I missed this paper (Yuan et al. 2024) when it came out last year, but my friend and colleague Jeremiah Scott brought it to my attention. The bit on nuchal sesamoids in shrews is so good and so weird that I’m just going to copy and paste it in its entirety.

(This was buried in Part 5 of my 2011 review of the Sideshow Apatosaurus maquette, but it’s long deserved to be a post of its own, and now it is. I’m not adding anything new here, just extracting and reposting the relevant bits, for reasons that will become clear in a future post.

I say “semi-spoileriffic” because I’m not going to go out of my way to give away any plot points or creature details you couldn’t get from watching the trailers and TV spots, but if you want to keep yourself pure as the driven snow, you might want to save this post for later.

It crept out quietly under cover of darkness, but I’m pleased to say that today saw the publication of a new paper: Van der Linden, Tom T. P., Michael P. Taylor, Amy Campbell, Brian D. Curtice, René Dederichs, Lucas N. Lerzo, John A. Whitlock, D. Cary Woodruff and Emanuel Tschopp. 2025. Introduction to Diplodocoidea.

White rami are usually thicker than gray rami, and sometimes they are visibly different in color, but they are always the more lateral connections between the sympathetic chain and the intercostal nerves, and the ones you’ll see first when you peel off the parietal pleura.

Gotta say, watching Scarlett Johansson making eyes at Aquilops is not getting old. Screengrab from this clip, the good stuff starts about 6:19. This short clip from the Tonight Show is also pretty great. Aaaand Halloween costume: sorted. I already have everything I need! (…except the lifelike Aquilops puppet. Dammit.) I may get back to posting actual science when I’m not drowning in summer anatomy teaching. Three days to go.

Most regular readers will know about DinoCon, a two-day semi-technical/semi-popular conference being run by SV-POW!’s own Darren Naish. (Darren is very much a silent partner here, and is much better known for his own blog Tetrapod Zoology, and of course for his technical work.) The first ever DinoCon will be this summer — Saturday 16th & Sunday 17th August at the University of Exeter.

First, before the world drowns in madness, it’s a-QUILL-ops, like a quill pen. Not AWK-wuh-lops, like Aquafina. Second, I made good use of my recent birthday and went to the Lego store at the local mall.

The second trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth is out today, and there’s my baby at 1:35! I am completely certain that at some point the tide of Aquilops -themed merch will overwhelm my ability to keep up — not to mention your interest in keeping up with this blog — but for now I am happily in squee-land. Fortunately Mike is keeping the site turning over with some actual science content.

Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic Diplodocus around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich. The first nine were all mounted, and most still stand in their original museums. (The London cast has moved around a lot and currently resides in Coventry;

I’m really delighted today to announce the publication of my, and my co-authors’, new paper on the Carnegie Diplodocus : Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1) :55–91. doi:10.2992/007.091.0104