The Sunday after SVP, Brian Engh and I visited the museum in Albuquerque. I was quite taken with the mounted T. rex. It’s waaaay more interesting and dynamic than any other T. rex mount I’ve seen.

This is not ‘Nam. This is Latin. There are rules. The term for a small growth off an organ or body is diverticulum, singular, or diverticula, plural. There are no diverticulae or God forbid diverticuli, no matter what you might read in some papers. Diverticuli is a word – it’s the genitive form of diverticulum.

I wasted some time today making memes. I blame the Paleontology Coproliteposting group on Facebook. Of course I started out by making fun of the most mockable sauropod. This one’s for you Cam-loving perverts out there. You know who you are.

In a comment on the last post, Mike wrote, “perhaps the pneumaticity was intially a size-related feature that merely failed to get unevolved when rebbachisaurs became smaller”. Or maybe pneumaticity got even more extreme as rebbachisaurids got smaller, which apparently happened with saltasaurines

An important paper is out today: Carpenter (2018) names Maraapunisaurus, a new genus to contain the species “Amphicoelias“ fragillimus, on the basis that it’s actually a rebbachisaurid rather than being closely related to the type species Amphicoelias altus. And it’s a compelling idea, as the illustration above shows.

In my recent visit to the LACM herpetology collection, I was interested to note that almost every croc, lizard, and snake vertebra I saw had a pair of neurovascular foramina on either side of the centrum, in “pleurocoel” position. You can see these in the baby Tomistoma tail, above.

A while back — near the start of the year, in fact — Szymon Górnicki interviewed me by email about palaeontology, alternative career paths, open access, palaeoart, PeerJ, scholarly infrastructure, the wonder of blogging, and how to get started learning about palaeo.

This is going to set new records for “almost too late to be worth posting”, but here goes. First up, this Wednesday evening, Oct.

Here’s D10 and the sacrum of Diplodocus AMNH 516 in left lateral and ventral view, from Osborn (1904: fig.

The afternoon of Day 1 at TetZooCon 2018 was split into two parallel streams: downstairs, some talks that I would have loved to see;

Last night, Fiona and I got back from an exhausting but very satisfying weekend spent at TetZooCon 2018, the conference of the famous Tetrapod Zoology blog run by Darren Naish — the sleeping third partner here at SV-POW!. What made this particularly special is that Fiona was one of the speakers this time.