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.

Skeletal reconstruction of Mirarce by Scott Hartman (Atterholt et al. 2018: fig. 19). Recovered bones in white, missing bones in gray. The humerus is 95.9mm long. Today sees the publication of the monster enantiornithine Mirarce eatoni (“Eaton’s wonderful winged messenger”) from the Kaiparowits Formation of Utah, by Jessie Atterholt, Howard Hutchinson, and Jingmai O’Connor.

The more I look at the problem of how flexible sauropod necks were, the more I think we’re going to struggle to ever know their range of motion It’s just too dependent on soft tissue that doesn’t fossilise.

The Sunday after SVP, Brian Engh and I visited the museum in Albuquerque. I was quite taken with the mounted T. rex. It’s waaaay more interesting and dynamic than any other T. rex mount I’ve seen.

This is not ‘Nam. This is Latin. There are rules. The term for a small growth off an organ or body is diverticulum, singular, or diverticula, plural. There are no diverticulae or God forbid diverticuli, no matter what you might read in some papers. Diverticuli is a word – it’s the genitive form of diverticulum.

I wasted some time today making memes. I blame the Paleontology Coproliteposting group on Facebook. Of course I started out by making fun of the most mockable sauropod. This one’s for you Cam-loving perverts out there. You know who you are.

In a comment on the last post, Mike wrote, “perhaps the pneumaticity was intially a size-related feature that merely failed to get unevolved when rebbachisaurs became smaller”. Or maybe pneumaticity got even more extreme as rebbachisaurids got smaller, which apparently happened with saltasaurines

An important paper is out today: Carpenter (2018) names Maraapunisaurus, a new genus to contain the species “Amphicoelias“ fragillimus, on the basis that it’s actually a rebbachisaurid rather than being closely related to the type species Amphicoelias altus. And it’s a compelling idea, as the illustration above shows.

In my recent visit to the LACM herpetology collection, I was interested to note that almost every croc, lizard, and snake vertebra I saw had a pair of neurovascular foramina on either side of the centrum, in “pleurocoel” position. You can see these in the baby Tomistoma tail, above.

A while back — near the start of the year, in fact — Szymon Górnicki interviewed me by email about palaeontology, alternative career paths, open access, palaeoart, PeerJ, scholarly infrastructure, the wonder of blogging, and how to get started learning about palaeo.

This is going to set new records for “almost too late to be worth posting”, but here goes. First up, this Wednesday evening, Oct.