My friend Toby Lowther wrote to me back in December to ask this question: It’s strange, isn’t it? The last I knew, Shonisaurus was the largest ichthyosaur, at about 20 m and 50 tonnes, and this is considerably bigger than any plesiosaur or mosasaur I know of. It’s up the sperm-whale size category, but not even close to the bigger baleen whales. Why not?

Long-time readers may remember that back in 2013, Matt and I played a game where we each designed a cover, in half an hour, for a book whose name was randomly generated. Here’s what I came up with for The Name of the Names : I really enjoyed that process and even toyed with the idea of offering it as a service for hire, for people creating self-published books.

The best thing about collaborations is that I get to work with amazing colleagues from around the world.

Here’s a cool comparo.

I have a new paper out in Acta Paleontologica Polonica, with Guillermo Windholz, Juan Porfiri, Domenica Dos Santos, and Flavio Bellardini, on the first CT scan of a pneumatic caudal vertebra of a rebbachisaurid: Windholz, G.J., Porfiri, J.D., Dos Santos, D., Bellardini, F., and Wedel, M.J. 2024.

Eoneophron, Parapropalaehoplophorus, Ia io, and friends The other day Mike wrote to me about the new Hell Creek oviraptorosaur Eoneophron (Atkins-Weltman et al. 2024), commenting that he liked the ‘eoneo’ — old new — part of the name. That sent me down a little etymological rabbit hole.

Just a quick post about the genesis of the Brachiosaurus rib paper (Taylor and Wedel 2023) that I wrote about at the very end of last year. Although this is in some respects a minor paper, I’m fond of it because it fell into place so quickly and easily. Taylor and Wedel 2023:Figure.

As we’ve often observed, it’s a funny thing that incredibly well-known dinosaur specimens can sit around for decades, or for more than a century, before someone notices something fascinating about them. One lesson to learn from this is the importance of collections — their creation, maintenance and accessibility. Another is of course to always look at the fossils we see.

Let’s look again at Figure 7 of our recent paper on bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines: Figure 7. Schematic reconstructions of ventral neck musculature in two diplodocid sauropods.

Back in the first post about our recent paper on bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines, I noted: This has been much on my mind of late, especially as the majority of talks at SVPCA 2023 and many new papers involve numerical methods.

Last time I promised you exciting news about sauropod neck-muscle mass. Let none say that I do not fulfil covenents. And, as usual, when talking about sauropod neck muscle mass, I’m going to start by talking about bird legs. Look at this flamingo: Ridiculous, right? Those legs are like matchsticks. How can they possibly work. Where are the muscles? And the answer of course is that they’re on this ostrich: Check out those huge drumsticks!