If you’re thinking that it’s about time to look at some sauropod vertebrae from the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation, well, you’re gol-durned right, pardner. Let’s ride. Here’s a vertebra sticking out of the rock. For once it’s not in cross-section.

In the last post, we looked at some sauropod vertebrae exposed in cross-section at our field sites in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation. This time, we’re going to do it again! Let’s look at another of my faves from the field, with Thuat Tran’s hand for scale.

Because I’ve worked a lot on the anatomy and evolution of air-filled bones in sauropod dinosaurs, I’ve spent most of my career looking at images like this: …and thinking about images like this: Turns out, that’s pretty good practice for fossil prospecting in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation, where we frequently find […]

Heinrich Mallison sent me this amazing photo, which he found unattributed on Facebook: Infuriatingly, I’ve not been able to track down an original source for this: searching for the text just finds a bunch of reposts on meme sites, and Google’s reverse image search just reports a bunch of hits on Reddit: The line-drawing shows […]

Over the past few years I’ve dropped hints here and there about the work I’ve been doing in the Morrison Formation of Utah with Brian Engh, John Foster, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, Jessie Atterholt, and Thuat Tran.

Amazing diagram of the path of the vagus nerve and its branches in the neck, thorax, and abdomen, from Wilson-Pauwels et al. (1988). The gonads aren’t drawn here, but they do receive vagal innervation.

A student wrote to me to ask where I got the motivation to prep my anatomy lectures. Here’s what I sent back.

Otters are a “near-threatened” species in the UK, so it’s a tragedy when one is killed by a car. That said, when a roadkill otter is spotted by a friend and delivered to me five days after Christmas, that goes some way to redeeming the tragedy.

In lieu of any new science today, have some memes, and a wonderful day! A timeless classic. In case you’re wondering, that’s “rolling on the beach laughing my telson off”. Horseshoe crabs have been around for 445 million years, about twice as long as mammals, turtles, and dinosaurs.

Since 2015 I’ve been working in the Morrison Formation of Utah with Brian Engh, John Foster, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, and more recently Jessie Atterholt and Thuat Tran.

Reconstructed right forelimb of Brachiosaurus at Dinosaur Journey in Fruita, Colorado, with me for scale, photo by Yara Haridy.