Mike and I are working on our respective talks for DinoCon 2025 — a timely concern, since Mike presents next Saturday and I’m on next Sunday. My talk will be an adapted and upgraded version of the keynote talk I gave at the Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference last summer.

A review of sorts, of questionable objectivity. Forty-eight minutes, so grab some popcorn and settle in. Or run screaming. Up to you!

DinoCon is right around the corner, the weekend of August 16-17. The speaker lineup looks fantastic, and the vendor lineup looks like it will execute a Chicxulub on my wallet. On the speaker side, I’m happy to see sauropods getting so much representation.

In Archie Carr’s encyclopedic “Handbook of Turtles: The Turtles of the United States, Canada, and Baja California”, first published in 1952, he quotes favorably and at length the observations of “Mrs. Knowlton” on the behavior of wood turtles (Clemmys insculpta) and box turtles (Terrapene carolina). The source given in the references is: Knowlton, Josphine Gibson.

Adam Mastroianni’s blog Experimental History is consistently fascinating. In a recent article on whether conversations end when people want them to, he makes this point, very much in passing: This is a brilliant insight, and it explains so much about what’s wrong with journal articles. When you’re balancing all six requirements, how are you ever going to write something that people are going to actually enjoy reading?

Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic The New Dinosaurs , which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press. Here’s the website, open for pre-orders (link); the book ships on August 11. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this absolute banger.

In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form: where the noun in question might be salt or wood or math or clouds or daydreaming or whatever. It’s not enough to write an engaging book on Topic X without somehow, by tortuously overreaching, making it the underpinning of life itself. If we ever do an SV-POW!

Ten years ago, almost to the day, Matt and I were having a conversation vie Google chat. We got onto the evergreen topic of scholarly publishing. Let’s ignore the somewhat dated references to Twitter and Skype, and listen in on those two starry-eyed youngsters … Matt : People will continue to publish papers (as currently understood) beyond the natural lifespan of the medium, because papers are easy to count.

This Saturday, July 19, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is hosting Aquilops Day.

Today sees the publication of what is, OK, an interesting paper on how the serrated trailing edge of the flippers of the ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus may have enabled it to generate less turbulence, enhancing its abilities as a stealth predator: Lindgren, Johan, Dean R. Lomax, Robert-Zoltán Szász, Miguel Marx, Johan Revstedt, Georg Göltz, Sven Sachs, Randolph G. De La Garza, Miriam Heingård, Martin Jarenmark, Kristina Ydström, Peter

I missed this paper (Yuan et al. 2024) when it came out last year, but my friend and colleague Jeremiah Scott brought it to my attention. The bit on nuchal sesamoids in shrews is so good and so weird that I’m just going to copy and paste it in its entirety.