Confession time: I have yet to find a satisfyingly regular and repeatable method for measuring neural canal diameters. A LOT of dinosaurian neural canals are not cylindrical but flare out on either end, like two trumpet bells set back-to-back.
Three weeks ago, I posted three colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” excavation at the Dry Mesa Quarry, provided by Tyler Holmes from an old dinosaur encyclopedia. Here’s the third one again: I wrote: This can’t be right.
I’ve now heard from several early-career folks some variant on this statement regarding manuscripts they intend to publish as papers: “I give the AI all my notes and it gives me a draft that isn’t perfect, but it’s easier to massage that draft into publishable shape than it would be to write it myself.” I […]
Long-time SV-POW! reader Tyler Holmes came across a book with the very un-searchable title “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” — I tried to find it in the Internet Archive, but there are waaay too many books of that name.
Back at the start of October I posted Necks: the lying liars that just keep lying, which included Coy Pearson’s beautiful photo of a Cooper’s hawk from behind, with its neck twisted a full 180 degrees to look at the camera.
Readers with good memories will remember that back in May last year I announced I would be one of the two participants in the plenary debate that closes the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.
A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1]. The subject line was: Your paper “NEURAL SPINE BIFURCATION…” is now an analogy. No; no, it’s not.
New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free: Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.
Two recent photo posts on Mastodon reminded me how much necks lie.
Just a quick update on the crowd-funding effort to publish the new diplodocoid volume as open-access papers at Palaeontologia Electronica.
Midnight in the museum In the yawning resonance Of empty space The great xylophone skeletons Play the lonely strains of Time Like cathedral organs Heralding the ends of ages. Time rushes on The final predator Implacable Like Dinichthys Cruising the crinoid beds Sounding one note: Everything dies.