SV-POW!  ...  All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695

In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature, is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the […]

University of Bristol

In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why

 Scientific Reports

, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate

 Nature

, is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, the

Why do people publish in Scientific Reports?

Last time, I noted that photographs of the exact same object, even under the same lighting conditions, can come out different colours.

Last time, I noted that photographs of the exact same object, even under the same lighting conditions, can come out different colours. That is one of the two reasons why I am not persuaded that the very different colours of my photos of the two

 Supersaurus

scapulae is strong evidence that they are from different individuals.

More on varying colours of bones

Sorry to you all for the recent radio-silence here on SV-POW!. Matt and I are hard at work preparing our presentations for SVPCA 2019, which will take place on the Isle of Wight next week. Delightfully, not only will Matt be joining us this year, but so will his wife, forensic anthropologist celebre Vicki;

Sorry to you all for the recent radio-silence here on SV-POW!. Matt and I are hard at work preparing our presentations for SVPCA 2019, which will take place on the Isle of Wight next week. Delightfully, not only will Matt be joining us this year, but so will his wife, forensic anthropologist

 celebre

Vicki; and their son London.

The whole of the SVPCA 2018 conference is on YouTube

Next to Charles Knight, the Czech painter Zdeněk Burian was arguably the most influential and important of the early palaeoartists. His dinosaurs tend to have a stately quality that’s very much at odds with our post-Dinosaur Renaissance sensibilities, but which has its own charm.

Zdeněk Burian at decent resolution

Mike Taylor

Well, I’ve had most of the day now to digest the news that Elsevier have withdrawn their support of the Research Works Act; and a few hours to get used to the idea that the Act itself is now dead.  I’ve had some time to think about what it all means. My first reaction was to be really delighted: the banner headline suggested a genuine change of direction from Elsevier, such as I had challenged them about a few weeks ago.

Can Elsevier save itself?

Left:

 Homo sapiens

, head, neck and upper trunk in right lateral view (unprepared specimen). Right:

 Camarasaurus

sp., skull in left lateral view. Photograph at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. 2016.

The stupidest head

First, a short personal backstory. Vicki’s and my extended families both live mostly in Oklahoma and Kansas, so they only get to see our son, London, at the holidays or at infrequent mid-year visits.

Western University of Health Sciences

First, a short personal backstory. Vicki’s and my extended families both live mostly in Oklahoma and Kansas, so they only get to see our son, London, at the holidays or at infrequent mid-year visits. Starting when London was five, every year I’ve made a photo book of his adventures through the year to give as Christmas presents to all of our relatives. These have also become cherished mementos for the three of us here in Cali.

Pro tip: turn your talks into photo books

University College London

Hat tip to Open Dinosaur Project contributor Rob Taylor, who drew my attention to this photo of a huge and sauropodoriffic snow sculpture at [what I thought when I wrote this was] the Fairbanks Ice Festival:  {.size-full .wp-image-2537 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“2537” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2010/02/17/giant-snow-sauropods-of-the-fairbanks-ice-festival/dinosaurs/”

Giant snow-sauropods of the FairbanksSapporo Ice Festival

Matt Wedel

So I finally got to see the Discovery Channel’s new series,

 Clash of the Dinosaurs

. The show follows the common Discovery Channel MO of cutting between CGI critters and talking heads. I’m one of the talking heads, and I get a lot of air time, and I suppose I should be happy about that. But I’m not, for reasons I’ll explain. I need to preface what follows by saying that I thought the other talking heads did a great job.

Lies, damned lies, and Clash of the Dinosaurs

Trying two new things this morning: grilling a turkey, and live-blogging on SV-POW! I like to grill. Steak, chicken, kebabs, yams, pineapple, bananas–as long as it’s an edible solid, I’m up for it. But I’ve never grilled a turkey before. Neighbor, colleague, fellow paleontologist and grillmeister Brian Kraatz sent me his recipe, which is also posted on Facebook for the edification of the masses.

