Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

SV-POW! ... All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695

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2026-04-21 00:15:40 GMT

Upcoming public talks about dinosaurs at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
Image courtesy of the SNOMNH
I’ll be at OU and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on May 8 and 9.
On Friday, May 8, I’m giving a lunch and learn thing for OU graduate students on how to make new discoveries in anatomy. That evening I’m giving a public talk on horned dinosaurs. Admission is free! Details here.
On Saturday, May 9, I’ll be back at the museum for the “Curiousiday: Collections Celebration”. One of the jackets of the Sauroposeidon holotype specimen will be on display in the museum’s public galleries, and I’ll be giving a couple of short talks about Sauroposeidon. Time for my talks is TBD, but probably something like 11:00 and 2:00. The first 25 visitors get in free, after that it’s regular museum admission ($12 for 18 and up, $10 seniors, $7 kids 4-17, free for babies and toddlers). Details here.
I don’t know yet if there will be a formal book signing, but if you have one of my books and would like it signed, I’ve never turned anyone down.
If you’re within striking distance of Norman, come on out, see the museum’s awesome fossils, and maybe put up with some geek banging on about dinosaurs and/or vandalizing your library.
In honor of the upcoming horned dinosaur talk, here’s a Triceratops I drew. More on that another time.
doi:10.59350/hnkz4-b3d26

2026-04-11 22:56:28 GMT

In search of rearing mounted sauropod skeletons
I’m pretty sure that our old friend the AMNH Barosaurus was the first sauropod skeleton even mounted in a rearing pose.
Taylor and Wedel 2016:Figure 1. Mounted cast skeleton of Barosaurus referred specimen AMNH 6341, in the entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History. Homo sapiens (MPT) for scale. Photograph by MJW.
(Does anyone know of an earlier one? That would be fascinating!)
But what other mounted sauropods have been placed in a rearing posture, with both forefeet off the ground? I know of four others. First, the rearing Diplodocus at the Museum of Science and Innovation in Tampa, Florida, that we discussed in detail in Taylor et al. (2023:80–82):
Taylor et al. 2023:Figure 10. Double Diplodocus mount at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), Tampa, Florida. Both individuals are identical, having been cast from the molds made by Dinolab from the concrete Diplodocus of Vernal. Photograph by Anthony Pelaez, taken between 1997 and 2017.
Strangely enough, the other three are all individuals of Camarasaurus, an ugly four-square sauropod whose centre of gravity was well forward of the acetabulum in normal posture, and which would have found rearing much more difficult than in diplodocids. My guess is that’s just because Camarasaurus is so abundant that there are a lot of mounted skeletons out there, and some have been mounted in rearing postures because, well, why not?
Here is one from the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre in Thermopolis:
Camarasaurus skeleton from the BS (Beside Sauropod) quarry, on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Photograph by CryolophosaurusEllioti, CC By. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WDC_-_Camarasaurus_skeleton.jpg
(I can’t find a good photo of this mount from the front or the side: if anyone can, please let me know in the comments.)
The next is in the US National Museum (USNM), otherwise known as the NMNH, otherwise known as the Smithsonian. It’s on the right of this photo:
Rearing Camarasaurus (right of photo, the smaller of the two sauropods) at the USNM/NMNH/Smithsonian. Photo by Ben Miller. https://sauropods.win/@extinctmonsters/109293854660129716
And finally, as I was putting this post together, I stumbled across this mount at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands:
Yet another rearing Camarasaurus, at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Photo by thedogg, CC By-SA. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WLANL_-_thedogg_-_Camarasaurus_(2).jpg
I know nothing about this one, and would welcome any details.
In fact, I don’t know much about any of the three rearing camarasaurs. Can anyone tell me, for example, when they went up? And whether the AMNH Barosaurus was a conscious inspiration?
And the $64,000 question: does anyone know of other rearing sauropod mounts?References
Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2016. The neck of Barosaurus: longer, wider and weirder than those of Diplodocus and other diplodocines. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e67v2 doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.67v2
Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
doi:10.59350/qg664-9be62

