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I wasted some time today making memes. I blame the Paleontology Coproliteposting group on Facebook.

In a comment on the last post, Mike wrote, “perhaps the pneumaticity was intially a size-related feature that merely failed to get unevolved when rebbachisaurs became smaller”. {.wp-image-6447 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-6447” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6447” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/06/28/hot-sauropod-news-part-1-rampant-pneumaticity-in-saltasaurines/caudal-pneumaticity-in-saltasaurines-cerda-et-al-2012-fig-1/”

An important paper is out today: Carpenter (2018) names Maraapunisaurus , a new genus to contain the species “ Amphicoelias ” fragillimus , on the basis that it’s actually a rebbachisaurid rather than being closely related to the type species Amphicoelias altus . {.size-full .wp-image-15433 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-15433” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15433”

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A while back — near the start of the year, in fact — Szymon Górnicki interviewed me by email about palaeontology, alternative career paths, open access, palaeoart, PeerJ, scholarly infrastructure, the wonder of blogging, and how to get started learning about palaeo. He also illustrated it with this caricature of me, nicely illustrating our 2009 paper on neck posture.

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The afternoon of Day 1 at TetZooCon 2018 was split into two parallel streams: downstairs, some talks that I would have loved to see; and upstairs, a palaeoart workshop that I was even keener not to miss out on. There were talks by Luis Rey (on how palaeoart has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting feathers and bright colours) and by Mark Witton (on the future of palaeoart — sadly, bereft of slides). Both fascinating.

Last night, Fiona and I got back from an exhausting but very satisfying weekend spent at TetZooCon 2018, the conference of the famous Tetrapod Zoology blog run by Darren Naish — the sleeping third partner here at SV-POW!. What made this particularly special is that Fiona was one of the speakers this time. She’s not a tetrapod zoologist, but a composer with a special interest in wildlife documentaries.