We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper.

Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest.

At the end of October, I submitted a paper that’s been hanging over me for a couple of years. I’ve been in the habit of tracking nearly all my submissions since I started out in palaeontology, it happens that this one is number 50 in the list.

Sobia “helping” Brian Engh draw Ornatops . I’ve written here before about Donald Glut’s The New Dinosaur Dictionary and the looooong shadow it cast over my adolescence.

Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer.

Here’s a funny thing I hadn’t given much thought to until recently: virtually all journals, even the born-digital variety, have pages in portrait mode for easy printing on 8.5×11 or A4 paper. And many offer a column-width option for figures.

Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total.

The Rebor model of Saurophaganax “Notorious BIG Jungle Variant”, photo from the Big Bad Toy Store. The SVP 2024 abstract book dropped earlier this week. You can download it here.

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.