2026-02-25 21:35:55 GMT

The checklist for new zoological genus and species names is published
A little over a month ago, I announced that DRAFT v4 of the the checklist for new zoological genus and species names, incorporating information about electronic publication, was available for critique. Perhaps surprisingly, there were no comments (in contrast to the 127 comments on DRAFT v3). So I have gone ahead and published the checklist. You are free to use this in your own work. If you want to cite it, I recommend:
Taylor, Michael P., 2026. Checklist for new zoological genus and species names. Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 25 February, 2026. doi:10.59350/knt7m-whb54. https://svpow.com/2026/02/25/checklist-for-new-zoological-genus-and-species-names/ archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260225210412/https://svpow.com/2026/02/25/checklist-for-new-zoological-genus-and-species-names/

2025-10-18 13:34:59 GMT

Video of the 2024 SSP debate: “The open access movement has failed”
Readers with good memories will remember that back in May last year I announced I would be one of the two participants in the plenary debate that closes the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was cast against type, proposing the motion “The open access movement has failed”, with preprint advocate Jessica Polka providing the honorable opposition.
I posted the full text of my opening argument and of Jessica’s argument in opposition — but not of the shorter rebuttals that each of us gave, or of course the unscripted Q&A that followed the formal part of the debate.
Now, only a year and a bit late, comes the video of the debate! My apologies for the delay: it wasn’t available straight after the meeting, and then I forgot to check back a month later.
I’d like to embed the video in this page, but WordPress won’t let me (not unreasonably — I wouldn’t let people embed arbitrary JavaScript in my site, either). So you’ll have to link through to the SSP’s page with the video.
It’s the only way to find out who won the debate, after all!

2025-10-13 21:09:10 GMT

If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?
A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1].
The subject line was:
Your paper “NEURAL SPINE BIFURCATION…” is now an analogy.
No; no, it’s not.
Our paper Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications (Wedel and Taylor 2013) is not an analogy. It’s a scientific study of whether neural spines bifurcate progressively through ontogeny. (Spoiler: not really. Somehow we stretched that out to 34 pages.)
The email then goes on to say:
Our AI turned your research into an easy to understand analogy
Oh, did it now? Do tell.
The bifurcation of neural spines in sauropods can be likened to the branching patterns of river deltas. Just as a river flows into a delta…
But it really, really can’t. You might just as well say “The bifurcation of neural spines in sauropods can be likened to Marcel Proust’s seven-volume masterwork À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.” It would be exactly as meaningful.
To add insult to injury, they want me to pay to upgrade to Premium if I want to see how this nonsense continues. Hard pass.
When I forwarded this exercise in idiocy to Matt, he replied with just two lines:
What is this I can’t even.
If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?
Well, quite.
The current generation of “AI”s do have some uses. I ask ChatGPT questions about the minutiae of programming all the time, like when I wanted to know whether there is a standard pattern for invoking a React hook on behalf of a class-based component. But for every useful application of LLMs, there are ten useless or actively destructive uses. I’m not sure which of those two categories “Your paper is now an analogy” falls into.
Just stop it.Notes
[1] It was academia.edu, and who can possibly explain how they were able to get a domain name in the .edu TLD?References
Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications. Palarch’s Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 10(1):1-34. ISSN 1567-2158.

