A middle caudal vertebra of a diplodocid, presumably Tornieria africana , on display at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, in left lateral view. Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History led me to this post at Nothing Human, and poking around there led me to another good’un: “Shallow feedback hollows you out”. That post really hit for me, and it made me think about SV-POW!

Newly out in VAMP: Oh man, there is soooo much to say about this paper, which is a free download here. The short, short version is that OMNH 1123, the holotype specimen of the giant allosaurid Saurophaganax maximus , does not definitely belong to a theropod and may actually belong to a sauropod, and the same goes for some of the referred material, namely the atlas and chevrons.

Check out the new paper by Jerry Harris, “What exactly is a nuchal ligament and who exactly has one?” This is one of those papers that fires on lots of cylinders for me: it’s interesting, it’s useful, and holy crap, the work that went into it is humbling.

I happened to be reading back over Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen, when something caught my eye in the example photo we used of how to capture the label and appropriately positioned scalebar along with the specimen: Somehow, when I wrote that post, I didn’t actually look at the photo I was showing […]

For our wedding anniversary last year (30 years!), Fiona gave me the very wonderful Lego 21320 kit, Dinosaur Fossils, which builds into impressive skeletons of Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Pteranodon. This is a truly great kit and I’d encourage anyone to go out and find one.

Back in 2013, John Conway was doing some paintings and Darren Naish was drawing lots of animals for a book. I chipped in to help with their artwork and some back and forth ensued. All this happened on Twitter, and I wrote it up in an SV-POW! post with lots of embedded tweets.

We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper.

Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest.

At the end of October, I submitted a paper that’s been hanging over me for a couple of years. I’ve been in the habit of tracking nearly all my submissions since I started out in palaeontology, it happens that this one is number 50 in the list.

Sobia “helping” Brian Engh draw Ornatops . I’ve written here before about Donald Glut’s The New Dinosaur Dictionary and the looooong shadow it cast over my adolescence.

Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer.