The largest dinosaurs had individual cells more than 30 meters long. How did such things develop? Read on! Illustration from Wedel (2012: fig. 2). Here’s something that’s been in the works for a while: a popular article in Scientific American on stretch growth of axons in large, fast-growing animals: Smith, Douglas H., Rodgers, Jeffrey M., Dollé, Jean-Pierre, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022.

This is the first 3D print of a dinosaur bone that I ever had access to: the third caudal vertebra of MWC 8028, the ‘new’ Haplocanthosaurus specimen from Snowmass, Colorado (Foster and Wedel 2014, Wedel et al. 2021). I’ve been carrying this thing around since 2018. It’s been an aid to thought.

Years ago, when I was young and stupid, I used to read papers containing phylogenetic analyses and think, “Oh, right, I see now, Euhelopus is not a mamenchisaurid after all, it’s a titanosauriform”. In other words, I believed the result that the computer spat out.

UPDATE: Y’all came through! I’m very happy to announce that Vicki’s scholarship is fully funded, and we’ll be able to give out the first scholarship in the spring of 2023 — and every year thereafter. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

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 […]

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.