Two and a half years ago, I posted a glorious hemisected hen, taken (with permission) from a poster by Roberts et al. 2016, and supplied by Ray Wilhite, best known in this parish for his work on sauropod appendicular material. At the end of that post, I blithely promised “More from this poster in a subsequent post!”, and then — predictably — forgot all about it. My apologies.

On Thursday, I took the family to the Cotswolds Wildlife Park, a rather lovely zoo just over an hour away from us in Burford, Oxfordshire. Somehow I’d never even heard of this place until we passed a sign for it on the A417 a few weeks ago.

In mammals — certainly the most-studied vertebrates — regional differentiation of the vertebral column is distinct and easy to spot. But things aren’t so simple with sauropods.

Various Internet rumours have suggested that the Archbishop is a super-giant sauropod one third larger than the mounted Giraffatitan specimen MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN SII). This is incorrect.

Here’s a pretty cool image: Plate 7 from Lull (1919), showing the partial skeleton of Barosaurus YPM 429 (above), compared to the much more complete skeleton of Diplodocus CM84/94 (below). I’ve been pretty familiar with that Barosaurus skeleton diagram since I was about 9 years old, because it’s in Donald Glut’s New Dinosaur Dictionary , which I’ve written about here before.

Two days ago, I wrote about what seemed to be an instance of peer review gone very wrong. I’ve now heard from two of the four authors of the paper and from the reviewer in question — both by email, and in comments on the original post — and it’s apparent that I misinterpreted the situation.

THIS POST IS RETRACTED. The reasons are explained in the next post. I wish I had never posted this, but you can’t undo what is done, especially on the Internet, so I am not deleting it but marking it as retracted. I suggest you don’t bother reading on, but it’s here if you want to.

This is the second in a series of posts on our new paper about the expanded neural canals in the tail vertebrae of the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus. I’m not going to talk much about Haplo in this post, though.

New paper out today: Wedel, Mathew; Atterholt, Jessie; Dooley, Jr., Alton C.; Farooq, Saad; Macalino, Jeff; Nalley, Thierra K.; Wisser, Gary; and Yasmer, John. 2021. Expanded neural canals in the caudal vertebrae of a specimen of Haplocanthosaurus. Academia Letters, Article 911, 10pp. DOI: 10.20935/AL911 (link) The paper is new, but the findings aren’t, particularly.

I have several small ordered sequences of data, each of about five to ten elements. For each of them, I want to calculate a metric which captures how much they vary along the sequence. I don’t want standard deviation, or anything like it, because that would consider the sequences 1 5 2 7 4 and 1 2 4 5 7 equally variable, whereas for my purposes the first of these is much more variable.

Back in 2017, I showed the world 83.33% of my collection of sauropod-themed mugs. Time passes, and I have lost some of them and gained some more. The tally now stands at eight, and here they are: My missing Brontomerus mug never did turn up. In the mean time, I have also lost or maybe broken the Sauroposeidon mug, the old black-and-white Archbishop mug, and the single-view Xenoposeidon mug.