When I visited Dinosaur National Monument in October with Brian Engh and Yara Haridy, we spent a decent amount of time checking out DNM 28, a skull and associated bits of Camarasaurus . In particular, I got some shots of the axis (the second cervical vertebra behind the head), and it got me thinking about pneumaticity in this unusual element.

Here’s a skull of a wild boar. Note the loooong face, practically a straight line from the tip of the snout to the top of the back of the head. We shall now proceed through a series of pig skulls with increasingly steep foreheads.

Long-term readers will remember that way back in the pre-history of this blog, I wrote about my experience de-fleshing a pig head, which because the very first part in our ongoing series Things to Make and Do. In a subsequent post with a sheep-skull multiview, I included the multiview of that pig skull, too.

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Here’s how I got my start in research. Through a mentorship program, I started volunteering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in the spring of 1992, when I was a junior in high school.

Tiny Titan, a temporary exhibit about the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus project, opened at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California, last night. How? Why? Read on. Things have been quieter this year on the Haplo front than they were in 2018, for many reasons.

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I had an interesting opportunity when I was in Utah and Colorado a couple of weeks ago. At Dinosaur Journey in Fruita, Colorado, I went looking for a cast of the Potter Creek Brachiosaurus humerus.

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I don’t know if this exists in the US, but here in Britain it’s common for kids in Year 11 at school (age 15 or 16) to have a week allocated where they find a position (usually unpaid) and do some work outside the school. It’s called “work experience”. A friend of a friend has a son that age, and he wants to be a palaeontologist. I was asked if I had any advice. Here’s what I wrote, lightly edited: I hope it’s useful to other enthusiastic kids.