Because I’ve worked a lot on the anatomy and evolution of air-filled bones in sauropod dinosaurs, I’ve spent most of my career looking at images like this: …and thinking about images like this: Turns out, that’s pretty good practice for fossil prospecting in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation, where we frequently find […]
Heinrich Mallison sent me this amazing photo, which he found unattributed on Facebook: Infuriatingly, I’ve not been able to track down an original source for this: searching for the text just finds a bunch of reposts on meme sites, and Google’s reverse image search just reports a bunch of hits on Reddit: The line-drawing shows […]
Over the past few years I’ve dropped hints here and there about the work I’ve been doing in the Morrison Formation of Utah with Brian Engh, John Foster, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, Jessie Atterholt, and Thuat Tran.
Amazing diagram of the path of the vagus nerve and its branches in the neck, thorax, and abdomen, from Wilson-Pauwels et al. (1988). The gonads aren’t drawn here, but they do receive vagal innervation.
A student wrote to me to ask where I got the motivation to prep my anatomy lectures. Here’s what I sent back.
Otters are a “near-threatened” species in the UK, so it’s a tragedy when one is killed by a car. That said, when a roadkill otter is spotted by a friend and delivered to me five days after Christmas, that goes some way to redeeming the tragedy.
In lieu of any new science today, have some memes, and a wonderful day! A timeless classic. In case you’re wondering, that’s “rolling on the beach laughing my telson off”. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 445 million years, about twice as long as mammals, turtles, and dinosaurs.
Since 2015 I’ve been working in the Morrison Formation of Utah with Brian Engh, John Foster, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, and more recently Jessie Atterholt and Thuat Tran.
Reconstructed right forelimb of Brachiosaurus at Dinosaur Journey in Fruita, Colorado, with me for scale, photo by Yara Haridy.
When I visited Dinosaur National Monument in October with Brian Engh and Yara Haridy, we spent a decent amount of time checking out DNM 28, a skull and associated bits of Camarasaurus.
From Will’s Skull Page, here. Here’s a skull of a wild boar. Note the loooong face, practically a straight line from the tip of the snout to the top of the back of the head. We shall now proceed through a series of pig skulls with increasingly steep foreheads. From the UCL Museums and Collections blog, here. Some domestic pigs have a longish snout and nearly straight forehead, like their wild forebears.