As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote on the misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him? We did start making tentative plans for a Wyoming Sauropocalypse centered on the Tate conference, but we couldn’t find a way to make it work for various reasons.

Here’s something I’m going to be yapping about in my keynote talk, “The sauropod heresies: evolutionary ratchets, the taphonomic event horizon, and all the evidence we cannot see”, at the 2024 Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference (link): how the fossil record of sauropods is probably wildly at variance with standing populations in life, at least in terms of sizes and maturity of the individuals that got fossilized.

I know this is hardly news any more, but here is a particularly spectacular example of a Large Language model (“artificial intelligence”) making mistake after mistake. My question: Who described Xenoposeidon, when and where?

I have a new paper out: Bas, A., Kay, K., Labovitz, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2024. New double and multiple variants of fibularis tertius. Extremitas 11: 111-118. This is a straight human anatomy paper, with a dual origin. But first let me tell you a little about the fibularis tertius muscle.

1. VARIATION An anatomical variant that shows up in 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 humans is by medical standards pretty common; in a metro area the size of London or Los Angeles you’d expect to find 10,000 or 20,000 people with that variation.

Here at SV-POW!, we love bifurcated cervical ribs. Those of Turiasaurus are one of the autapomorphies proposed by Royo-Torres et al. (2006:figure 1K). Their diagnosis of the new genus included “accessory process projecting caudodorsally from the dorsal margin of the shafts of proximal cervical ribs”. Here is the best example of such a rib in Turiasaurus , attached to its vertebra.

As iconic as Brachiosaurus altithorax is, it’s known from surprisingly little material.

I was cleaning out my Downloads directory — which, even after my initial forays, still accounts for 11 Gb that I really need to reclaim from my perptually almost-full SSD. And I found this beautiful image under the filename csgeo4028.jpeg . Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH PR 25107 during excavation. The thing is, I have no idea where this image came from.

Eighteen months ago, I noted that the Carnegie Museum’s Diplodocus mount has no atlantal ribs (i.e. ribs of the first cervical vertebra, the atlas). But that the Paris cast has long atlantal ribs — so long the extend past the posterior end of the axis. There were two especially provocative comments to that post. First, Konstantin linked to a photo of the Russian cast (first mounted in St. Petersburg but currently residing in Moscow).

New paper out today with Logan King, Julia McHugh, and Brian Curtice, on pneumatic ribs in Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus (King et al. 2024). This one had an unusual gestation. In the summer of 2002 2022 I did a road trip to Utah and western Colorado with my friend and frequent collaborator Jessie Atterholt.

This is one of those things that has been sitting in my brain, gradually heating up and getting denser, until it achieved criticality, melted down my spinal cord, and rocketed out my fingers and through the keyboard. Stand by for caffeine-fueled testifyin’ mode.