Today sees the publication of the monster enantiornithine Mirarce eatoni (“Eaton’s wonderful winged messenger”) from the Kaiparowits Formation of Utah, by Jessie Atterholt, Howard Hutchinson, and Jingmai O’Connor. Not my critter, not my story, but it is SV-POW!-adjacent. (Just here for the paper?

The more I look at the problem of how flexible sauropod necks were, the more I think we’re going to struggle to ever know their range of motion It’s just too dependent on soft tissue that doesn’t fossilise.

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I wasted some time today making memes. I blame the Paleontology Coproliteposting group on Facebook.

In a comment on the last post, Mike wrote, “perhaps the pneumaticity was intially a size-related feature that merely failed to get unevolved when rebbachisaurs became smaller”. {.wp-image-6447 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-6447” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6447” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/06/28/hot-sauropod-news-part-1-rampant-pneumaticity-in-saltasaurines/caudal-pneumaticity-in-saltasaurines-cerda-et-al-2012-fig-1/”

An important paper is out today: Carpenter (2018) names Maraapunisaurus , a new genus to contain the species “ Amphicoelias ” fragillimus , on the basis that it’s actually a rebbachisaurid rather than being closely related to the type species Amphicoelias altus . {.size-full .wp-image-15433 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-15433” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15433”

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A while back — near the start of the year, in fact — Szymon Górnicki interviewed me by email about palaeontology, alternative career paths, open access, palaeoart, PeerJ, scholarly infrastructure, the wonder of blogging, and how to get started learning about palaeo. He also illustrated it with this caricature of me, nicely illustrating our 2009 paper on neck posture.

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{.size-large .wp-image-15375 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15375” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2018/10/16/sacral-pneumatization-in-sauropods-was-complex/amnh-516-diplodocus-sacrum-osborn-1904-fig-3/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/amnh-516-diplodocus-sacrum-osborn-1904-fig-3.png” orig-size=“1500,2350” comments-opened=“1”