Hot news! Matt and I will be spending the week of 11th-15th March at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh: the home of the world’s two most definitive sauropods! The Carnegie Diplodocus , CM 84, is the original from which all those Diplodocus mounts around the globe were taken, and so by far the most-seen sauropod in the world — almost certainly the most-seen dinosaur of any kind.

Thanks to a comment from long-time reader Andrew Stuck, I realised he is also the tweeter @dinodadreviews, who pointed us to Xenoposeidon in a kids’ book. Now, a review on his website of Ted Rechlin’s comic-book Jurassic has pointed me to what I think is the first depiction of the BRONTOSMASH!

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Sorry for the short notice, but I just wanted to let you all know: Today is Academic-Led Publishing Day, which the official website describes as “a global digital event to foster discussions about how members of the scholarly community can develop and support academic-led publishing initiatives”. More informally, it’s about how we can throw off the shackles of “publishers” that have made themselves our masters rather than our servants.

I was delighted today to see a tweet from dinodadreviews: https://twitter.com/dinodadreviews/status/1086494527345623040 (Here is it, archived, in case it goes away for any reason): This is a nice, elegant bit of artwork, based of course on the old brachiosaurid interpretation of Xenoposeidon — which has been superseded by the new rebbachisaurid interpretation, but the author and designer weren’t to know that.

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In short, no. I discussed this a bit in the first post of the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga, but it deserves a more thorough unpacking, so we can put this dumb idea to bed once and for all. As Marco brought up in the comments on the previous post, glycogen bodies are probably to blame for the idea that some dinosaurs had a second brain to run their back ends.

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Ray Wilhite posted this gorgeous image on a Facebook thread, and we’re re-posting it here with his permission.

If you followed along with the last post in this series, you now have some bird vertebrae to play with. Here are some things to do with them. 1. Learn the parts of the vertebrae, and compare them with those of other animals Why are we so excited about bird vertebrae around here?