Left side, posterolateral oblique view, wide shot. Same thing, close up. Right side, lateral, wide. Same thing, close up. For more on this and other pneumatic sauropod tails, please see Wedel and Taylor (2013, here). And for more on the currently unresolved taxonomic status of FMNH P25112, see this post.

In her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo argues that you should get rid of everything in

Back in the spring of 1998, Kent Sanders and I started CT scanning sauropod vertebrae. We started just to get a baseline for the Sauroposeidon project, but in time the data we collected formed the basis for my MS thesis, and for a good chunk of my dissertation as well.

Open-access journalist Richard Poynder posted a really good interview today with the Gates Foundation’s Associate Officer of Knowledge & Research Services, Ashley Farley. I feel bad about picking on one fragment of it, but I really can’t let this bit pass: RP: As you said, Gates-funded research publications must now have a CC BY licence attached.

This past weekend I was camping up the coast at Hearst San Simeon State Park, with my son, London, and Brian Engh. We went to see the elephant seal colony at Piedras Blancas. It was my first time seeing elephant seals in the wild.

As part of a major spring cleaning operation that we started the first week of January, this week I opened the last two boxes left over from when we moved into our current house. One of them had a bundle of framed art.

There’s a new paper out, describing the Argentinian titanosaur Mendozasaurus in detail (Gonzalez Riga et al. 2018): 46 pages of multi-view photos, tables of measurement, and careful, detailed description and discussion. But here’s what leapt out at me when I skimmed the paper: Just look at that thing. It’s ridiculous.

Here’s OMNH 1330, another vertebra from the big Oklahoma apatosaurine. Based on the size and shape of the transverse process, and the large pneumatic chambers on either side of the neural canal, I think this is probably a 4th caudal, but it could plausibly be a 3rd or a 5th.

In the first installment in this series (link), we looked at a couple of weird sauropod vertebrae with neurocentral joints that were situated either entirely dorsal or ventral to the neural canals. This post has more examples of what I am calling “offset” neurocentral synchondroses.

When I was nine, a copy of Don Glut’s The New Dinosaur Dictionary turned up in my local Waldenbooks. It wasn’t my first dinosaur book, by far – I’d been a dinosaurophile since the age of three. But The New Dinosaur Dictionary was different.

Computer programmer, essayist and venture capitalist Paul Graham writes: In most fields, prototypes have traditionally been made out of different materials. Typefaces to be cut in metal were initially designed with a brush on paper. Statues to be cast in bronze were modelled in wax.