Vicki and London and I were in downtown Los Angeles for a friend’s wedding on Dec. 30, and afterward we visited The Last Bookstore. Embarrassingly, even though I’m LA-adjacent, I had not been before.

Hey, look, a new sauropod vertebra to kick off the new year! I’ve blogged a lot about the giant – and tiny – apatosaurines from the Morrison Formation of Oklahoma, and just once on Saurophaganax. But otherwise I don’t think I’ve covered any of the other Oklahoma Morrison dinos.

As Matt recently noted, we both have a ton of photos from various expeditions that we’ve never got around to posting — not to mention a ton of specimens that we’ve seen but never got around to working on. Here is one of the most exciting: As you can see, this is a massive cervical […]

Matt just commented to me: “One thing I am realizing is that I have loads(*) of cleaned-up, ready-to-post photos in old talks, that I’ve never posted.” I too have that experience. The problem is, they tend to be sized for a 1280×960 projector screen, which is not really good enough for modern illustrations.

Hey sports fans, as the year winds down I bring you another podcast appearance. This time out I’m rolling with Mark Hallett, and we’re talking about sauropods through the lens of our still-plausibly-somewhat-newish book, The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants, on the I Know Dino podcast.

This year Santaposeidon comes to you courtesy of OMNH vert paleo head preparator and 20th-level fossil conservation wizard Kyle Davies, who took the photo, composed the card, and gave me kind permission to share it here.

I have used this photo in loads of talks, but as far as I can tell, this is the first time I’ve put it up on SV-POW!

Here’s a bunch of cool stuff that is either available now or happening soon: Sauropod Dinosaurs book excerpt in Prehistoric Times Been on the fence about the sauropod book Mark Hallett and I wrote?

Having benefitted so hugely from 3D models that Heinrich Mallison made for me — most notably, the Xenoposeidon model that is the supplementary data file for the recent preprint — I realised the time has come for me to learn to do this for myself.

Peter Falkingham and Nick Gardner independently put me onto Sketchfab: a website that provides a way to view and navigate 3D models without needing to download any software beyond the browser that you’re already running. So get yourself over to the live Xenoposeidon model!

In writing the recent preprint “Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur” (Taylor 2017), it was invaluable to have a 3D model of the Xenoposeidon vertebra available. Here’s a short clip of viewing the model in the free MeshLab program.