2025-10-11 06:24:33 GMT

New paper: pneumatic diverticula and blood vessels in the neural canals of the toothed birds Ichthyornis and Janavis
New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free:Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.
If I recall the sequence correctly, Jessie Atterholt met Dan Field at one of the recent Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution (SAPE) meetings. Between them they spun up the idea of looking for evidence of paramedullary diverticula (PMDs) in the neural canals of some fossil birds that Dan and his collaborators and students had been studying, namely Ichthyornis and Janavis, both toothy ichthyornithines from the Late Cretaceous. This was not long after Jessie and I had our paper on PMDs in extant birds published (Atterholt and Wedel 2022), and we were interested in chasing PMDs down the tree. At the same time, Dan and his former student, Juan Benito, had a big war chest of CT scans of Ichthyornis and Janavis. So the actual work for this project was very similar to the work for Atterholt and Wedel (2022): lots of hours in front of a computer, flipping through stacks of CT slices. But I’m getting ahead of myself.Skeletal reconstruction of Ichthyornis from Marsh 1880
Ichthyornis you know, it’s one of the toothed birds that O.C. Marsh described in the 1870s, after basically buying the specimen out from under E.D. Cope, one of the many inciting incidents of the Bone Wars. For most of my career I simply could not keep Ichthyornis and Hesperornis straight. It has always been perversely confusing to me that the flightless swimming bird is not named “fish bird”, and the gull-like flying bird is not named for Hesperus, or Venus, a thing actually up in the sky. The “fish bird” was the flyer and the “Venus bird” was the flightless swimmer. It’s just plain backwards. (Before anyone pushes their glasses up their nose in the comments, yes, I know that Hesperornis is intended as “western bird”. Both taxa are from the West. Still confusing.)The much larger Janavis (right) compared to the more-completely-known Ichthyornis (left). From Benito et al. (2022: fig. 1).
Janavis I was not familiar with prior to this project. It’s the sister taxon of Ichthyornis, only named in 2022 by Benito et al. Janavis was big, too, with an estimated wingspan of 5 feet, about the same as the largest extant gulls (or for me, an Oklahoma farmboy, a really big hawk). The vertebrae of Janavis are cuh-ray-zee pneumatic, totally honeycombed inside and fairly Swiss-cheesy in places on the outside, edging up to the frankly unbelievable anatomy of pelicans. Or shoebill storks, about which more in a sec.Jessie Atterholt, Grace Burton, and me at the LACM in August, 2024. Sorry about the unfortunate non-sauropods in the background.
Grace Burton, one of Dan’s current PhD students, came over to SoCal last year to do some research at the LACM and work with Jessie and me on the IchyJan project (it only took me about half a dozen emails to realize that I was too lazy to type “Ichthyornis and Janavis” the thousand or so times I’d need to). The three of us had an enjoyable visit to the LACM Ornithology collection to find comparative specimens, some of which we ended up figuring in the new paper. And Jessie and Grace spend a LOT of time looking through CT scans. I got in on some of that, but really, Jessie and Grace did almost all the heavy lifting with both the research and the writing, so it’s only just that they’re the first two authors. This was mostly an Atterholt joint from the get-go anyway. If my interest in weird neural canal anatomy is a roaring bonfire, Jessie’s is more like the Sun.One of the cervical vertebrae of the shoebill stork, Balaeniceps rex, LACM 116167. Check out the “bone foam” of pneumatic foramina inside the cervical rib loop and on the side of the centrum.
Of the new coauthors I picked up on this project, one is close to home: Elle Fricano, who works alongside Jessie and me as one of the anatomy faculty at WesternU. We ended up needing to scan some specimens at WesternU with our microCT machine, and Elle did virtually all of the scanning and interp, so we brought her on as an author. Elle’s own research is mostly on the evolution of the cranial base and ear region in humans and other primates, but she’s gotten into pneumaticity with a very nice paper on the human maxillary sinus (Fricano et al. 2025). She also works as a forensic anthropologist, and earlier this year she passed her forensic board exams to became the 176th Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology — the 176th ever (full list here) — and one of only 124 active board-certified forensic anthropologists in the world. That is a heck of an achievement for anyone, but especially for someone on the tenure track, with a heavy teaching load, research, committee service, and a family. Am I bragging on my colleague? Heck yes. When a fire burns down a neighborhood out here, Elle is one of the people who goes and sifts bone shards out of the ashes and does her best to give the survivors some closure (not to mention helping investigate other deaths, ones that Nature had less of a hand in). That work is not without its costs, and I’m a little in awe of anyone who chooses to do it.Hypothesized reconstructions of respiratory, vascular, and neurological structures in the neural canals of Ichthyornis dispar and Janavis finalidens. (a) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) cervical 11 showing likely arrangement of paramedullary diverticula (green) and paired extradural ventral spinal vessels (pink) relative to the spinal cord (yellow). (b) Janavis (NHMM RD 271) indeterminate mid-thoracic vertebra 1 showing likely arrangement of the extradural dorsal spinal vein (blue) relative to the spinal cord (yellow). Atterholt et al. (2025: figure 5).
