I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: Here is the “solution” it suggested: That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Here’s the screenshot if you don’t believe me: This is a particularly lovely demonstration of the emptiness of LLMs. It recognises the words from the classic river-crossing puzzle, and generates a sequence of words resembling those to a solution. But they are entirely devoid of meaning.

This one hardly needs making. I found it by accident when we roasted a chicken this Sunday. As we were tearing the carcass apart like a pack of hyaenas, I noticed that one of the wings had a nice, distinct thumb claw.

Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: *FACEPALM* How we’ve gone almost 17 years without posting about a hypothetical sauropod dissection is quite beyond my capacity. I am also contractually obligated to remind you that the TV show “Inside Nature’s Giants” shows dissections of a whale, elephant, giraffe, tiger, anaconda, giant squid, etc., so it’s probably the closest we’ll ever get.

It is a measure of how scattershot our blogging is that we haven’t mentioned Adam Mastroianni or his blog Experimental History before now.

[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in early 2020, but…you know how that particular story turned out.

Trunk vertebra of a tuna ( Thunnus ), OMNH RE 0042, showing paired bony spinal cord supports Here’s a grab-bag of follow-up stuff related to our new paper on neural canal ridges in dinos (Atterholt et al. 2024, see the previous post and sidebar page). Neural canal ridges, or bony spinal cord supports? I got into the habit of calling the inwardly-projecting bony prominences in the neural canals of sauropods and other

Bony spinal cord supports (arrows) in caudal vertebrae of several specimens of Camarasaurus . (a) Right lateral view of neural canal with broken vertebral arch, clearly exposing a bony spinal cord support (MWC 5496). (b) Anterolateral oblique view of the neural canal of the third caudal vertebra (SUSA 515) with a broken vertebral arch displaying a bony spinal cord support.

If you live within striking distance of Norman, Oklahoma, and you have some time free next Monday and Tuesday, August 26 and 27, and you care enough about dinosaurs to be on SV-POW! reading this, then I have good news for you.

The world is full of wonderful animals, both extant and extinct, and they all have names.

Last time we talked about the evident hijacking of the PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. No-one seemed to know what had happened or how. I managed to track down Andre J. Veldmeijer, who was involved with the PalArch journals a while back.

Back in our annus mirabilis of 2013, one of the Wedel-and-Taylor papers was Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications (Wedel and Taylor 2013). We this published in PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which we chose because it was a small, open-access journal in our field that was […]