Windpipe and lungs in pink, air sacs in teal. Steps 1 and 3 happen at the same time — one breath of air is moving through the lungs and into the air sacs in back (1) at the same time as an earlier breath of air is moving out of the lungs and into the air sacs up front (3). Steps 2 and 4 happen at the same time as well — the air sacs in back are blowing air through the lungs (2) while the air sacs in front are blowing air out the windpipe (4).

Last time, we looked briefly at my new paper Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted (Taylor 2022). As hinted at in that post, this paper had a difficult and protracted genesis.

Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of Diplodocus?

This is super cool: my friend and lead author on the new saltasaur pneumaticity paper, Tito Aureliano, made a short (~6 min) video about the fieldwork that Aline Ghilardi and Marcelo Fernandes and their team — many of whom are authors on the new paper — have been doing in Brazil, and how it led […]

Posterior dorsal vertebra of the Upper Cretaceous nanoid saltasaurid LPP-PV-0200. Three-dimensional reconstruction from CT scan in left lateral view ( A ). Circle and rectangle show sampling planes and the respective thin sections are in ( B , C ). ce centrum, ns neural spine, pn pneumatopore, poz postzygaphophysis, prz prezygapophysis.

Here’s another “blogging this so I can stop retyping it in emails to students” post.  Relevant to all anatomy practical exams: Every time you approach a cadaver/station, get your orientation down first.

Science doesn’t always get done in the right order. In the course of the research for my paper with Mike this past spring, “Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaur so variable?”, published in Qeios in January, I had a couple of epiphanies.

As I was clearing out some old documents, I stumbled on this form from 2006: This was back when Paul Upchurch’s dissertation, then only 13 years old, contained much that still unpublished in more formal venues, notably the description of what was then “Pelorosaurus” becklesii.

Back in June, I saw a series of tweets by sculptor and digital artist Ruadhrí Brennan, showing off the work he’d been doing on sculpting brachiosaurid skulls: Giraffatitan, Brachiosaurus (based on the Felch Quarry skull USNM 5730) and Europasaurus.

FMNH P13018 with me for scale. Photo by Holly Woodward. Some of the Burpee Museum folks and PaleoFest speakers visited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago after the 2020 ‘Fest. I hadn’t been there since 2012, and a lot had changed. More on that in future posts, maybe.

Back in May, Amy Schwartz posted a photo of a starling that shethat had ringed that morning: Impressed by the subtlety of the coloration, I wondered what would happen if I increased the colour saturation.