When last I blogged about James Herrmann’s art, it was about some cool sculptures of dinosaurs that he had done for the Cincinnati Museum Center. I am particularly taken with the sculptures that are skeleton on one side, and fully-fleshed on the other side. Now he’s doing mammals, specifically Ice Age megafauna.

We’re currently in open access week, and one of the things I’ve noticed has been a rash of tweets of the form “I support #OpenAccess because …”. Here is a random collection. We support #OpenAccess because #OpenScience needs good infrastructures.

Altounian et al. (2015: fig 6). As has been discussed here before, the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) does not only innervate the larynx, but also parts of the esophagus and trachea (see this post, and in particular this comment). You can see that in this cadaver photo, in which the RLN is sending nice big visible branches into both the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. Why is it doing this?

Get your red-cyan glasses — you do have some, right? — and check out this glorious image. Best full-screen it, it’s worth seeing! And here is the lame 2D version for those of you who have still not spent 99 lousy cents on a pair of 3D glasses: What are we looking at here?

Last week, while Fiona and I were out walking, we noticed a decaying roadkill badger a bit over half a mile from our house. Yesterday we were out walking again, and we saw that it had decayed to the point where there was not much to the flesh at all.

Everyone knows that the very first thing you should do to improve your specimen photography is to use a tripod: it eliminates hand-shake and gives you much crisper photos. In most respects, my photographs have got much, much better since I’ve been habitually using a tripod.

Well, one reason is the utterly rancid “block editor” that WordPress has started imposing with increasing insistence on its poor users. If there is one thing that world really doesn’t need, it’s a completely new way of writing text. Seriously, WordPress, that was a solved problem in 1984.

This past summer, I got into a Facebook conversation with Steve Kary about turtles and tortoises.

Here’s an odd thing. Over and over again, when a researcher is mistreated by a journal or publisher, we see them telling their story but redacting the name of the journal or publisher involved. Here are a couple of recent examples.

OK, technically this is MB.R.3822, a dorsal vertebra of Giraffatitan brancai formerly known as HMN Ar1, in posterior view, rendered from a 3D scan provided by Heinrich Mallison. But you can’t tell me that when you look at that you don’t see Gandalf shouting at a balrog.

This just in from John Conway: John doesn’t say much about it in the tweet where he unveiled this piece: just “A new #painting, of a Saltapotamus”. His website is just a little more forthcoming: Saltapotamus Saltasaurus was a small (for a sauropod) sauropod from the Late Cretaceous of Argentina.