Anyway: neural canals in fossil birds. We were hunting for hard evidence of pneumatic diverticula inside the neural canal, ideally unambiguous foramina opening into clearly pneumatic spaces in the neural arch or centrum. We found those foramina, and lots of other weird stuff besides. Some of the vertebrae of Ichthyornis and Janavis have bilobed neural canals, and from comparisons with extant birds we’re pretty sure the upper lobe held a big venous sinus. Crocs have one, too, in their bilobed neural canals. Most of the critters that fall evolutionarily between crocs and birds don’t have bilobed neural canals, but they may still have had big venous sinuses that simply failed to leave diagnostic traces — the curse of pneumaticity researchers extended to blood vessels.
Some of our CT scans of extant birds show that upper lobe being shared by both a big venous sinus and pneumatic diverticula, and the upper lobe is sometimes expanded into what Jessie and I nicknamed the “pneumatic attic”: a large space of variable geometry that very often has big pneumatic foramina opening into the transverse processes, postzygapophyseal rami, or neural spines. You can see the “pneumatic attic” with the pneumatic diverticula restored in a vertebra of Ichthyornis in Figure 5, above. Virtually everything we found in Ichthyornis and Janavis could be lined up 1-for-1 with an identical geometry or topology in one or another extant bird, which made us feel better about our interpretations.Paired ventrolateral channels in Ichthyornis dispar, and examples of similar structures in extant avians. (a) Ichthyornis (ALMNH 3316) axis; note that the channel on the right has just given rise to a neurovascular foramen. (b) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) vertebra 11. (c) King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus, LACM 99854) thoracic vertebra. (d) Ichthyornis (ALMNH 3316) sacral vertebra. (e) Blue petrel (Halobaena caerulea) sacral vertebra. (f) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) indeterminate caudal vertebra 1. (g) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) indeterminate caudal vertebra 2. (h) Common loon (Gavia immer, LACM 112761) caudal vertebra. (i) Antarctic prion (Pachyptila desolata) caudal vertebra. Atterholt et al. (2025: figure 4).
One thing that needs more work is the frequent occurrence of small, paired troughs at the ventrolateral corners of the neural canal, not only in Ichthyornis and Janavis but in many extant birds as well. These troughs often bud off little vascular foramina that we can trace down into the centrum, so we’re pretty sure the troughs held blood vessels in life. A lot of vertebrates have a ladder-like arrangement of arteries in their neural canals, which could be the source of these troughs, but they might also have been produced by little basivertebral veins, which birds otherwise seem to lack. Why don’t we we just inject some dead birds, dissect them, and find out, you maybe wondering. Well, we’re gonna, at some point, but that’s at least another whole paper’s worth of work, and possibly several. We’d rather just go look up the answer, but as far as we and our reviewers could tell, no-one has ever written about these troughs and their contents before (if you know otherwise, please sing out in the comments!).
So once again, Jessie and I find ourselves needing to do novel anatomical research on living animals, partly because it’s worth doing in its own right, but also so that we can make progress on the paleontological questions that got us into this in the first place. It’s awfully hard to make informed paleobiological inferences when so much basic anatomy remains to be documented for the first time, even in extant critters. As I keep saying, a lot of this is work that anyone with sufficient time and curiosity could do, much of it inexpensively. So if you find this stuff intriguing, we’d love to have more explorers out here where the pneumatosphere intrudes into the neural-canal-iverse.I was up inside the Utah Field House Diplodocus three weeks ago, logging pneumatic structures that no-one had documented in 125 years. More on that another time. Many thanks to John Foster for the ladder and the permission.
As for Jessie and me, this is our fifth neural-canal-related paper (see the evolving list here). We keep kicking them out the rate of one per year, which is nice and sustainable and unlikely to stop anytime soon. According to my to-do list, she and I have at least another 15 collaborative papers planned. Not all of them are about neural canals, but still… I reckon we’d better get to it.REFERENCES
Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves. The Anatomical Record 306(1): 29-50. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24923
Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.
Benito, Juan; Kuo, Pei-Chen; Widrig, Klara E.; Jagt, John W. M.; Field, Daniel J. 2022. Cretaceous ornithurine supports a neognathous crown bird ancestor. Nature. 612 (7938): 100–105. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05445-y.
Fricano, Ellen E.I; Nguyen, Joseph; Hallal, Ryan; and Llera Martín, Catherine J. 2025. Under the surface: Correlates with maxillary sinus shape. Journal of Anatomy. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.14283
Marsh, O.C. 1880. Odontornithes: a monograph on the extinct toothed birds of North America. United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 201 pp.

