Left to right: alligator, beaver, black bear, armadillo, cat, ostrich. I know, the archosaurs aren’t mammals, and the alligator isn’t even a skull. But if you can’t have a lounge lizard crash your mammal skull party, what are you even doing with your life? Not pictured: about four rabbit skulls I forgot I had boxed up, plus a couple of turtles (yeah, yeah) sitting on a friend’s desk, in their locked office.

These are out as I consider how to reorganise my office. The pig skull came from a hog-roast, and was very crumbly by the time I had prepped it out. It’s subsequently had an accident when it fell off a loudspeaker in my youngest son’s room, so it’s not the pig it once was.

Many aspects of scholarly publishing are presently in flux. But for most journals the process of getting a paper published remains essentially the same as decades ago, the main change being that documents are sent electronically rather than by post.

Windpipe and lungs in pink, air sacs in teal. Steps 1 and 3 happen at the same time — one breath of air is moving through the lungs and into the air sacs in back (1) at the same time as an earlier breath of air is moving out of the lungs and into the air sacs up front (3). Steps 2 and 4 happen at the same time as well — the air sacs in back are blowing air through the lungs (2) while the air sacs in front are blowing air out the windpipe (4).

Last time, we looked briefly at my new paper Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted (Taylor 2022). As hinted at in that post, this paper had a difficult and protracted genesis.

Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of Diplodocus?

This is super cool: my friend and lead author on the new saltasaur pneumaticity paper, Tito Aureliano, made a short (~6 min) video about the fieldwork that Aline Ghilardi and Marcelo Fernandes and their team — many of whom are authors on the new paper — have been doing in Brazil, and how it led […]

Posterior dorsal vertebra of the Upper Cretaceous nanoid saltasaurid LPP-PV-0200. Three-dimensional reconstruction from CT scan in left lateral view ( A ). Circle and rectangle show sampling planes and the respective thin sections are in ( B , C ). ce centrum, ns neural spine, pn pneumatopore, poz postzygaphophysis, prz prezygapophysis.

Here’s another “blogging this so I can stop retyping it in emails to students” post.  Relevant to all anatomy practical exams: Every time you approach a cadaver/station, get your orientation down first.

Science doesn’t always get done in the right order. In the course of the research for my paper with Mike this past spring, “Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaur so variable?”, published in Qeios in January, I had a couple of epiphanies.

As I was clearing out some old documents, I stumbled on this form from 2006: This was back when Paul Upchurch’s dissertation, then only 13 years old, contained much that still unpublished in more formal venues, notably the description of what was then “Pelorosaurus” becklesii.