Oh, hey, so you know how the most tedious thing you can ever hear is someone recounting one of their dreams? I want to tell you about a dream I had last night.

Xinjiangtitan when originally described, from Wu et al. (2013) We’re way late to this party, but better late than never I guess. Wu et al. (2013) described Xinjiangtitan shanshanesis as a new mamenchisaurid from the Middle Jurassic of China. At the time of the initial description, all of the dorsal and sacral vertebrae had been uncovered, as well as a handful of the most posterior cervicals and most anterior caudals.

Early in my 2015 preprint on the incompleteness of sauropod necks, I wrote “Unambiguously complete necks are known from published account of only six species of sauropod, two of which are species of the same genus”, and listed them. Haha, stupid me! I had hugely under-counted.

Can I really be the first one to have done this? Seems unlikely. Sing out in the comments if you’ve seen others. Anyway, folks, here’s your new all-purpose scale silhouette. Useful fact: the standard metal folding chairs found from sea to shining sea are 29.25 inches tall, or 0.75 meters.

We’ve noted many times over the years how inconsistent pneumatic features are in sauropod vertebra. Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and even between the sides of individual vertebrae.

These are nice. Click through to empiggen. I ripped them from Parker (1874), which appears to be a free download from JSTOR, here, and tweaked the colors just a bit. If you are here for serious science, these guides to the abbreviations used in the plates will come in handy.

Here’s how my pig skull turned out (prep post is here). Verdict? I’m reasonably happy with it. As Mike wrote in the post that kicked off the “Things to Make and Do” series, “a pig skull is a serious piece of kit”. It’s big and substantial and it looks awesome sitting on the shelf.

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Up top, C10 and C11 of Diplodocus carnegii CM 84, from Hatcher (1901). Below, C9 and C10 of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018, from Gilmore (1936). The Diplodocus verts are in right lateral view but reversed for ease of comparison, and the Apatosaurus verts are in left lateral view.

This is a very belated follow-up to “Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on“, and it’s about how to turn Step 2, “Learn lots of stuff”, into concrete progress.

This beautiful image is bird 52659 from Florida Museum, a green heron Butorides virescens, CT scanned and published on Twitter.

This is something I did over Thanksgiving break in 2019. I meant to blog about it sooner, but you know, 2020 and all. So here I am finally getting around to it. (Yes, I know the ruler in the above photo is the worst scale bar ever. I was, uh, making a point.