Oh, hey, so you know how the most tedious thing you can ever hear is someone recounting one of their dreams? I want to tell you about a dream I had last night.
We’re way late to this party, but better late than never I guess. Wu et al. (2013) described Xinjiangtitan shanshanesis as a new mamenchisaurid from the Middle Jurassic of China.
Early in my 2015 preprint on the incompleteness of sauropod necks, I wrote “Unambiguously complete necks are known from published account of only six species of sauropod, two of which are species of the same genus”, and listed them.
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We’ve noted many times over the years how inconsistent pneumatic features are in sauropod vertebra. Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and even between the sides of individual vertebrae.
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It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? {.size-large .wp-image-18254 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“18254” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2021/01/15/hey-look-sauropod-vertebrae/cm-diplo-and-apato-compared/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/cm-diplo-and-apato-compared.jpg” orig-size=“1800,2103” comments-opened=“1”
This is a very belated follow-up to “Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on”, and it’s about how to turn Step 2, “Learn lots of stuff”, into concrete progress. I’m putting it here, now, because I frequently get asked by students about how to get started in research, and I’ve been sending them the same advice for a while.
This beautiful image is bird 52659 from Florida Museum, a green heron Butorides virescens , CT scanned and published on Twitter.