Grilling your Thanksgiving dinosaur: live-blogging the bird

The Sunday after SVP, Brian Engh and I visited the museum in Albuquerque. I was quite taken with the mounted T. rex. It’s waaaay more interesting and dynamic than any other T. rex mount I’ve seen.

The Sunday after SVP, Brian Engh and I visited the museum in Albuquerque. I was quite taken with the mounted

 T. rex

. It’s waaaay more interesting and dynamic than any other

 T. rex

mount I’ve seen. It even beats the “Rockette rex” in Denver (which I really like and need to blog about), by virtue of putting the body and head down at eye level where you can study them up close.

T. rex mount at New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science

I’ve now heard from several early-career folks some variant on this statement regarding manuscripts they intend to publish as papers: “I give the AI all my notes and it gives me a draft that isn’t perfect, but it’s easier to massage that draft into publishable shape than it would be to write it myself.” I […]

I’ve now heard from several early-career folks some variant on this statement regarding manuscripts they intend to publish as papers: “I give the AI all my notes and it gives me a draft that isn’t perfect, but it’s easier to massage that draft into publishable shape than it would be to write it myself.” I haven’t found the right time or the right words to tell them that the work the LLM is “saving” them is the very work that would make them

What LLMs are really saving you from

Three weeks ago, I posted three colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” excavation at the Dry Mesa Quarry, provided by Tyler Holmes from an old dinosaur encyclopedia. Here’s the third one again: I wrote: This can’t be right.

Three weeks ago, I posted three colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” excavation at the Dry Mesa Quarry, provided by Tyler Holmes from an old dinosaur encyclopedia. Here’s the third one again: The scapula of

 Ultrasaurus

being excavated. [caption from original book.] I wrote: Several people (Llewelly, Adam Yates, Matt) disagreed, and thought this was indeed the “

 Ultrasaurus

” scap, but that the photo had been left-right reversed.

More on that “Ultrasaurus” scap photo

Long-time SV-POW! reader Tyler Holmes came across a book with the very un-searchable title “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” — I tried to find it in the Internet Archive, but there are waaay too many books of that name.

Long-time SV-POW! reader Tyler Holmes came across a book with the very un-searchable title “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” — I tried to find it in the Internet Archive, but there are waaay too many books of that name. He emailed me about it because it contains three colour photos of the excavation of our old friend “

 Ultrasaurus

“. Here they are, with their captions as they appear in the book.

Colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” quarry

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?

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? Here you go.) Müller (1908: fig. 12). Upper respiratory tract, trachea, and lungs in pink, air sacs and diverticula in blue.

The Atterholt and Wedel (2018) SVPCA abstract and talk are now available on PeerJ Preprints

Confession time: I have yet to find a satisfyingly regular and repeatable method for measuring neural canal diameters. A LOT of dinosaurian neural canals are not cylindrical but flare out on either end, like two trumpet bells set back-to-back.

How — and where — should we measure neural canal diameter?

A middle caudal vertebra of a diplodocid, presumably

 Tornieria africana

, on display at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, in left lateral view. Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History led me to this post at Nothing Human, and poking around there led me to another good’un: “Shallow feedback hollows you out”. That post really hit for me, and it made me think about SV-POW!

My Constant Reader, and staying close to the work

This is what it’s like. The lack of narration is deliberate. We have other videos, which we’ll post at other times, with lots of yap. This one is just for reference, in case later on we need to know what the ischia look like in posterior view, or how the scapulocoracoid is curved, or whatever.

This is what it’s like. The lack of narration is deliberate. We have other videos, which we’ll post at other times, with lots of yap. This one is just for reference, in case later on we need to know what the ischia look like in posterior view, or how the scapulocoracoid is curved, or whatever. The

 Apatosaurus louisae

walk-around video will be up in the near future. And a similar thing for both skeletons from the second floor balcony.

