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.
White rami are usually thicker than gray rami, and sometimes they are visibly different in color, but they are always the more lateral connections between the sympathetic chain and the intercostal nerves, and the ones you’ll see first when you peel off the parietal pleura.
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.
Most regular readers will know about DinoCon, a two-day semi-technical/semi-popular conference being run by SV-POW!’s own Darren Naish. (Darren is very much a silent partner here, and is much better known for his own blog Tetrapod Zoology, and of course for his technical work.) The first ever DinoCon will be this summer — Saturday 16th & Sunday 17th August at the University of Exeter.
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.
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.
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;
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:10.2992/007.091.0104
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.
This seems to have gone under the radar: Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy. It’s a memo from Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH (the United States’ National Institutes of Health): Well, this is tremendous news. The NIH is the biggest single funder of health research in the USA, and making all the work that it funds immediately open access is a huge win.
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.