2025-08-09 21:37:37 GMT

Talk slides are not fungibleHere’s a new slide that wasn’t in my talk last summer.
Mike and I are working on our respective talks for DinoCon 2025 — a timely concern, since Mike presents next Saturday and I’m on next Sunday. My talk will be an adapted and upgraded version of the keynote talk I gave at the Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference last summer. Adapted because I have to shave off about half an hour from my very long Tate talk, and upgraded because I’ve had 13 months of additional thoughts. The required changes led to this exchange:
Matt: The trick — and what I’m dithering over — is what combination of slides will make a talk that will not just be passable, but sing, as its own separate and coherent thing.
Mike: Exactly. It’s always about sequencing, and the narrative that that sequence induces.
Matt: It’s such an interesting problem. Some slides don’t disrupt the narrative much, others are like big rocks in a stream — you can’t put them just anywhere, because they threaten to direct the flow in some new direction, or create awkwardness if you force the flow back onto its original path around them. So in much the same way that paint or graphite interact with the canvas or paper to produce unexpected results that were more than just your artistic intent flowing from your brain through your fingers — they push back, in a way — I find that slides have their own narrative geometry, that makes some transitions natural and others almost impossible. And personally I find it very hard to redo a slide to change that geometry; I’m much more likely to change things upstream and downstream to make that slide seem natural rather than like a dam or impediment. If it’s a sufficiently good slide, which for me is driven by its internal logic. In ecological terms, each slide has an autecology that dictates how it works on its own, and a synecology that describes how it works with other slides.
Mike: Once again, you have accidentally written an SV-POW! post. Seriously. Just post it.

2025-08-07 20:52:50 GMT

DinoCon 2025 is next weekThe DinoCon brochure — really a conference guidebook, with schedule, speaker list, vendor list, maps, etc. — is a free download here. Art by Natalia Jagielska.
DinoCon is right around the corner, the weekend of August 16-17. The speaker lineup looks fantastic, and the vendor lineup looks like it will execute a Chicxulub on my wallet. On the speaker side, I’m happy to see sauropods getting so much representation. In addition to Mike’s talk on the Carnegie Diplodocus and its various offspring, and mine on the sauropod body plan, Tess Gallagher is giving a talk on sauropod skin. I’ve vaguely noodled on that topic (once, twice), but it is far from my realm of expertise, so I’m looking forward to getting the real story from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. A talk on sauropod skin seems extremely fitting for a conference that straddles the science and art of dinosaurs, with lots of presenters and attendees who are interested in the life appearance of extinct animals.DinoCon 2025 schedule (with the Saturday evening quiz and art exhibition cut off). Click to embiggen, or see the full version online at this link.
I’m stoked for every single book signing — Witton! Hennessy! Naish! — but most especially for Dougal Dixon’s event on Sunday afternoon. He’ll be signing copies of the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, which I recently reviewed and am looking forward to acquiring. I’ve been idolizing Dixon from afar since I was 10, so it will be deeply satisfying to finally meet him and tell him in person how much his books have meant to me. There’s a non-zero chance that I will also throw myself on the floor, crying and begging like a spoiled child for him to work with Breakdown Press on new English-language editions of Man After Man and Greenworld. (I gather Dixon doesn’t have fond memories of Man After Man or think highly of it, but it’s still one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution and it would be great to have it in print again, not least so I could get a copy without selling any organs.) If you see me there, have your camera ready, just in case.
I don’t have the time or financial fortitude to cover all the vendors right now, but there’s a list in the DinoCon 2025 Brochure (link) and various vendors have been getting love on the DinoCon Instagram account for weeks. I’m horrifixhilarated at the prospect of my impending bankruptcy.
Hope to see you there!