Walking around the mounted skeleton of Diplodocus carnegii

This is part 3 of an emerging and occasional SV-POW!

Things to Make and Do, part 3: Butchering a Wallaby

I planned to post this last spring but I never got around to it. I think I have a mental block about discussing the glycogen body.

Bird neural canals are weird, part 3: the glycogen body

Last year about this time I vowed to return SV-POW! to its nominal roots: a new post at least once a week for all of 2018.

Last year about this time I vowed to return SV-POW! to its nominal roots: a new post at least once a week for all of 2018. It had been a while since the blog had lived up to the letter of its name, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to see if blogging to a schedule again would be inspiring or oppressive.

2018 at SV-POW!

Darren Naish

Here’s another article in my ‘sauropods of 2008’ series. Previous entries have looked at

 Eomamenchisaurus

and

 Dongyangosaurus

, both of which are Asian. This time round we look at a new South American taxon:

 Malarguesaurus florenciae

González Riga

 et al

., 2008. In marked contrast to the majority of recent SV-POW! articles, this article really is going to be short!

Sauropods of 2008: Malarguesaurus

University of Portsmouth

As Matt frequently reminds me, it’s now nearly five years since I started to work on “The Archbishop”, more formally known as BMNH R5973, the Natural History Museum’s long-neglected Tendaguru brachiosaur.  This is, or at least once was, one of the most complete brachiosaurid specimens ever discovered — although quite a bit of the material has gone missing or remains unprepared.

Where the hell are my superpowers?

If you’re new to this thread, here’s a minimal reading list, in chronological order. I say ‘minimal’ because all of the relevant papers are freely available, and therefore all of the factual claims are easy to check.

The Aerosteon saga, Part 3: True and false ad hominems

New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free: Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.

New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free: Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines

 Ichthyornis

and

 Janavis

. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.

New paper: pneumatic diverticula and blood vessels in the neural canals of the toothed birds Ichthyornis and Janavis

Two recent photo posts on Mastodon reminded me how much necks lie.

Two recent photo posts on Mastodon reminded me how much necks lie. First, there’s this fine set of four photos of the same grey heron, by Zongora:    From a distance, you might assume that the long-necked bird shown in the top two pictures is a different species from the short-necked bird in the bottom two, especially the one at bottom left. But the great thing in this case is that the lie doesn’t quite come off.

Necks: the lying liars that just keep lying

Just a quick update on the crowd-funding effort to publish the new diplodocoid volume as open-access papers at Palaeontologia Electronica.

Just a quick update on the crowd-funding effort to publish the new diplodocoid volume as open-access papers at

 Palaeontologia Electronica

.

 Van der Linden et al. 2024:Figure 6.

Cervical vertebra 13 of

 Ardetosaurus viator

MAB011899. CV13 is shown in A) ventral, B) dorsal, C) left lateral, D) right lateral, E) posterior, and F) anterior view.

Get your name into the permanent scientific record!

Very nice photo of Alex Pritchard’s

 Aquilops

skeleton from DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk. I am often so far down the rabbit holes of my own work (and given that I work mostly on pneumaticity and weird stuff in neural canals, they are literally holes) that I do a very poor job of keeping up with what’s going on in the broader dinosphere.

Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops and friends

In 1962, Richard Frank Kingham — a student at Woodward School Washington, D.C. — wrote a four-page paper, with three further pages of line drawings, about the Early Cretaceous sauropod Astrodon (Kingham 1962). It was published in the Proceedings of the Washington Junior Academy of Sciences (which to no-one’s great surprise does not seem to […]

In 1962, Richard Frank Kingham — a student at Woodward School Washington, D.C. — wrote a four-page paper, with three further pages of line drawings, about the Early Cretaceous sauropod

 Astrodon

(Kingham 1962). It was published in the

 Proceedings of the Washington Junior Academy of Sciences

(which to no-one’s great surprise does not seem to be available online). For a smallish high-school project, it’s been pretty influential.

