth preserving for posterity (posted with permission from all participants).

(BTW, the gizmo the sauropod dude is holding with his tongue is a pipe, not a paintbrush. Personally, I think he should be smoking a calabash pipe, and wearing a deerstalker.)

Nemo: “I just completed this drawing of an unlikely but cool intelligent sauropod. Why should all dinosauroids come from that pesky theropod lineage? :)

I hope you find it to your liking.”

Matt: “Cool. I assume that the sacs on the face and neck are inflatable and used for social signaling?

“A big-bodied…what are going to call these things? sapientitans? encephalopods? [note: I hadn’t seen the deviantART link and didn’t know that Nemo had already coined a vastly superior name]…could get away with having a longish neck because adding a 4-5 kilo brain would not seriously unbalance things. But if there were any pressure for the intelligent sauropod lineage to evolve smaller body size, the more-or-less fixed size of the head would eventually drive them to evolve shorter necks, I would think. And I see that your critter has a neck almost as short as Brachytrachelopan, and seems from the limb proportions to be a diplodocid. I’m curious, did you start with the big brain -> big head -> short neck train and end up gravitating toward dicraeosaurs, or did you choose a diplodocid-like plan for another reason and evolve the short neck independently?

“Any thoughts, from anyone, on whether sapientitans would tend to stay big, evolve to even larger sizes, or get small? I also wonder how intelligence might affect the postcranial skeleton. A prehensile whiplash tail suggests itself. How about a mobile thumb instead of just a thumb claw on the forefoot, or is that too blatantly primate-like? If they were diplodocids, perhaps they would pick up interesting objects and store them in the cleft between their presacral neural spines. The tongue or tail or both could serve to pick up objects and deposit them in the cleft, where they’d be readily available no matter where the animal roamed. Perhaps they would evolve very wide neural spine troughs or even a bowl over the shoulders that could be reached by tongue and tail alike. I also like the idea of a more vertically pitched face with a narrow snout to give the eyes some binocular overlap.

“None of this is criticism of your drawing, which is fantastic–thanks for sending. It’s just that I have never thought along these lines and can’t help playing What If. I’d like to evolve the sapientitan through a few more iterations, to get something more outre but still plausible.”

Nemo: “When I was doing this, I thought that an intelligent sauropod would look either like a big-headed Isisaurus / chalicothere crossover, or something more conventional, like this guy. I imagined this guy would be a diplodocid, but I wasn’t inspired by Brachytrachelopan. I just thought the neck would grow shorter and thicker as the brain grew.

“I imagine these guys would use their big “mitten” claws and thumbs for very strong and crude manipulation, and the long tongue for fine-tuning and touch. I just gave it a whiplash tail, I didn’t think it would play a role in manipulation. The neck and face sacs were indeed for social purposes – I imagine they would sound like monstrous bagpipes, audible for miles around…”

Darren: “I wanted to add a few comments, take them or leave them…

— Normal sauropods presumably acted mostly on instinct when it came to finding food sources – you don’t need a big brain for that. But a herbivore with a reasonable memory can remember the whens and wheres of fruiting trees and other seasonally available resources. Individuals might therefore spend their time migrating between key areas: they might have encountered these during their youthful wanderings, or may recall them from their time of parental supervision.

— It’s looking likely that sauropods were precoccial with little or no post-hatching parental care. But a big-brained lineage perhaps required extensive parental care, so perhaps we should expect smaller clutches because juvenile mortality was much lower. And if parents are caring for babies, they’d have to work hard to protect them from predators.

— Increased intelligence means that these sauropods were better at predicting the behaviour of, and therefore avoiding, predators. I would expect them to exhibit active ‘predator awareness’ bits of behaviour: regular bipedal standing to scan the horizon, long-distance communication with conspecifics to see what’s happening out of sight, perhaps a better multi-spacial awareness than normal sauropods. Maybe they have evolved on islands where big predators are absent, or maybe they swim to islands to breed.

— Some biologists argue that big brains are ‘luxury organs’ – only possible when high amount of fat/energy/protein are available in abundance. Could one lineage of sauropods have evolved big brains because they began exploiting a new, energy-rich resource? Fatty fruits and/or carrion may have contributed to brain size in hominoids, so could sauropods have followed a similar path? Exploitation of a new, oily fruit?

— Normal sauropods may well have been able to communicate long distances with infrasound, loud vocalisations etc. A smart sauropod lineage could hypothetically use complex, phased or staccato sounds to communicate more complicated messages. Sophisticated control of air sacs (both internal ones and balloon-like sacs on neck and head) could have allowed crazy complicated drumming or multi-part messages.

— I speculate that all smart animals think the world was made for them. And if you’re a sauropod, that’s easy to believe. The earth is borne on the back of a giant sauropod earth mother, covered in a billion kinds of fleas. As the sun goes down, the iridescent ossicles, studded within the skin of the sky sauropod, wheel overhead. What smart sauropods think of their dumb cousins is a good question.”

