We’ve noted many times over the years how inconsistent pneumatic features are in sauropod vertebra. Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and even between the sides of individual vertebrae.

These are nice. Click through to empiggen. I ripped them from Parker (1874), which appears to be a free download from JSTOR, here, and tweaked the colors just a bit. If you are here for serious science, these guides to the abbreviations used in the plates will come in handy.

Here’s how my pig skull turned out (prep post is here). Verdict? I’m reasonably happy with it. As Mike wrote in the post that kicked off the “Things to Make and Do” series, “a pig skull is a serious piece of kit”. It’s big and substantial and it looks awesome sitting on the shelf.

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Up top, C10 and C11 of Diplodocus carnegii CM 84, from Hatcher (1901). Below, C9 and C10 of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018, from Gilmore (1936). The Diplodocus verts are in right lateral view but reversed for ease of comparison, and the Apatosaurus verts are in left lateral view.

This is a very belated follow-up to “Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on“, and it’s about how to turn Step 2, “Learn lots of stuff”, into concrete progress.

This beautiful image is bird 52659 from Florida Museum, a green heron Butorides virescens, CT scanned and published on Twitter.

This is something I did over Thanksgiving break in 2019. I meant to blog about it sooner, but you know, 2020 and all. So here I am finally getting around to it. (Yes, I know the ruler in the above photo is the worst scale bar ever. I was, uh, making a point.

On 22nd December 2020, I gave this talk (via Zoom) to Martin Sander’s palaeontology research group at the University of Bonn, Germany.

These things just catch my eye, I can’t help it. Left: Oddbins corkscrew, circa 1997. Right: left femur of Patagotitan mayorum , circa 100,000,000 BC. Note that the corkscrew features a distinct medially directed femoral head, the bulge in the lateral margin of the proximal portion that is characteristic of titanosaurs, and a straight shaft.

Darren has written a brief review of TetZooMCon, the online event that replaced the now traditional annual conference of Tetrapod Zoology.

I’m late to this party, but I want to say a few things about the recently announced €9,500 article-processing charge (APC) that Nature has introduced to make itself Plan-S compliant. The first thing is that a lot of people are quite understandably outraged by this very large fee. Good. They should be outraged.