I have long intended to write a paper entitled Why Elephants Are So Small, as a companion piece to Why Giraffes Have Short Necks (Taylor and Wedel 2013). I’ve often discussed this project with Matt, usually under the acronym WEASS, and its substance has come up in the previous post, and especially Mickey Mortimer’s comment: That is exactly what the WEASS project was supposed to consist of: a list of many candidate limitations on how big animals

Consider a small sauropod of length x , as shown on the left above. Its mass is proportional to x cubed, it stands on leg bones whose cross-sectional area is x squared, and it ingests food through a gullet whose cross-sectional area is x squared. Now consider a larger sauropod of length 2 x , as shown on the right above.

I’m currently working on a paper about the AMNH’s rearing Barosaurus mount. (That’s just one of the multiple reasons I am currently obsessed by Barosaurus .) It’s a fascinating process: more of a history project than a scientific one. It’s throwing up all sorts of things. Here’s one. In 1992, the year after the mount went up, S. O. Landry gave a talk at the annual meeting of American Zoologist about this mount.

Last Thursday I gave a public lecture for the No Man’s Land Historical Society in the Oklahoma Panhandle, titled “Oklahoma’s Jurassic Giants: the Dinosaurs of Black Mesa”. It’s now on YouTube, on the No Man’s Land Museum’s channel. There’s a point I want to make here, that I also made in the talk: we can’t predict the value of natural history collections.

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New paper out: Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves.

Remember this classic XKCD comic?

I made this for my own amusement, and thought you guys may as well get to benefit from it, too.

For reasons that would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse, I recently found myself in need of a hemisected turkey cervical. Happily, I own five skeletonised turkey necks, so it was with me the work of a moment to select a candidate. But now what? How to hemisect it? We have

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