The dawn of a new era: AMNH FR 34089, a caudal vertebra of the giant extinct croc Thecachampsa , backlit to show the neural canal ridges. This is not just my favorite specimen with NCRs, it’s one of my favorite images of any fossil ever. Photo by William Jude Hart. New paper out: Hart, W.J., Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First occurrences of neural canal ridges in Crocodylia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 70(4): 749–753.

We’ve written plenty about the problems with what is now ubiquitously called “artificial intelligence”: see for example These new “artificial intelligence” programs don’t know what they’re talking about, Another day, another catastrophic “AI” failure, If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well, What LLMs are really […]

Ha ha, I lied. Book Week will continue until morale improves. Mike has made the point to me more than once that there are papers I could and probably should write, but haven’t, because they’re things that I just assume everyone else knows.

I have been a fanboy of prominent animal physiologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen for a long time. I first encountered his papers back in the late 90s, working on my MS thesis at OU. I realized that vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods implied, among other things, that I had better get to reading about birds.

Drawing is how I understand things best, and it’s one of the ways I teach myself new subjects. My top advice for anyone wanting to be a paleontologist is “learn how to write” and “learn how to draw”, which really boil down to, “practice writing and drawing”. You only get better by doing.

I put these Book Week posts into sequence with a level of forethought about one notch above pure randomness, but a felicity emerged. It’s useful for me to cover The Last Days of the Dinosaurs after the previous three books, each for a particular reason.

Otherlands is unlike any other book I’ve encountered.

This book is squarely at the intersection of being an objectively great thing to have in the world, and a subjectively great thing to have on my gaming shelf. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 16, and running Dungeons &

This one starts with a personal note. I’ve never blogged much about the media whirlwind that accompanied the announcement of Sauroposeidon. Rich Cifelli and I did tons of interviews, separately and together, for local and national television news, newspapers, and magazines.

I would like this book just for being funny. I would like this book just for being well-illustrated. I would like this book just for covering lots of different dinosaurs and other Mesozoic critters, some familiar and many others only recently described, from more dinosaur-bearing formations than I was previously familiar with.

I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps me get the photos, notes, and measurements that I want.