Most regular readers will know about DinoCon, a two-day semi-technical/semi-popular conference being run by SV-POW!’s own Darren Naish. (Darren is very much a silent partner here, and is much better known for his own blog Tetrapod Zoology, and of course for his technical work.) The first ever DinoCon will be this summer — Saturday 16th & Sunday 17th August at the University of Exeter.
First, before the world drowns in madness, it’s a-QUILL-ops, like a quill pen. Not AWK-wuh-lops, like Aquafina. Second, I made good use of my recent birthday and went to the Lego store at the local mall.
The second trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth is out today, and there’s my baby at 1:35! I am completely certain that at some point the tide of Aquilops -themed merch will overwhelm my ability to keep up — not to mention your interest in keeping up with this blog — but for now I am happily in squee-land. Fortunately Mike is keeping the site turning over with some actual science content.
Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic Diplodocus around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich. The first nine were all mounted, and most still stand in their original museums. (The London cast has moved around a lot and currently resides in Coventry;
I’m really delighted today to announce the publication of my, and my co-authors’, new paper on the Carnegie Diplodocus : Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1) :55–91. doi:10.2992/007.091.0104
I realize that the titular statement is open to misinterpretation so let me head that off at the pass: I’m not saying this prescriptively, like you should learn anatomy to become a better person (you should learn anatomy because it’s accessible and it rules), or that knowing anatomy makes people better. I’m also not saying this distributively, like anatomists are better people than non-anatomists.
This seems to have gone under the radar: Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy. It’s a memo from Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH (the United States’ National Institutes of Health): Well, this is tremendous news. The NIH is the biggest single funder of health research in the USA, and making all the work that it funds immediately open access is a huge win.
This is our dog Eleanor. She’s a Great Pyrenees/German Shepherd mix, just over one year old. We rescued her last September — some heartless jerkbag had dumped her out out of a moving vehicle in a random neighborhood. Fortunately she was unhurt, but she needed a home, and here we are. I love her more than I love most people, and it’s only by deliberate exercise of will that I’ve waited this long to put any pictures of her up on this blog.
A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand. Two months ago, Stephen Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk’s activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society’s code of conduct.
Here’s a short post on another 5PVC presentation: Raber et al. (2025) on a musculoskeletal lesion in an apatosaur femur. At the Utah Field House in Vernal, there’s a partial skeleton of an apatosaur from just north of Dinosaur National Monument. It’s nicknamed the “Soft Sauropod” because the bone is softer than the matrix, which made preparation a bit of an adventure.
When our paper on neural canal ridges came out last year (Atterholt et al. 2024), I hoped that it would inspire other people to go peer inside neural canals and discover a lot more of them. My wish was granted, and quickly.