I whipped up these doodles with a handwritten list of characteristics during office hours recently, and then realized that this should be a tutorial post.   Most of the stuff listed in the image is pretty self-explanatory, but I want to expand a bit on the textures.

My Oct. 13 National Fossil Day public lecture, “Lost Giants of the Jurassic”, for the Museums of Western Colorado – Dinosaur Journey is now up on their YouTube channel. First 48 minutes are talk, last 36 minutes are Q&A with audience, moderated by Dr. Julia McHugh.

The last time we saw the sauropod femur that Paige Wiren discovered sticking out of a riverbank, it had been moved into the prep lab at the Moab Museum, with the idea that it would eventually go on exhibit as a touch specimen for the public to enjoy and be inspired by. That has come to pass. I was in Moab last month with Drs.

Last time, we looked at the difference between cost, value and price, and applied those concepts to simple markets like the one for chairs, and the complex market that is scholarly publication.

We have a tendency to be sloppy about language in everyday usage, so that words like “cost”, “value” and “price” are used more or less interchangeably. But economists will tell you that the words have distinct meanings, and picking them apart is crucial to understand economic transaction.

I have the honor of giving the National Fossil Day Virtual Lecture for The Museums of Western Colorado – Dinosaur Journey, next Wednesday, October 13, from 7:00 to 8:00 PM, Mountain Daylight Time. The title of my talk is “Lost Giants of the Jurassic” but it’s mostly going to be about Brachiosaurus.

Two and a half years ago, I posted a glorious hemisected hen, taken (with permission) from a poster by Roberts et al. 2016, and supplied by Ray Wilhite, best known in this parish for his work on sauropod appendicular material.

On Thursday, I took the family to the Cotswolds Wildlife Park, a rather lovely zoo just over an hour away from us in Burford, Oxfordshire. Somehow I’d never even heard of this place until we passed a sign for it on the A417 a few weeks ago.

In mammals — certainly the most-studied vertebrates — regional differentiation of the vertebral column is distinct and easy to spot. But things aren’t so simple with sauropods.

Various Internet rumours have suggested that the Archbishop is a super-giant sauropod one third larger than the mounted Giraffatitan specimen MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN SII). This is incorrect.

Here’s a pretty cool image: Plate 7 from Lull (1919), showing the partial skeleton of Barosaurus YPM 429 (above), compared to the much more complete skeleton of Diplodocus CM84/94 (below). I’ve been pretty familiar with that Barosaurus skeleton diagram since I was about 9 years old, because it’s in Donald Glut’s New Dinosaur Dictionary, which […]