I’ll be sending this letter to the Royal Society, but I also want it out there in public, because I hope that more people will follow the lead set by Dorothy Bishop and Stephen Curry in putting pressure on the Royal Society to grow a backbone.
A truly obscure variant muscle: the tibiocalcaneus internus. Ramnani et al. (2025: fig. 5). I have a new paper out: Ramnani, A.S., Landeros, J.T., Wedel, M., Moellmer, R., Wan, S., Shofler, D.W. 2025. Supernumerary muscles in the leg and foot: A review of their types, frequency, and clinical implications. Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association 114(6): 9pp.
New paper out today, in Geology of the Intermountain West (free at this link): Boisvert, Colin, Bivens, Gunnar, Curtice, Brian, Wilhite, Ray, and Wedel, Mathew. 2025. Census of currently known specimens of the Late Jurassic sauropod Haplocanthosaurus from the Morrison Formation, USA.
Jessie Atterholt and I are helping one of our students write up a pathological dinosaur bone (you’ll definitely hear more about this in time), and we needed a good example paper for our student to use as a model.
Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus, basing it and its type species H. priscus on the adult specimen CM 572.
A middle caudal vertebra of a diplodocid, presumably Tornieria africana , on display at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, in left lateral view. Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History led me to this post at Nothing Human, and poking around there led me to another good’un: “Shallow feedback hollows you out”. That post really hit for me, and it made me think about SV-POW!
Newly out in VAMP: Oh man, there is soooo much to say about this paper, which is a free download here. The short, short version is that OMNH 1123, the holotype specimen of the giant allosaurid Saurophaganax maximus , does not definitely belong to a theropod and may actually belong to a sauropod, and the same goes for some of the referred material, namely the atlas and chevrons.
Check out the new paper by Jerry Harris, “What exactly is a nuchal ligament and who exactly has one?” This is one of those papers that fires on lots of cylinders for me: it’s interesting, it’s useful, and holy crap, the work that went into it is humbling.
I happened to be reading back over Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen, when something caught my eye in the example photo we used of how to capture the label and appropriately positioned scalebar along with the specimen: Somehow, when I wrote that post, I didn’t actually look at the photo I was showing […]
For our wedding anniversary last year (30 years!), Fiona gave me the very wonderful Lego 21320 kit, Dinosaur Fossils, which builds into impressive skeletons of Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Pteranodon. This is a truly great kit and I’d encourage anyone to go out and find one.
Back in 2013, John Conway was doing some paintings and Darren Naish was drawing lots of animals for a book. I chipped in to help with their artwork and some back and forth ensued. All this happened on Twitter, and I wrote it up in an SV-POW! post with lots of embedded tweets.