As noted in the last post, Matt and I are off to spend a week at the Carnegie Museum from 11th-15th March. We expect to see many, many fascinating specimens there: far more than we’ll be able to do proper work on in the five days we have.

Hot news! Matt and I will be spending the week of 11th-15th March at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh: the home of the world’s two most definitive sauropods!

Thanks to a comment from long-time reader Andrew Stuck, I realised he is also the tweeter @dinodadreviews, who pointed us to Xenoposeidon in a kids’ book. Now, a review on his website of Ted Rechlin‘s comic-book Jurassic has pointed me to what I think is the first depiction of the BRONTOSMASH!

Darren covered this briefly on the Scientific American version of Tetrapod Zoology, but the photos seem to have gone down and who knows how much longer any of that stuff will be up. Plus, he had other things to discuss, so the story has never been told in its entirety. This happened back in April, 2014.

Cool new paper out today by Yara Haridy and colleagues, describing the oldest known osteosarcoma in the vertebrate fossil record. The growth in question is on the proximal femur of the Triassic stem turtle Pappochelys.

Sorry for the short notice, but I just wanted to let you all know: Today is Academic-Led Publishing Day, which the official website describes as “a global digital event to foster discussions about how members of the scholarly community can develop and support academic-led publishing initiatives”. More informally, it’s about how we can throw off […]

I was delighted today to see a tweet from dinodadreviews: https://twitter.com/dinodadreviews/status/1086494527345623040 (Here is it, archived, in case it goes away for any reason): Another kid’s book featuring @MikeTaylor’s baby, Xenoposeidon! Seen in this “#Alphasaurs” book as its old brachiosaurus interpretation, I love the “X-ray” flap showing the approximate location of its one known bone!

Birds have little blobs of tissue sticking out on either side of the spinal cord in the lumbosacral region (solid black arrow in the image above). These are the accessory lobes of Lachi, and they are made up of mechanosensory neurons and glycogen-rich glial cells (but they are not part of the glycogen body, that’s […]

In short, no. I discussed this a bit in the first post of the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga, but it deserves a more thorough unpacking, so we can put this dumb idea to bed once and for all.

I planned to post this last spring but I never got around to it. I think I have a mental block about discussing the glycogen body.

Ray Wilhite posted this gorgeous image on a Facebook thread, and we’re re-posting it here with his permission. It’s taken from a poster that Ray co-authored (Roberts et al. 2016). We’re looking here at a coronal cross-section of a hen (age not specified), with anterior to the left.