Last time, I told you about my new paper, The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023), and finished up by saying this: “But Mike, you ask — how did you, a scientist, find yourself writing a history paper? It’s a good question, and one with a complicated answer. Tune in next time to find out!” Paper 1 The truth is, I never set out to write a history paper. My goal was

… and I’m guessing that if you read this blog, you like at least one of these things.

I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt. I discovered SMTM through its fascinating discussions of scurvy and citrus-fruit taxonomy.

This recent news story tells of a cane toad found in Australia that weighs six pounds.

I was a bit shaken to read this short article, Submit It Again! Learning From Rejected Manuscripts (Campbell et al. 2022), recently posted on Mastodon by open-access legend Peter Suber. For example: Let’s pick this apart a bit. “Because they recently published a similar article” ? What is this nonsense.

In the last post I showed the Brachiosaurus humerus standee I made last weekend, and I said that the idea had been “a gleam in my eye for a long time”. That’s true, but it got kicked into high gear late in 2021 when I got an email from a colleague, Dr. Michelle Stocker at […]

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I’m sure you’ve seen things like ChatGPT in the news: programs that can carry out pretty convincing conversations. They are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and are frequently referred to as being Artificial Intelligence (AI) — but I really don’t like that designation as it implies some understanding.

For some bizarre reason, I have only today discovered Sauropoda Central — a sauropod blog written by someone who goes only by the name “Davidow”, but whose introductory post reveals that he is occasional SV-POW! commenter Vahe Demirjian. It’s a solid blog full of meaty, sauropodolicious nourishment.

Here’s a nice early holiday present for me: 51 weeks after our first paper together, I’m on another one with Tito Aureliano and colleagues: Aureliano, T., Ghilardi, A.M., Müller, R.T., Kerber, L., Pretto, F.A., Fernandes, M.A.,Ricardi-Branco, F., and Wedel, M.J. 2022.