I had an interesting opportunity when I was in Utah and Colorado a couple of weeks ago. At Dinosaur Journey in Fruita, Colorado, I went looking for a cast of the Potter Creek Brachiosaurus humerus.

Unworn: Worn: Spent some time last week just admiring these things. They’re pretty cool. EDIT: in answer to Mike’s question in the first comment below, here’s a photo of some more worn teeth, showing that the level of wear in the one shown above is not unusual.

Nothing too serious here, just a fun shot I got while in the collections at BYU this past week. The Brachiosaurus element is metacarpal 1 (thumb column) from BYU 4744, the Potter Creek material.

I don’t know if this exists in the US, but here in Britain it’s common for kids in Year 11 at school (age 15 or 16) to have a week allocated where they find a position (usually unpaid) and do some work outside the school.

Two professionals, hard at work. After this year’s SVPCA, Vicki and London and I spent a few days with the Taylor family in the lovely village of Ruardean. It wasn’t all faffing about with the Iguanodon pelvis, the above photo notwithstanding. Mike and I had much to discuss after the conference, in particular what the next steps might be for the Supersaurus project.

Matt and I are about to submit a paper. One of the journals we considered — and would have really liked in many respects — turned out to use the CC By-NC-SA license.

Spotted this beauty in the collections at Dinosaur Journey this past summer. With the front end of the centrum blown off, taphonomy once again proves to be the poor man’s CT machine, giving us a great look at the pneumatic spaces inside the vertebra. EDIT, Oct. 13, 2019 — WHOOPS! That ain’t a cervical.

This past summer I did a post on my birthday card from Brian Engh, but I haven’t posted about my birthday present from him: this handmade fired-clay sculpture of Parasaurolophus.

Regular readers will remember that we followed up our 1VPC talk about what it means for a vertebra to be horizontal by writing it up as a paper, and doing it in the open.

This awesome photo was taken in the SVPCA 2019 exhibit area by Dean Lomax (L). On the right, Jessie Atterholt, me, and Mike are checking out some Isle of Wight rebbachisaurid vertebrae prepped by Mick Green, who is juuuust visible behind Dean.

As usual I came back from SVPCA to a mountain of un-dealt-with day-job work, which is why it’s taken me so long to get this post done and up. I wanted to get it posted as quickly as I could decently arrange, because I had a fantastic time at this year’s meeting and I wanted […]