Clouds over Black Mesa. Baby spadefoot toad, with my index finger for scale. Someone was here before us. Even though Black Mesa is best known for its Morrison exposures and giant Jurassic dinosaurs, there are Triassic rocks here, too, which have produced both body fossils and tracks, including these.

We all know that apatosaurines have big honkin’ cervical ribs (well, most of us know that). But did they also have unusually large neural spines? The question occurred to me the other day when I was driving home from work.

I’ve known who Peter Doson was since I was nine years old. A copy of The Dinosaurs by William Stout and William Service, with scientific content by Peter, showed up at my local Waldenbooks around the same time as the New Dinosaur Dictionary – much more on The Dinosaurs another time.

Years ago, the roof of our summer-house suffered some water damage and had to be replaced. So I converted it into a woodshed which I attached to the side of our house.

Exploded turtle skulls are cool, but what about exploding the entire turtle? (Not that way.) Folks at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien roll hard. Or did – I assume these exhibits are old.

Many thanks to all of the good folks in the radiology department at the Hemet Valley Medical Center, especially John Yasmer, DO, my partner in crime, and Heather Salzwedel, who did all of the actual work of scanning while the rest of us stood around making oooh and aaah noises. Further bulletins as events warrant.

I know, I know — you never believed this day would come. And who could blame you? Nearly thirteen years after my 2005 SVPCA talkSweet Seventy-Five and Never Been Kissed, I am finally kicking the Archbishop descriptive work into gear. And I’m doing it in the open!

I got an email a couple of days ago from Maija Karala, asking me a question I’d not come across before (among several other questions): how much poop did Argentinosaurus produce in a day?

Remember this broken Giraffatitan dorsal vertebra, which Janensch figured in 1950? It is not only cracked in half, anteroposteriorly, it’s also unfused.

Last Wednesday, May 9, Brian Engh and I bombed out to Utah for a few days of paleo adventures. Here are some highlights from our trip. We started at a Triassic tracksite on Thursday.

This is the second post in the “bird neural canals are weird” series (intro post here), and it covers the first of five expansions of the spinal cord or meninges in the lumbosacral regions of birds. The lumbosacral expansion of the spinal cord is not unique to birds and doesn’t require any special explanation.