This is super cool: my friend and lead author on the new saltasaur pneumaticity paper, Tito Aureliano, made a short (~6 min) video about the fieldwork that Aline Ghilardi and Marcelo Fernandes and their team — many of whom are authors on the new paper — have been doing in Brazil, and how it led […]

Posterior dorsal vertebra of the Upper Cretaceous nanoid saltasaurid LPP-PV-0200. Three-dimensional reconstruction from CT scan in left lateral view ( A ). Circle and rectangle show sampling planes and the respective thin sections are in ( B , C ). ce centrum, ns neural spine, pn pneumatopore, poz postzygaphophysis, prz prezygapophysis.

Here’s another “blogging this so I can stop retyping it in emails to students” post.  Relevant to all anatomy practical exams: Every time you approach a cadaver/station, get your orientation down first.

Science doesn’t always get done in the right order. In the course of the research for my paper with Mike this past spring, “Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaur so variable?”, published in Qeios in January, I had a couple of epiphanies.

As I was clearing out some old documents, I stumbled on this form from 2006: This was back when Paul Upchurch’s dissertation, then only 13 years old, contained much that still unpublished in more formal venues, notably the description of what was then “Pelorosaurus” becklesii.

Back in June, I saw a series of tweets by sculptor and digital artist Ruadhrí Brennan, showing off the work he’d been doing on sculpting brachiosaurid skulls: Giraffatitan, Brachiosaurus (based on the Felch Quarry skull USNM 5730) and Europasaurus.

FMNH P13018 with me for scale. Photo by Holly Woodward. Some of the Burpee Museum folks and PaleoFest speakers visited the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago after the 2020 ‘Fest. I hadn’t been there since 2012, and a lot had changed. More on that in future posts, maybe.

Back in May, Amy Schwartz posted a photo of a starling that shethat had ringed that morning: Impressed by the subtlety of the coloration, I wondered what would happen if I increased the colour saturation.

I whipped up these doodles with a handwritten list of characteristics during office hours recently, and then realized that this should be a tutorial post.   Most of the stuff listed in the image is pretty self-explanatory, but I want to expand a bit on the textures.

My Oct. 13 National Fossil Day public lecture, “Lost Giants of the Jurassic”, for the Museums of Western Colorado – Dinosaur Journey is now up on their YouTube channel. First 48 minutes are talk, last 36 minutes are Q&A with audience, moderated by Dr. Julia McHugh.

The last time we saw the sauropod femur that Paige Wiren discovered sticking out of a riverbank, it had been moved into the prep lab at the Moab Museum, with the idea that it would eventually go on exhibit as a touch specimen for the public to enjoy and be inspired by. That has come to pass. I was in Moab last month with Drs.