A PDF of Kingham (1962) on Astrodon

Where all discerning paleontologists buy road trip junk food. This one is in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. I just got back home after a solid four weeks on the road, an epic peregrination from SoCal to Oklahoma to England to Oklahoma to SoCal. DinoCon 2025 was embedded mid-trip, which is why I haven’t gotten anything about it posted before now. I love driving across the American West.

Matt’s DinoCon 2025 adventure

One often hears it said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. For example, if you excavate some fossil sauropods and they don’t have preserved feathers, that not evidence that sauropods didn’t have feathers. Oh yes it is. This is an example of a mantra that’s short, catchy, and wrong.

One often hears it said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. For example, if you excavate some fossil sauropods and they don’t have preserved feathers, that not evidence that sauropods didn’t have feathers. Oh yes it is.  This is an example of a mantra that’s short, catchy, and wrong. Every time you see absence of evidence, you are accumulating evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence; it just isn’t proof

Matt’s staying with me for a few days, and we’re working into the night trying to put a stake through the heart of a long-running project. He just left the room to take a quick break, and I snapped this photo of the work area. We have everything we need!

WARNING: Science In Progress!

Here’s a new slide that wasn’t in my talk last summer. Mike and I are working on our respective talks for DinoCon 2025 — a timely concern, since Mike presents next Saturday and I’m on next Sunday. My talk will be an adapted and upgraded version of the keynote talk I gave at the Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference last summer.

Talk slides are not fungible

Ten years ago, almost to the day, Matt and I were having a conversation vie Google chat. We got onto the evergreen topic of scholarly publishing.

Ten years ago, almost to the day, Matt and I were having a conversation vie Google chat. We got onto the evergreen topic of scholarly publishing. Let’s ignore the somewhat dated references to Twitter and Skype, and listen in on those two starry-eyed youngsters …

 Matt

: People will continue to publish papers (as currently understood) beyond the natural lifespan of the medium, because papers are easy to count.

Did journal articles survive the last ten years?

Adam Mastroianni’s blog Experimental History is consistently fascinating.

Adam Mastroianni’s blog

 Experimental History

is consistently fascinating. In a recent article on whether conversations end when people want them to, he makes this point, very much in passing: This is a brilliant insight, and it explains so much about what’s wrong with journal articles. When you’re balancing all six requirements, how are you ever going to write something that people are going to actually enjoy reading?

Journal articles are trying to do six things at once — no wonder they’re unreadable

Lateral (

 a, b

) and postero-dorsal (

 c

) views of the head and neck region in alcohol-preserved, intact specimens of

 Congosorex verheyeni

(

 a

, SMNS 50411),

 Surdisorex norae

(

 b

, FMNH 190260) and

 Congosorex phillipsorum

(

 c

, FMNH 177721). Posterodorsal view (

 c

) is of the same semi-transverse section, osteology in red, with

Nuchal sesamoids in shrews

Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic The New Dinosaurs, which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press.

Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic

 The New Dinosaurs

, which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press. Here’s the website, open for pre-orders (link); the book ships on August 11. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this absolute banger.

Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition

This Saturday, July 19, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is hosting Aquilops Day. Before Jurassic World Rebirth was released, I was interviewed by the folks at the SNOMNH about Aquilops.

This Saturday, July 19, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is hosting Aquilops Day.

This Saturday is Aquilops Day!

Today sees the publication of what is, OK, an interesting paper on how the serrated trailing edge of the flippers of the ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus may have enabled it to generate less turbulence, enhancing its abilities as a stealth predator: Lindgren, Johan, Dean R. Lomax, Robert-Zoltán Szász, Miguel Marx, Johan Revstedt, Georg Göltz, Sven Sachs, Randolph […]

Today sees the publication of what is, OK, an interesting paper on how the serrated trailing edge of the flippers of the ichthyosaur

 Temnodontosaurus

may have enabled it to generate less turbulence, enhancing its abilities as a stealth predator: Lindgren, Johan, Dean R. Lomax, Robert-Zoltán Szász, Miguel Marx, Johan Revstedt, Georg Göltz, Sven Sachs, Randolph G. De La Garza, Miriam Heingård, Martin Jarenmark, Kristina Ydström, Peter

I say, I say, I say! How many palaeontologists does it take to write a paper? Twenty-four (if it’s in Nature)!

