Remember this broken Giraffatitan dorsal vertebra, which Janensch figured in 1950? It is not only cracked in half, anteroposteriorly, it’s also unfused.

Last Wednesday, May 9, Brian Engh and I bombed out to Utah for a few days of paleo adventures. Here are some highlights from our trip. We started at a Triassic tracksite on Thursday.

This is the second post in the “bird neural canals are weird” series (intro post here), and it covers the first of five expansions of the spinal cord or meninges in the lumbosacral regions of birds. The lumbosacral expansion of the spinal cord is not unique to birds and doesn’t require any special explanation.

It’s common to come across abstracts like this one, from an interesting paper on how a paper’s revision history influences how often it gets cited (Rigby, Cox and Julian 2018): Journal peer review lies at the heart of academic quality control.

Dorsal vertebra of a rhea from the LACM ornithology collection. Note the pneumatic foramina in the lateral wall of the neural canal. If you’ve been here for very long you know I have a bit of a neural canal fixation.

Here at SV-POW! we’re big fans of the way that animals’ neck skeletons are much more extended, and often much longer, than you would guess by looking at the complete animal, with its misleading envelope of flesh.

This will be a short and mostly navel-gaze-y collection of links. Back in November, 2016, I posted here about my “Twelve Steps to Infinity” article in Sky & Telescope magazine. That one covered 12 objects in the winter sky and corresponding events in Earth history when the light we see now left those objects.

Saw this gem back in the herpetology collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and thought, “Someone up and Beauchened a turtle head.” (My inner monologue is a tennis match between an arch language pedant and an unreconstructed hick with a penchant for folksy archaisms.) What a sweet mount – there should be […]

So, here’s a cool thing that happened at Norwescon. On Saturday afternoon, there was an autograph signing session.

At the 2011 sauropod gigantism symposium in Bonn, John Hutchinson gave a talk on biomechanics of large animals. At the end he showed a short video of a rhino running full-tilt, tripping, and literally flipping end over end. After the wipeout, the rhino got up and trotted off, apparently unhurt.

Here at SV-POW!, we’re just not having it. Photo by Liguo Li, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Also, because it’s only fair: Giant Irish Matt, to go with Giant Irish Mike.