Matt: “It might be cool to post the picture, Nemo’s thoughts on the picture, and further thoughts from some or all of the SV-POW!sketeers. We already have those thoughts from everyone but Mike.

“So, Darren and Nemo, can I post your thoughts? And Mike, do you have anything you’d like to have included?”

Darren: “You can post my thoughts if you want (yikes, I didn’t really polish them or add references, as I would if I were doing it properly), feel free to chop/change, add or subtract. I was inspired by stuff I’ve read on big-brained artiodactyls, primates and birds.”

Nemo: “Sure, please include all of my thoughts – I’d love to see this guy go up on SV POW.

“Darren’s points are very interesting and as usual they lead to even cooler possibilities. Could it be that these guys arose through an increase in social behavior, which eventually led to a self-sustaining cycle of increased parental care, fewer offspring and stronger social bonds. At one point, a lucky encounter with a richer food source could have given them a decisive advantage. Perhaps there could even be an anatomical adaptation supporting this social structure. Vomit milk for the offspring, perhaps?

“Someone on Deviantart also suggested that perhaps these intelligent sauropods could use their offspring in a hereditary system of “youth slavery” to have the smaller offspring perform more complicated tasks of manipulation, manufacture and so on. Work hard, and the kids “earn their vomit.” By the way, this reminds me – I keep hearing stuff about bipedal trackways left by juvenile sauropods. Is there any truth behind this?

“Elaborating more on the intelligent sauropods; I wonder what these guys’ version of agriculture would be like. Would it be fields and terraces, or a generation-long semi-migratory habit of leaving some areas fallow and alternating between different realms? Or would they just demolish everything aside from their food trees?”

Darren: “Luis Rey, John Conway and I were talking about these tracks when we met in London a few weeks ago. I wouldn’t be totally bowled over with surprise if someone were to demonstrate bipedality in diplodocids – but bipedality where the body and tail are pretty much horizontal and the forelimbs are just hovering above the ground. This is what pangolins do: it’s probably an accidental effect of having such a heavy-ass tail, and the animals do it because they can: they’re pre-adapted for it, with particularly strong hindlimbs, well reinforced pelvis, shortened forelimbs etc. And bipedal walking has been suggested before for diplodocids: Emily Buchholtz argued that small forelimb nerves indicated ‘weak’ forelimbs… leading Greg Paul to propose bipedality. So, yeah, in principle I don’t think it that ridiculous.

“However….

“The tracks are supposed to show wide gait, and (IIRC) running behaviour. This makes me think that misinterpretation is the more likely explanation.”

Mike: “Holy poop! Nemo has independently reinvented the Nourishing Vomit Of Eucamerotus hypothesis! (Hereafter the NVOE hypothesis.) No matter, though — my Tet Zoo comment of a couple of years ago establishes publication precedence :-)”

[Exeunt all, pursued by bear.]

That brings us up to this morning, and to this post.

The ‘youth slavery’ bit got me thinking. We tend to think of words like “nurturing” and “loving” when we think of extensive parental care. But maybe it ain’t necessarily so. What if Brontosapiens evolved a big brain and intelligence with no decrease in its reproductive output, compared to its ancestors? Parental care might mean, “while you’re overseeing their labor, make sure that at least some of these worthless little bastards survive to adulthood”, not “lavish each child with love and attention”. That’s not the route taken by cetaceans and anthropoids, but then almost any mammal is radically K-selected by sauropod standards, especially the big, non-rodenty types. I don’t think that intelligence and R-selection are a priori incompatible; how about cephalopods?

In the entire racial memory of Brontosapiens, there might never have been a time when offspring were not expendable. Brontosapiens parents might be fairly ruthless about culling the unfit from their immense clutches. Cannibalism would probably be rampant, both of adults on their offspring and of juveniles on hatchlings (in fact, I wonder if that was true of real-world sauropods). By the time the few survivors reached adulthood, they would have to be cunning, nefarious, backstabbing, conspiratorial monsters. Much like the Prador of Neal Asher’s Polity novels, or going back a bit further, the Tharks of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom. Although the Tharks, at least, are not R-selected, producing only one egg each breeding season. The hatchlings are raised communally and without affection because the Tharks are degenerate barbarians, not for strictly biological reasons, and the poor treatment of the young is one of the factors reinforcing their low state. I wonder if Burroughs was taking a dig at Plato’s Republic there?

All right, now I’m speculating about imaginary beings that aren’t even sauropods, so I’d best close. Many thanks to Nemo for thinking this up, inviting us to comment, and giving permission to post his thoughts. The comment field is open; let’s keep it rolling.Update (an hour or two later)

Nemo has kindly given us permission to upload the ultra-high-resolution version of his artwork, so here it is (greyscale JPEG, 1.14 Mb, 8859 x 2126 pixels.)