(This was buried in Part 5 of my 2011 review of the Sideshow Apatosaurus maquette, but it’s long deserved to be a post of its own, and now it is. I’m not adding anything new here, just extracting and reposting the relevant bits, for reasons that will become clear in a future post.

(This was buried in Part 5 of my 2011 review of the Sideshow

Apatosaurus

 maquette, but it’s long deserved to be a post of its own, and now it is. I’m not adding anything new here, just extracting and reposting the relevant bits, for reasons that will become clear in a future post.

The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus

It crept out quietly under cover of darkness, but I’m pleased to say that today saw the publication of a new paper: Van der Linden, Tom T. P., Michael P. Taylor, Amy Campbell, Brian D. Curtice, René Dederichs, Lucas N. Lerzo, John A. Whitlock, D. Cary Woodruff and Emanuel Tschopp. 2025. Introduction to Diplodocoidea.

Baffled by diplodocoids? Need a comprehensive introduction? You’re in luck!

This thing arrived in the mail yesterday. Just in time…  I say “semi-spoileriffic” because I’m not going to go out of my way to give away any plot points or creature details you couldn’t get from watching the trailers and TV spots, but if you want to keep yourself pure as the driven snow, you might want to save this post for later. I don’t know that I’ve ever done a movie review on this blog. It’s not really our thing here.

Semi-spoileriffic first thoughts on Jurassic World Rebirth

Gotta say, watching Scarlett Johansson making eyes at Aquilops is not getting old. Screengrab from this clip, the good stuff starts about 6:19. This short clip from the Tonight Show is also pretty great. Aaaand Halloween costume: sorted. I already have everything I need! (…except the lifelike Aquilops puppet.

Gotta say, watching Scarlett Johansson making eyes at

 Aquilops

is not getting old. Screengrab from this clip, the good stuff starts about 6:19. This short clip from the Tonight Show is also pretty great. Aaaand Halloween costume: sorted. I already have everything I need! (…except the lifelike

 Aquilops

puppet. Dammit.) I may get back to posting actual science when I’m not drowning in summer anatomy teaching. Three days to go.

Super-brief, content-free Aquilops update

Click to embiggen White rami are

 usually

thicker than gray rami, and

 sometimes

they are visibly different in color, but they are

 always

the more lateral connections between the sympathetic chain and the intercostal nerves, and the ones you’ll see first when you peel off the parietal pleura. You may even see the white rami through the parietal pleura if it’s thin enough.

Tutorial 47: distinguishing white and gray rami communicantes in dissection

The second trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth is out today, and there’s my baby at 1:35! I am completely certain that at some point the tide of Aquilops-themed merch will overwhelm my ability to keep up — not to mention your interest in keeping up with this blog — but for now I am happily […]

The second trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth is out today, and there’s my baby at 1:35! I am completely certain that at some point the tide of

 Aquilops

-themed merch will overwhelm my ability to keep up — not to mention your interest in keeping up with this blog — but for now I am happily in squee-land. Fortunately Mike is keeping the site turning over with some actual science content.

Aquilops-ing intensifies

Most regular readers will know about DinoCon, a two-day semi-technical/semi-popular conference being run by SV-POW!’s own Darren Naish.

Most regular readers will know about DinoCon, a two-day semi-technical/semi-popular conference being run by SV-POW!’s own Darren Naish. (Darren is very much a silent partner here, and is much better known for his own blog Tetrapod Zoology, and of course for his technical work.)    The first ever DinoCon will be this summer — Saturday 16th &amp; Sunday 17th August at the University of Exeter.

