Earlier this month I was amazed to see the new paper by Cerda et al. (2012), “Extreme postcranial pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs from South America.” The title is dramatic, but the paper delivers the promised extremeness in spades.
From the collections of the American Museum of Natural History, I give you the sacrum and fused ilia of “ Apatosaurus ” minimus AMNH 675, as correctly identified by Steve P in a comment to the previous post: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-6439 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6439” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/06/27/apatosaurus-minimus-sacrumilia-right-lateral-view/img_0612-apatosaurus-minimus-sacrum-right-lateral/”
A couple of posts back, when Matt was talking about turtle laminae, he included a photo of me in front of the skeleton of the giant turtle Archelon . Also in that photo is the tripod I was using — if you want to call it that — a tripod of altogether startling inadequacy.
Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up. You may recall a story from the Onion Our Dumb Century book, allegedly from 1904, about the skeleton of Satan being discovered in Wyoming.
Folks, I just got this email from open-access guru Peter Suber (quoted with permission): Has anyone else seen this? Is it something we should be worried about? Does anyone know what we can do to stop it? (BTW., for what it’s worth I can assure anyone else who’s seeing this warning that it can be ignored. There’s no malware here.)
Here’s a cool skeleton of the South American pleurodire Podocnemis in the Yale Peabody Museum.
Secretary bird: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-6405 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6405” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/06/19/eyelashes-of-the-harvard-museum-of-natural-history/secretary/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/secretary.jpeg” orig-size=“1280,960” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"4.5","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot
Check this baby out: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-6401 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6401” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/06/17/sperm-whales-of-the-harvard-museum-of-natural-history/img_0313/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/img_0313.jpg” orig-size=“2000,1332” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"2","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot
It’s five to ten on Saturday night. Matt and I are in New York City. We could be at the all-you-can-eat sushi buffet a couple of blocks down from our hotel, or watching a film, or doing all sorts of cool stuff. Instead, we’re in our hotel room. Matt is reformatting the bibliography of our neck-elongation manuscript, and I am tweaking the format of the citations. Just sayin’.
I am finalising an article for submission to Palaeontologia Electronica . Regarding the acknowledgements, the Contributor Instructions say: “Initials are used rather than given names.” WHY?! What on earth is gained by forcing authors to thank R. Cifelli instead of Rich Cifelli for access to specimens? And of course this is the tiniest tip of the pointless-reformatting iceberg.
More from my flying visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I found this exhibition of bird eggs very striking. In particular, it was shocking how much bigger the elephant-bird egg is than that of the ostrich.