Everyone knows that the very first thing you should do to improve your specimen photography is to use a tripod: it eliminates hand-shake and gives you much crisper photos. In most respects, my photographs have got much, much better since I’ve been habitually using a tripod.

Well, one reason is the utterly rancid “block editor” that WordPress has started imposing with increasing insistence on its poor users. If there is one thing that world really doesn’t need, it’s a completely new way of writing text. Seriously, WordPress, that was a solved problem in 1984.

This past summer, I got into a Facebook conversation with Steve Kary about turtles and tortoises.

Here’s an odd thing. Over and over again, when a researcher is mistreated by a journal or publisher, we see them telling their story but redacting the name of the journal or publisher involved. Here are a couple of recent examples.

OK, technically this is MB.R.3822, a dorsal vertebra of Giraffatitan brancai formerly known as HMN Ar1, in posterior view, rendered from a 3D scan provided by Heinrich Mallison. But you can’t tell me that when you look at that you don’t see Gandalf shouting at a balrog.

This just in from John Conway: John doesn’t say much about it in the tweet where he unveiled this piece: just “A new #painting, of a Saltapotamus”. His website is just a little more forthcoming: Saltapotamus Saltasaurus was a small (for a sauropod) sauropod from the Late Cretaceous of Argentina.

Long before Matt and others were CT-scanning sauropod vertebrae to understand their internal structure, Werner Janensch was doing it the old-fashioned way.

I’ve got a problem. For a paper I’m working on, I need to run a phylogenetic analysis based on that of Mannion et al. (2013) — the Lusotitan paper.

As John himsef admits in the tweet that announced this picture, it’s five years late … but I am prepared to forgive that because IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO BRONTOSMASH! As always, John’s art is not just scientifically accurate, but evocative.

I just stumbled across this tweet from bird photographer Gloria (@Lucent508). Four photos of the same individual, apparently a Green Heron.

For those following the saga of Oculudentavis (the beautiful tiny dinosaur preserved in amber that turned out to be a lizard), three more things. First, I’ve updated the timeline in Friday’s post to include several more events, kindly pointed out by commenters Pallas1773 and Ian Corfe.