I have long intended to write a paper entitled Why Elephants Are So Small, as a companion piece to Why Giraffes Have Short Necks (Taylor and Wedel 2013). I’ve often discussed this project with Matt, usually under the acronym WEASS, and its substance has come up in the previous post, and especially Mickey Mortimer’s comment: […]

Consider a small sauropod of length x, as shown on the left above. Its mass is proportional to x cubed, it stands on leg bones whose cross-sectional area is x squared, and it ingests food through a gullet whose cross-sectional area is x squared.

I’m currently working on a paper about the AMNH’s rearing Barosaurus mount. (That’s just one of the multiple reasons I am currently obsessed by Barosaurus.) It’s a fascinating process: more of a history project than a scientific one. It’s throwing up all sorts of things. Here’s one.

Last Thursday I gave a public lecture for the No Man’s Land Historical Society in the Oklahoma Panhandle, titled “Oklahoma’s Jurassic Giants: the Dinosaurs of Black Mesa”. It’s now on YouTube, on the No Man’s Land Museum’s channel.

A new book is out from Cambridge University Press, Dental Cementum in Anthropology, edited by Stephan Naji, William Rendu, and Lionel Gourichon.

Today sees the publication of a special issue of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica in honor of my mentor, Rich Cifelli, who took me under his wing when I was in high school and advised me in my undergraduate and Master’s thesis research.

Morphological variation in paramedullary airways; yellow = spinal cord, green = diverticula. The spectrum of variation is discretized into four groups: i , branches of intertransverse diverticula contact spinal cord at intervertebral joints; ii , branches of intertransverse diverticula extend partially into the vertebral canal, but remain discontinuous;

Remember this classic XKCD comic?

I made this for my own amusement, and thought you guys may as well get to benefit from it, too. Enjoy! References Melstrom, Keegan M., Michael D. D’Emic, Daniel Chure and Jeffrey A. Wilson. 2016. A juvenile sauropod dinosaur from the Late Jurassic of Utah, U.S.A., presents further evidence of an avian style air-sac system.

For reasons that would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse, I recently found myself in need of a hemisected turkey cervical. Happily, I own five skeletonised turkey necks, so it was with me the work of a moment to select a candidate. But now what?

Among the numerous weird features of MWC 8028, the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus, is the extreme biconcave profile of the caudal vertebrae, in which each centrum is basically reduced to a vertical plate of bone separating two cup-shaped articular surfaces.