A student wrote to me to ask where I got the motivation to prep my anatomy lectures. Here’s what I sent back. What works for you?

Otters are a “near-threatened” species in the UK, so it’s a tragedy when one is killed by a car. That said, when a roadkill otter is spotted by a friend and delivered to me five days after Christmas, that goes some way to redeeming the tragedy. So far as I can determine, while otters are protected by law in the UK, there’s nothing saying that a roadkill otter can’t be kept for scientific purposes.

In lieu of any new science today, have some memes, and a wonderful day!

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When I visited Dinosaur National Monument in October with Brian Engh and Yara Haridy, we spent a decent amount of time checking out DNM 28, a skull and associated bits of Camarasaurus . In particular, I got some shots of the axis (the second cervical vertebra behind the head), and it got me thinking about pneumaticity in this unusual element.

Here’s a skull of a wild boar. Note the loooong face, practically a straight line from the tip of the snout to the top of the back of the head. We shall now proceed through a series of pig skulls with increasingly steep foreheads.

Long-term readers will remember that way back in the pre-history of this blog, I wrote about my experience de-fleshing a pig head, which because the very first part in our ongoing series Things to Make and Do. In a subsequent post with a sheep-skull multiview, I included the multiview of that pig skull, too.

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Here’s how I got my start in research. Through a mentorship program, I started volunteering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in the spring of 1992, when I was a junior in high school.

Tiny Titan, a temporary exhibit about the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus project, opened at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California, last night. How? Why? Read on. Things have been quieter this year on the Haplo front than they were in 2018, for many reasons.