I spent last week bombing around Utah and western Colorado with Dave Hone, who was over from England to visit those states for the first time in his life. We did some fieldwork out at Brachiosaur Gulch and visited quite a few museums and quarries around the Dinosaur Diamond, in a sort of mini-recapitulation of my 2016 Sauropocalypse with Mike.

Prompted by a post on Mastodon (which, like all Mastodon posts, I can no longer find), I asked ChatGPT to tell me about my own papers. The response started out well but quickly got much worse. I will indent my comments on its response. Q. What are some articles written by Michael P. Taylor? A. Michael P. Taylor is a vertebrate paleontologist and open science advocate.

New paper out today: Tito Aureliano, Aline M. Ghilardi, Rodrigo T. Müller, Leonardo Kerber, Marcelo A. Fernandes, Fresia Ricardi-Branco, Mathew J. Wedel. 2023. The origin of an invasive air sac system in sauropodomorph dinosaurs.

Last night a thought occurred to me, and I wrote to Matt: If birds had gone extinct 66 Mya along with all the other dinosaurs, would it ever have occurred to us that they had flow-through lungs?

This is one of those posts where the title pretty much says it all, but here’s the detailed version.

Our old friend Ray Wilhite sent us this glorious photo of a horse neck that he dissected recently, with permission to post here: The big yellow sheet at the top is the nuchal ligament, which in many mammals provides axial tension for the cervical vertebrae, and which has been hypothesized (e.g. by Alexander 1985:13) to have existed and provided similar support in at least some sauropods.

Here’s a cool photo of an apatosaur cervical in anterior view. This is from R. McNeill Alexander’s wonderful book Bones: The Unity of Form and Function , which was published in 1994.

I was going to write a bit more about my recent paper The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (seriously, go and read it, you’ll like it, it’s fun). But then something more urgent came up. And here it is! This is the work of our old friend Mark Witton, so we’ll let him explain it: Needless to say, we at SV-POW! are always big fans of the Sauropods Stomping Theropods theme in art.

Last time, I told you about my new paper, The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023), and finished up by saying this: “But Mike, you ask — how did you, a scientist, find yourself writing a history paper? It’s a good question, and one with a complicated answer. Tune in next time to find out!” Paper 1 The truth is, I never set out to write a history paper. My goal was

… and I’m guessing that if you read this blog, you like at least one of these things.

I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt. I discovered SMTM through its fascinating discussions of scurvy and citrus-fruit taxonomy.