Come hear Matt and Mike at Darren’s DinoCon!

Here’s a short post on another 5PVC presentation: Raber et al. (2025) on a musculoskeletal lesion in an apatosaur femur. At the Utah Field House in Vernal, there’s a partial skeleton of an apatosaur from just north of Dinosaur National Monument.

Here’s a short post on another 5PVC presentation: Raber et al. (2025) on a musculoskeletal lesion in an apatosaur femur. At the Utah Field House in Vernal, there’s a partial skeleton of an apatosaur from just north of Dinosaur National Monument. It’s nicknamed the “Soft Sauropod” because the bone is softer than the matrix, which made preparation a bit of an adventure.

5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress: a bony lesion in an apatosaur femur

I’ll be sending this letter to the Royal Society, but I also want it out there in public, because I hope that more people will follow the lead set by Dorothy Bishop and Stephen Curry in putting pressure on the Royal Society to grow a backbone.

I’ll be sending this letter to the Royal Society, but I also want it out there in public, because I hope that more people will follow the lead set by Dorothy Bishop and Stephen Curry in putting pressure on the Royal Society to grow a backbone. Dear Royal Society of London,  You exist to support the advancement of science.

Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk

It’s pretty amazing to realise we’ve been running SV-POW! for nearly seventeen years now, since 1st October 2007. And it’s astonishing, and gratifying, and even a tiny by humbling, to see how popular it’s been in its niche.

It’s pretty amazing to realise we’ve been running SV-POW! for nearly seventeen years now, since 1st October 2007. And it’s astonishing, and gratifying, and even a tiny by humbling, to see how popular it’s been in its niche. That niche has turned out to be a bit bigger than we could have imagined, and I am delighted to say that earlier today we notched up our five millionth view!

Five million hits!

Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic Diplodocus around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich.

Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic

 Diplodocus

around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich. The first nine were all mounted, and most still stand in their original museums. (The London cast has moved around a lot and currently resides in Coventry;

Whatever happened to the Munich Diplododcus?

I’m really delighted today to announce the publication of my, and my co-authors’, new paper on the Carnegie Diplodocus: Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus.

I’m really delighted today to announce the publication of my, and my co-authors’, new paper on the Carnegie

 Diplodocus

: Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025.

 The history and composition of the Carnegie

Diplodocus.

 Annals of the Carnegie Museum


 91(1)

:55–91. doi:10.2992/007.091.0104

Everything you always wanted to know about the Carnegie Diplodocus (but were afraid to ask)

This seems to have gone under the radar: Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy.

This seems to have gone under the radar: Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy. It’s a memo from Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH (the United States’ National Institutes of Health):  Well, this is tremendous news. The NIH is the biggest single funder of health research in the USA, and making all the work that it funds immediately open access is a huge win.

From 1 July, no embargoes on NIH-funded publications!

I’m kidding, of course. It will continue no matter what. Loads of more and better photos of the upcoming Aquilops Lego sets — yes, sets, plural — thanks to the Brothers Brick. What’s that other thing included in this jeep-and-raptor set? It’s a teensy widdle Aquilops of teensiness! And it’s pretty darned accurate!

I’m kidding, of course. It will continue no matter what. Loads of more and better photos of the upcoming

 Aquilops

Lego sets — yes, sets, plural — thanks to the Brothers Brick. What’s that other thing included in this jeep-and-raptor set? It’s a teensy widdle

 Aquilops

of teensiness! And it’s pretty darned accurate! I don’t see a lot of room for improvement at minifig scale.

The Aquilops toy news will continue until morale improves

Clarivate is the content-hoarding corporation that owns ProQuest, the Web of Science and EndNote, among many other services widely used in academia. Plus a ton of content.

