Back in 2013, John Conway was doing some paintings and Darren Naish was drawing lots of animals for a book. I chipped in to help with their artwork and some back and forth ensued. All this happened on Twitter, and I wrote it up in an SV-POW! post with lots of embedded tweets. But with the progressing enshittification of Twitter (I refuse to call it X), that post is rendering less and less well, and at some point will probably fail completely.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve written here before about Donald Glut’s The New Dinosaur Dictionary and the looooong shadow it cast over my adolescence.

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.

Here’s a funny thing I hadn’t given much thought to until recently: virtually all journals, even the born-digital variety, have pages in portrait mode for easy printing on 8.5×11 or A4 paper. And many offer a column-width option for figures.

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.

The SVP 2024 abstract book dropped earlier this week. You can download it here.

I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: A man needs to cross a river. He has a goat with him, which he needs to take across. The boat is big enough to carry the man and only one other object.

This one hardly needs making. I found it by accident when we roasted a chicken this Sunday. As we were tearing the carcass apart like a pack of hyaenas, I noticed that one of the wings had a nice, distinct thumb claw. Here it is in a big plastic bowl in the kitchen — shown this way to emphasize its mundanity.