I have the honor of giving the National Fossil Day Virtual Lecture for The Museums of Western Colorado – Dinosaur Journey, next Wednesday, October 13, from 7:00 to 8:00 PM, Mountain Daylight Time. The title of my talk is “Lost Giants of the Jurassic” but it’s mostly going to be about Brachiosaurus.

Two and a half years ago, I posted a glorious hemisected hen, taken (with permission) from a poster by Roberts et al. 2016, and supplied by Ray Wilhite, best known in this parish for his work on sauropod appendicular material.

On Thursday, I took the family to the Cotswolds Wildlife Park, a rather lovely zoo just over an hour away from us in Burford, Oxfordshire. Somehow I’d never even heard of this place until we passed a sign for it on the A417 a few weeks ago.

In mammals — certainly the most-studied vertebrates — regional differentiation of the vertebral column is distinct and easy to spot. But things aren’t so simple with sauropods.

Various Internet rumours have suggested that the Archbishop is a super-giant sauropod one third larger than the mounted Giraffatitan specimen MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN SII). This is incorrect.

Here’s a pretty cool image: Plate 7 from Lull (1919), showing the partial skeleton of Barosaurus YPM 429 (above), compared to the much more complete skeleton of Diplodocus CM84/94 (below). I’ve been pretty familiar with that Barosaurus skeleton diagram since I was about 9 years old, because it’s in Donald Glut’s New Dinosaur Dictionary, which […]

Two days ago, I wrote about what seemed to be an instance of peer review gone very wrong.

THIS POST IS RETRACTED. The reasons are explained in the next post. I wish I had never posted this, but you can’t undo what is done, especially on the Internet, so I am not deleting it but marking it as retracted.

Anatomical features of the neural canal in birds and other dinosaurs. A. MWC 9698, a mid caudal vertebra of Apatosaurus in posterodorsal view. Arrows highlight probable vascular foramina in the ventral floor of the neural canal. B. LACM 97479, a dorsal vertebra of Rhea americana in left anterolateral view. Arrows highlight pneumatic foramina inside the neural canal.

A. Recovered skeletal elements of Haplocanthosaurus specimen MWC 8028. B. Caudal vertebra 3 in right lateral view. C. The same vertebra in posterior view. Lines show the location of sections for D and E. D. Midsagittal CT slice. The arrow indicates the ventral expansion of the neural canal into the centrum.

I have several small ordered sequences of data, each of about five to ten elements. For each of them, I want to calculate a metric which captures how much they vary along the sequence.