Clarivate is the content-hoarding corporation that owns ProQuest, the Web of Science and EndNote, among many other services widely used in academia. Plus a ton of content. Today’s announcement, “Introducing ProQuest Digital Collections, a new library subscription offering unparalleled breadth, value and access”, sounds nice, doesn’t it? And the first few paragraphs are certainly full of praise for the changes they’re making.

Burn it all down

I realize that the titular statement is open to misinterpretation so let me head that off at the pass: I’m not saying this prescriptively, like you should learn anatomy to become a better person (you should learn anatomy because it’s accessible and it rules), or that knowing anatomy makes people better.

I realize that the titular statement is open to misinterpretation so let me head that off at the pass:  I’m not saying this prescriptively, like you should learn anatomy to become a better person (you should learn anatomy because it’s accessible and it rules), or that knowing anatomy makes people better. I’m also not saying this distributively, like anatomists are better people than non-anatomists.

Being an anatomist probably made me a better person

When our paper on neural canal ridges came out last year (Atterholt et al. 2024), I hoped that it would inspire other people to go peer inside neural canals and discover a lot more of them. My wish was granted, and quickly.

5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress: Neural canal ridges in crocs

Jessie Atterholt and I are helping one of our students write up a pathological dinosaur bone (you’ll definitely hear more about this in time), and we needed a good example paper for our student to use as a model.

Jessie Atterholt and I are helping one of our students write up a pathological dinosaur bone (you’ll definitely hear more about this in time), and we needed a good example paper for our student to use as a model. We chose several, but for me the standout was Scott et al. (2015), and that’s the one I’m focusing on here.

A great paper: Scott et al. (2015) on a traumatically amputated timber wolf femur

Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus, basing it and its type species H. priscus on the adult specimen CM 572.

Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod

 Haplocanthus

, basing it and its type species

 H

.

 priscus

on the adult specimen CM 572.

A unique sauropod mount: Haplocanthosaurus delfsi CMNH 10380

I happened to be reading back over Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen, when something caught my eye in the example photo we used of how to capture the label and appropriately positioned scalebar along with the specimen: Somehow, when I wrote that post, I didn’t actually look at the photo I was showing […]

I happened to be reading back over Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen, when something caught my eye in the example photo we used of how to capture the label and appropriately positioned scalebar along with the specimen:  BYU 20178, cervical vertebra from an apatosaurine sauropod in ventral view, anterior to the left.

What’s up with your perforated parapophyseal ramus, Apatosaurinae indet. BYU 20178? —&nbsp;Featuring: What have we learned?

At the end of October, I submitted a paper that’s been hanging over me for a couple of years. I’ve been in the habit of tracking nearly all my submissions since I started out in palaeontology, it happens that this one is number 50 in the list.

At the end of October, I submitted a paper that’s been hanging over me for a couple of years. I’ve been in the habit of tracking nearly all my submissions since I started out in palaeontology, it happens that this one is number 50 in the list. It feels like an interesting time to stop and take stock of them all.

The fate (so far) of my 50 submitted papers

Newly out in VAMP: Oh man, there is soooo much to say about this paper, which is a free download here. The short, short version is that OMNH 1123, the holotype specimen of the giant allosaurid

 Saurophaganax maximus

, does not definitely belong to a theropod and may actually belong to a sauropod, and the same goes for some of the referred material, namely the atlas and chevrons.

About that Saurophaganax paper

We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper.

We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a profoundly fallible AI summary, we could read a summary written by the actual authors, who know the material inside out? We can, of course.

Tutorial 46: how to write an abstract

Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest.

Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest. Here’s Liam’s question, lightly edited:  And my reply (which I did send to Liam the next day, but am only now getting around to posting here):  I never set out to do a Ph.D really.

Tutorial 45: how to decide whether to do a higher degree in palaeontology

Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post:  *FACEPALM* How we’ve gone almost 17 years without posting about a hypothetical sauropod dissection is quite beyond my capacity. I am also contractually obligated to remind you that the TV show “Inside Nature’s Giants” shows dissections of a whale, elephant, giraffe, tiger, anaconda, giant squid, etc., so it’s probably the closest we’ll ever get.

