In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form: where the noun in question might be salt or wood or math or clouds or daydreaming or whatever. It’s not enough to write an engaging book on Topic X without somehow, by tortuously overreaching, making it the underpinning of life itself. If we ever do an SV-POW!

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.

This Saturday, July 19, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is hosting 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 G. De La Garza, Miriam Heingård, Martin Jarenmark, Kristina Ydström, Peter

I missed this paper (Yuan et al. 2024) when it came out last year, but my friend and colleague Jeremiah Scott brought it to my attention. The bit on nuchal sesamoids in shrews is so good and so weird that I’m just going to copy and paste it in its entirety.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 & Sunday 17th August at the University of Exeter.