I was back in Utah the week before last, looking for monsters with Brian Engh and Jessie Atterholt. It was a successful hunt – more about that another time. We made a run to Fruita, Colorado, to visit Dinosaur Journey.

This is SUSA 515, a partial skeleton of Camarasaurus on display in the Museum of Moab. (SUSA stands for Southeastern Utah Society of Arts & Sciences.) It was described by John Foster in 2005. I like this thing.

Caudal vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus priscus (formerly H. utterbacki ) CM 879 in right lateral view, from Hatcher (1903: plate 2). You know how you’ll be doing an image search for some vertebrate fossil and you’ll get a page full of SV-POW!

Lots of museums have some version of this, but this is the nicest one I’ve seen myself. Just back from the field. Will post photos soon. Putting this up to meet the weekly posting requirement.

Left: Xenoposeidon proneneukos holotype NHMUK PV R2095 in dorsal view (anterior to top), from Taylor (2018: figure 1A). Right: FIFA World Cup 2018 logo. You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence. References Taylor, Michael P. 2018. Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur. PeerJ 6 :e5212.

I’m delighted to announce the publication today of my new paper “Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur”. This is the peer-reviewed version, in my favourite journal PeerJ, of the manuscript that became available as a preprint eight months ago — which was in turn a formalisation of a blog-post from 2015.

The most complete caudal vertebra of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus (Foster and Wedel 2014) in right lateral view: specimen photo, CT scout, 3D model, 3D print at 50% scale.

It’s been a bit since my last update. That’s how things go on the road. We got in some time for exploration and a little prospecting. We also had to close the quarry.

Ripple rock. Not from the Morrison, but from the overlying Dakota – Lower Cretaceous. Now this is from the Morrison. My son, London, spotted this tiny tooth of a Jurassic croc while working in the quarry. That’s my thumb and London’s index finger for scale. London’s index finger again, pointing at a different Morrison tooth.

Clouds over Black Mesa. Baby spadefoot toad, with my index finger for scale. Someone was here before us. Even though Black Mesa is best known for its Morrison exposures and giant Jurassic dinosaurs, there are Triassic rocks here, too, which have produced both body fossils and tracks, including these.

We all know that apatosaurines have big honkin’ cervical ribs (well, most of us know that). But did they also have unusually large neural spines? The question occurred to me the other day when I was driving home from work.