If you were curious about the Wedel et al. presentation on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress but didn’t attend the event, it is now preserved for posterity and freely available to the world as a PeerJ Preprint (as promised). Here’s the link.

Now that Matt and I have blogged various thoughts about how to orient vertebra (part 1, part 2, relevant digression 1, relevant digression 2, part 3) and presented a talk on the subject at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress, it’s time for us to strike while the iron is hot and write the paper.

Click to embiggen. Trust me. Last year about this time I wrote: The museum I was thinking about more than any other when I wrote that is the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City. I don’t get there every year, but I stop in as often as possible, and I make it more years than not. And yet, looking back through the archives I see that almost all of my posts about the Museum of Osteology came in a brief flurry five years ago. Shameful!

Nothing really new here, not like a new skull recon or anything. The original version I did for Farke et al. (2014) had the jaw articulated and closed. Then in 2017 I posted a version with the lower jaw disarticulated. Obviously what was needed was one with the lower jaw articulated and open.

The 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress is underway now, and will run through December 15. Mike and I have two presentations up: “What do we mean by the directions ‘cranial’ and ‘caudal’ on a vertebra?” by Mike and me, which consists of a video Mike made presenting a slide show that he put together.

Here’s a frozen pig head being hemisected with a band saw. The head in question, and the other bits we’ll get to later on in this post, both came from Jessie Atterholt’s Thanksgiving pig.

We’ve posted a lot here about how crazy the cervical vertebrae of apatosaurines are (for example: 1, 2, 3), and especially the redonkulosity of their cervical ribs.

Scholastica is a publishing platform that offers support for super-low-cost open-access journals such as Discrete Analysis, led by Tim Gowers.

What it says on the tin. This is a specimen from the UCMP comparative collection. I was just going to post this photo with zero commentary, but I can’t help myself.

Matt’s drawn my attention to a bizarre fact: despite 17 separate posts about Xenoposeidon on this blog (linked from here and here), we’ve never shown a decent scan of Lydekker’s (1893) original illustration of NHMUK PV R2095, the partial mid-to-posterior dorsal vertebra that since Taylor and Naish (2007) has been the holotype specimen of Xenoposeidon […]

Late last year I got tapped by the good folks at Capstone Press to write a dinosaur book for their Mind Benders series for intermediate readers. Now it’s out.