I am co-authoring a manuscript that, among other things, tries to trace the history of the molds made by the Carnegie Museum in the early 1900s, from which they cast numerous replica skeletons of the Diplodocus carnegii mount (CM 84, CM 94, CM 307 and other contributing specimens). This turns out to be quite a mystery, and I have become fascinated by it. Below is the relevant section of the manuscript as it now stands.

I was in the Oklahoma panhandle in late June for fieldwork in the Morrison with Anne Weil and her crew at the Homestead Quarry. It’s always a fun trip, in part because we see a lot of wildlife out there.

We have many times been in the position of having the reference for a paper and wanting to find the full text. But I think this is a first: I have the full text of a paper, and I want to find the reference!

One of the benefits of being me is that my friends often make me cool dino-themed stuff for my birthday (f’rinstance). This year, it was this dinosaur dig cake from my friend Jenny Adams.

I’ve been in contact recently with Matt Lamanna, Associate Curator in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History — which is obviously the best job in the world.

We’ve shown you the Apatosaurus louisae holotype mounted skeleton CM 3018 several times: shot from the hip, posing with another massive vertebrate, photographed from above, and more. Today we bring you a world first: Apatosaurus from below. Scroll and enjoy! Obviously there’s a lot of perspective distortion here.

Yes, we’ve touched on a similar subject in a previous tutorial, but today I want to make a really important point about writing anything of substance, whether it’s a scientific paper, a novel or the manual for a piece of software. It’s this: you have to actually do the work. And the way you do that is by first doing a bit of the work, then doing a bit more, and iterating until it’s all done.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we like to show you iconic mounted skeletons from unusual perspectives. Here’s one: Apatosaurus louisae holotype CM 3018, mounted skeleton in the public gallery of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History: head, neck, torso and hip in right posterolateral view. Photograph by Matt Wedel, 12th March 2019 (my birthday!) Oh, man, I love that museum. And I love that specimen.

I have a new article out in the Journal of Data and Information Science (Taylor 2022), on a subject that will be familiar to long-time readers.

Long-time readers may recall that back in 2009, I was quote-mined in the television documentary series Clash of the Dinosaurs (1, 2, 3). Turns out, such misrepresentations are not that uncommon, and now there’s a whole feature-length documentary about the problem, titled Science Friction . The trailer is above, and the film’s homepage is here. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime Video and on Tubi (maaaybe for free?

I have long intended to write a paper entitled Why Elephants Are So Small, as a companion piece to Why Giraffes Have Short Necks (Taylor and Wedel 2013). I’ve often discussed this project with Matt, usually under the acronym WEASS, and its substance has come up in the previous post, and especially Mickey Mortimer’s comment: That is exactly what the WEASS project was supposed to consist of: a list of many candidate limitations on how big animals