Utahraptor is a “giant” dromaeosaurid from Utah, described by Kirkland et al. (1993). Famously, its existence was part of the reason that the people making Jurassic Park felt at liberty to make their “Velociraptor” individuals not only much bigger than the turkey-sized Velociraptor proper, but also than than sheep-sized Deinonychus.

As all good SV-POW! regulars will know, Elmer S. Riggs published the name Brachiosaurus altothorax in a short (but not trival) 1903 paper (Riggs 1903) and followed it up with a proper descriptive monograph (Riggs 1904) that had several useful plates. I’ve never seen a real copy of the latter (or indeed the former), so for the last quarter-century I’ve made do with various low-quality photocopies and scans.

Last night I took some boxes out to our recycling bin, and as I was walking along the back fence I did a double-take — I’d walked within a couple of feet of this opossum before I knew it was there. It was so close that if I hadn’t been worried about either scaring it or getting bitten, I could easily have reached out and petted it like a cat. We both froze, and I whipped out my phone and started taking pictures.

My talk (Taylor et al. 2023) from this year’s SVPCA is up! The talks were not recorded live. But while it was fresh in my mind, I did a screencast of my own, and posted it on YouTube (CC By). For the conference, I spoke very quickly and omitted some details to squeeze it into a 15-minute slot. In this version, I go a bit slower and make some effort to ensure it’s intelligible to an intelligent layman. That’s why it runs 21 minutes.

Here’s Mike with the cast dorsal vertebra of Argentinosaurus that’s on display at the LACM. I tried to get myself equidistant from both Mike and the vert when I took the photo, but even I couldn’t quite believe it when I looked at it on my laptop.

Back into 2019, when Matt and I visited the Carnegie Museum, we were struck by how different the necks of juvenile and adult Tyrannosaurus rex individuals are. In particular, the juvenile individual known as Jane has a slender and amost fragile-looking neck compared with the monstrously robust neck of its adult counterpart.

I popped into my local Michaels arts-n-crafts store today to see what Halloween goodies they had. One trend I can definitely get behind is the rise of anatomical oddities and cabinets of curiosities as Halloween decor. A lot of what gets marketed in this space is not my thing, like decorative skulls with snakes or butterflies or whatever. I don’t hate these;

That’s FMNH PR 25107, better known as a the holotype of Brachiosaurus altithorax — the biggest known dinosaur at the time of its description (Riggs 1903) and still for my money one of the most elegant, along with its buddy and one-time genus-mate Giraffatitan brancai . I had a spare morning in Chicago two Tuesday ago, and Bill Simpson (collection manager of fossil vertebrates at the Field Museum) managed to fit it a collections

I have often lamented that there are so very few photos of the Field Museum’s Brachiosaurus mount from that brief six years — 1993 to 1999 — when it was the centrepiece of the main hall. It seems to have been kicked out just a year or two too early to get captured by numerous digital cameras.

For reals, tho, Megatherium , why do you even?   doi:10.59350/6meje-8zj35

Most dinosaurs are elegant animals. Tyrannosaurs are elegant biting machines. Chasmosaurs are elegent. Brachiosaurs are hella elegant. Even ankylosaurs have their own robust elegance. And then there’s Camptosaurus . Why do you have to be so lumpen? What’s your head doing down there? What the heck are your ilia doing up there? What are they even supposed to be, TV aerials?