On 22nd December 2020, I gave this talk (via Zoom) to Martin Sander’s palaeontology research group at the University of Bonn, Germany.

These things just catch my eye, I can’t help it. Left: Oddbins corkscrew, circa 1997. Right: left femur of Patagotitan mayorum , circa 100,000,000 BC. Note that the corkscrew features a distinct medially directed femoral head, the bulge in the lateral margin of the proximal portion that is characteristic of titanosaurs, and a straight shaft.

Darren has written a brief review of TetZooMCon, the online event that replaced the now traditional annual conference of Tetrapod Zoology.

I’m late to this party, but I want to say a few things about the recently announced €9,500 article-processing charge (APC) that Nature has introduced to make itself Plan-S compliant. The first thing is that a lot of people are quite understandably outraged by this very large fee. Good. They should be outraged.

It’s now 22 years since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote the classic document Cool URIs don’t change [1]. It’s core message is simple, and the title summarises it. Once an organization brings a URI into existence, it should keep it working forever.

Here are some blank diagrams I whipped up for drawing in spinal cord pathways. This one shows the whole cord, brainstem, thalamus, and cerebral cortex in coronal section, in cartoon form. It’s for drawing in ascending sensory and descending motor pathways, as shown in this office hours sketch.

When last I blogged about James Herrmann’s art, it was about some cool sculptures of dinosaurs that he had done for the Cincinnati Museum Center. I am particularly taken with the sculptures that are skeleton on one side, and fully-fleshed on the other side. Now he’s doing mammals, specifically Ice Age megafauna.

We’re currently in open access week, and one of the things I’ve noticed has been a rash of tweets of the form “I support #OpenAccess because …”. Here is a random collection. We support #OpenAccess because #OpenScience needs good infrastructures.

Altounian et al. (2015: fig 6). As has been discussed here before, the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) does not only innervate the larynx, but also parts of the esophagus and trachea (see this post, and in particular this comment). You can see that in this cadaver photo, in which the RLN is sending nice big visible branches into both the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. Why is it doing this?

Get your red-cyan glasses — you do have some, right? — and check out this glorious image. Best full-screen it, it’s worth seeing! And here is the lame 2D version for those of you who have still not spent 99 lousy cents on a pair of 3D glasses: What are we looking at here?

Last week, while Fiona and I were out walking, we noticed a decaying roadkill badger a bit over half a mile from our house. Yesterday we were out walking again, and we saw that it had decayed to the point where there was not much to the flesh at all.