I was googling around some photos, confirming to myself that turtles don’t have cervical ribs, when I stumbled across this monstrosity (and when I use that word I mean it as a compliment): Softshell turtle Trionyx spinifera , cervicodorsal transition in ventral view, anterior to right. Copyright © Mike Dodd, used by kind permission.

Just to wash our mouths out after all the theropod-related unpleasantness yesterday: What we’re seeing here, in glorious 3D, is the 7th cervical vertebrae of BYU 1252-18531.

Over on Mastodon (sign up, it’s great!), Jim Kirkland posted a baby Utahraptor caudal vertebrae for #FossilFriday. Here it is: And after a bit of virtual prep work: My first reaction was just “That’s pretty!“. My second, which I admit should have been my first, was “Wait a sec — how the heck do those things articulate?” The issue is that both the prezygs and the postzygs overhang the centrum by so much.

While I was thinking about Diplodocus atlas ribs, I was reminded of the ribs on the atlas of a diplodocine skull-and-three-cervicals exhibit that Matt and I saw at MOAL(*) back in the heady days of the Sauropocalypse. And that reminded me that I have other pairs of photos from the MOAL visit, which I took with the intention of making anaglyphs. like the one I did of the diplodocine.

Last time, I showed you a photo of the head and neck of the London Diplodocus and asked what was wrong. Quite a few of you got it right (including Matt when we were chatting, but I asked him not to give it away by posting a comment). The 100 SV-POW! dollars, with their cash value of $0.00, go to Orribec, who was the first to reply that the atlas (cervical 1) is upside-down.

Last Saturday I was at a wedding at Holy Trinity Brompton, a London church that is conveniently located a ten-minute stroll from the Natural History Museum. As I am currently working on a history paper concerning the Carnegie Diplodocus , I persuaded my wife, my eldest son and his fiancée to join me for a quick scoot around the “Dippy Returns” exhibition.

Alert readers probably noticed that I titled the first post in this series “Matt’s first megalodon tooth“, implying that there would be other megalodon teeth to follow. Here’s my second one.At first glance, this is a pretty jacked-up megalodon tooth. It is pocked with circular and ovoid craters, and has a big fat hole drilled right through it. Hardly collector grade!

In a paper that I’m just finishing up now, we want to include this 1903 photo of Carnegie Museum personnel: A few weeks ago I asked for help on Twitter in identifying the people shown here, and I got a lot of useful contributions.

Couple of fun things here. First, if you’d like to play with — or print — 3D models of megalodon teeth, there are a bunch of them on Sketchfab, helpfully curated by Thomas Flynn, the Cultural Heritage Lead there. As of this writing there are 24 meg teeth in the collection (link), and by my count 14 of them are downloadable, 11 for free and 3 for sale.

Something cool came in the mail today: a fossil tooth of a great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. The root is a bit eroded, but the enamel-covered crown is in great shape, and it’s almost exactly the same size as my cast tooth from a modern great white. I got this for a couple of reasons.

I got this thing a while back. I’d always wanted one, and it really does spark joy. First up: what should we call this critter?