I got an email a couple of days ago from Maija Karala, asking me a question I’d not come across before (among several other questions): how much poop did Argentinosaurus produce in a day? I don’t recall this question having been addressed in the literature, though if anyone knows different please shout. Having thought about it a little, I sent the following really really vague and hand-wavy response.

Remember this broken Giraffatitan dorsal vertebra, which Janensch figured in 1950?

Last Wednesday, May 9, Brian Engh and I bombed out to Utah for a few days of paleo adventures. Here are some highlights from our trip.

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It’s common to come across abstracts like this one, from an interesting paper on how a paper’s revision history influences how often it gets cited (Rigby, Cox and Julian 2018): This tells us that a larger number of revisions leads to (or at least is correlated with) an increased citation-count. Interesting! Immediately, I have two questions, and I bet you do, too: 1. What is the size of the effect?

If you’ve been here for very long you know I have a bit of a neural canal fixation.

Here at SV-POW! we’re big fans of the way that animals’ neck skeletons are much more extended, and often much longer, than you would guess by looking at the complete animal, with its misleading envelope of flesh.

This will be a short and mostly navel-gaze-y collection of links.

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At the 2011 sauropod gigantism symposium in Bonn, John Hutchinson gave a talk on biomechanics of large animals. At the end he showed a short video of a rhino running full-tilt, tripping, and literally flipping end over end. After the wipeout, the rhino got up and trotted off, apparently unhurt.