My good friend, frequent collaborator, and fellow adventurer Brian Engh has won the John J. Lanzendorf Paleoart Prize for 2D paleoart (there are also categories for 3D paleoart and scientific illustration). He’s in august company;

I am still building up to a big post on vertebral orientation, but in the meantime, check out this caudal vertebra of a Komodo dragon, Varanus komodoensis. This is right lateral view–the vert is strongly procoelous, and the articular ends of the centrum are really tilted relative to the long axis.

Juvenile Tomistoma schlegelii, LACM Herpetology 166483, with me for scale. It wasn’t until I picked up the skull that I realized it was the same specimen I had looked at back when. I was looking at its neck in 2011, and its tail today, for reasons that will be revealed at the dramatically appropriate moment.

Just a quickie today. The 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress is happening this December. Where? Everywhere! Well, everywhere with internet service. There is no physical place to go attend. Talks, posters, discussions, etc. will happen online. Consequently, registration is extremely affordable at a whopping 5 Euros. Circulars are here if you want to know more.

Here’s the story of my fascination with supramedullary airways over the last 20 years, and how Jessie Atterholt and I ended up working on them together, culminating with her talk at SVPCA last week. (Just here for the preprint link?

My wife Fiona is a musician and composer, and she’s giving a talk at this year’s TetZooCon on “Music for Wildlife Documentaries – A Composer’s Perspective”. (By the way, it looks like some tickets are still available: if you live near or in striking distance of London, you should definitely go! Get your tickets here.) […]

Left lateral view Have we ever posted decent photos of the Brachiosaurus altithorax caudals? Has anyone? I can’t remember either thing ever happening. When I need images of brachiosaur bits, including caudals, I usually go to Taylor (2009). Taylor (2009: fig.

No time right now for me to dig into the interesting and important discussion on how we should orient vertebrae (here and here so far) – that will be coming soon. In the meantime, here’s something else. As printed, in one of WesternU’s 3D printers. Coming off the tray. Cleaned up and in my hand.

Thanks to everyone who’s engaged with yesterday’s apparently trivial question: what does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”? I know Matt has plenty of thoughts to share on this, but before he does I want to clear up a couple of things.

I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that Xenoposeidon is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial disagreement about one of the autapomorphies that I proposed in the revised diagnosis: “Neural arch slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character […]

I first encountered Larry Niven’s story/essay “Down in Flames” in the collection N-Space in high school.