If I could dissect a sauropod…

Sobia “helping” Brian Engh draw

 Ornatops

. I’ve written here before about Donald Glut’s

 The New Dinosaur Dictionary

and the looooong shadow it cast over my adolescence.

My favorite piece of paleoart is now for sale

Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total.

Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total. When I wrote to thank him his reply included “I have thousands of questions about apatosaurus that I would like to ask you some day.”  It seemed only fair to invite him to ask some of those questions, so we asked him to give us five and said we’d try to answer them.

Five questions from Tom Redd

Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer.

Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer. I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute.

To what extent is science a strong-link problem?

I asked ChatGPT a very simple question:  Here is the “solution” it suggested:  That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Here’s the screenshot if you don’t believe me:    This is a particularly lovely demonstration of the emptiness of LLMs. It recognises the words from the classic river-crossing puzzle, and generates a sequence of words resembling those to a solution. But they are entirely devoid of meaning.

More “artificial intelligence” idiocy

[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in early 2020, but…you know how that particular story turned out.

[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!]

I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in early 2020, but…you know how that particular story turned out. I’m picking it back up again now because I’ve had the titular point reinforced on several trips and projects over the past couple of years.

We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon

TL;DR
 
 : This blog now has an ISSN (3033-3695), and each new post gets a DOI, usually a day or two after it’s published. Read on for the details.

Over the years, we and others have cited

 a lot

of SV-POW! posts in the formal literature. To quote from a sampling in a long-delayed in-press manuscript: I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how little pushback I’ve had from editors when citing SV-POW! posts.

DOIs and an ISSN for SV-POW!

It is a measure of how scattershot our blogging is that we haven’t mentioned Adam Mastroianni or his blog Experimental History before now.

I won a thing! From someone I admire!

Last time we talked about the evident hijacking of the PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. No-one seemed to know what had happened or how. I managed to track down Andre J. Veldmeijer, who was involved with the PalArch journals a while back.

Last time we talked about the evident hijacking of the PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. No-one seemed to know what had happened or how. I managed to track down Andre J. Veldmeijer, who was involved with the PalArch journals a while back. Based on my Facebook Messenger discussions with him, here’s what we now know:  Andre is not involved any more with these journals.

More on PalArch: it’s dead

To answer Mike’s question from the last post, here’s a nice dorsal of Jimbo. All the material’s from the same quarry and has consistent preservation, and this dorsal is a monster. I didn’t try to measure it through the glass. Hey guess what? It’s gonna be another really short photo post. Here are some pix of the Jimbo material on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.

Fossils of Jimbo the Supersaurus on exhibit

Trunk vertebra of a tuna (

 Thunnus

), OMNH RE 0042, showing paired bony spinal cord supports Here’s a grab-bag of follow-up stuff related to our new paper on neural canal ridges in dinos (Atterholt et al. 2024, see the previous post and sidebar page).

 Neural canal ridges, or bony spinal cord supports?

I got into the habit of calling the inwardly-projecting bony prominences in the neural canals of sauropods and other

Neural canal ridges: the director’s cut

Bony spinal cord supports (arrows) in caudal vertebrae of several specimens of

 Camarasaurus

. (a) Right lateral view of neural canal with broken vertebral arch, clearly exposing a bony spinal cord support (MWC 5496). (b) Anterolateral oblique view of the neural canal of the third caudal vertebra (SUSA 515) with a broken vertebral arch displaying a bony spinal cord support.

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Brachiosaurus altithorax, last four dorsals

Skyward!

Tutorial 2: Basic vertebral anatomy

Mystery sauropod dorsals of the Wealden, part 1: BMNH R2523

The wonder that is MIWG.7306

Tutorial 1: Regions of the vertebral column