2025-08-03 03:53:56 GMT

Lay research on turtles, and the evolution of scholarly journalsEasty, resident Terrapene carolina triunguis at Casa Adams Wedel, sometime gnawer of rat skulls, whose recent exploits will be detailed in future posts.
In Archie Carr’s encyclopedic “Handbook of Turtles: The Turtles of the United States, Canada, and Baja California”, first published in 1952, he quotes favorably and at length the observations of “Mrs. Knowlton” on the behavior of wood turtles (Clemmys insculpta) and box turtles (Terrapene carolina). The source given in the references is:Knowlton, Josphine Gibson. 1943. My Turtles. Privately printed. Pp. i-xxxvii, 39-222, 22 figs.
Who was Josephine Gibson Knowlton? She was the author of a few other books, including “The Innocent Cause” and “Roma”; the younger sister of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and possibly one of the models for his iconic “Gibson Girl” illustrations around the turn of the 20th century; and she married Daniel Knowlton, who played football for Harvard and was later the legal counsel for the Interstate Commerce Commission. Importantly for our purposes, and for Archie Carr’s, she wrote and privately published a whole book about the turtles in her backyard. At least at the time that Carr was writing in the 1950s, Knowlton had cornered the market on observations of wood turtle mating behavior. For all I know, her observations on the topic are still the most detailed available; lots of people write about where turtles are found, but few take the time to sit like Jane Goodall and watch them go through their stereotypically protracted mating sessions.It sure as heck looks like Josephine’s quite famous older brother illustrated her turtle book; there are interior illustrations in the same style.
Archie Carr was utterly omnivorous in collecting information on the ranges, life history, and behavior of turtles, and his book cites all kinds of sources, from august scientific journals to newspaper clippings. It’s fascinating just to page through the bibliography. Anyone with more than one citation is almost certainly a professional biologist or scientist of some kind, but a lot of the one-hit-wonders, especially from the 1800s, are regular folks. This is directly relevant to a recent comment by Allen Hazen, in which he asked, “Is it worth trying the ‘experiment’ of comparing articles in the same journal published decades apart?” What follows is the example I promised to post.
While reading Carr, I was intrigued by a reference to Fisher (1887) on Muhlenberg’s turtle at a lake in New York, so I tracked it down. The account appears in the Zoology section of the “general notes”, on pp. 672-673 of the 1887 volume of The American Naturalist. Fisher was an MD, not a herpetologist, and he was just reporting on some turtle shells he found stomping around the edges of a lake. Here’s the whole publication (note that nowadays we’d call it Muhlenberg’s turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergii; when I was a kid it was Clemmys muhlenbergii):
I really admire this little paper — in 165 words, Fisher laid out his methods, described his findings, raised a taphonomic mystery, tied in ornithological and botanical observations to make a biogeographic point, and cited a source, and it’s written like it was meant to be read by humans (curious non-specialists, even) and not merely to pass an editorial gauntlet. This reinforces my strong feeling that conference abstracts can and should be fully-fledged miniature papers, in conception, execution, credit received, and citeability. I will aim to hold my future abstracts to the Fisher standard.
Still, it is wild to me that American Naturalist is now one of the most prestigious journals in ecology and evolution, such that publishing one paper in “AmNat” can be a career-maker for an up-and-coming biologist, and this has been true for some decades already. But 140 years ago they were publishing letters from randos on dead varmints they found down at the lake.
More on that shift — which was certainly not unique to AmNat, and has happened at other journals within my lifetime — in a future post.
#1 #2 #3

2025-07-29 18:36:01 GMT

Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition
Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic The New Dinosaurs, which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press. Here’s the website, open for pre-orders (link); the book ships on August 11. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this absolute banger.CHRONONAUT
Dougal Dixon’s books After Man (1981) and The New Dinosaurs (1988) both cast very long shadows over my intellectual development. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when I first saw a thumbnail advertisement for After Man in a bookstore flyer. With nothing more than the cover art and a 2-3 sentence description to go on, my mind fizzed. To say that the mere idea of the book fired my imagination is an understatement so gross as to be a lie; more accurately it detonated an atomic bomb under my imagination, Project-Orion-style, and sent it rocketing into the stratosphere. When I finally found a copy at the local public library a couple of years later, I was not disappointed. The Gigantelopes, Raboons, and Porpins were awesomely strange and wonderful and inspiring. At about the same time in my life that The Dinosaurs by William Stout and William Service was making me a chrononaut in the Mesozoic, After Man was giving me a similarly vertiginous sensation of the distant future.My 1988 first edition of The New Dinosaurs and my 2022 40th anniversary edition of After Man.
I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw The New Dinosaurs on the shelf in my local Waldenbooks, a week before my 14th birthday. The book was on a display rack, cover facing out, and the image of the cutlasstooth made my stomach drop. The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution, by Dougal Dixon. “OMG it’s the After Man guy he did a dinosaur book OMG OMG OMG!!” crashed through my mind like a railgun projectile. The New Dinosaurs bent my brain no less than After Man, with its flightless pterosaurs, aquatic hypsilophodonts, and tiny, eusocial pachycephalosaurs. I cared for my first edition hardcover like it was a holy relic; even though I reread it countless times as a teenager and have revisited it many times as an adult, it still looks essentially brand new.
Fast forward to the 2020s. When Breakdown Press published the 40th anniversary edition of After Man in 2022, I bought a copy quick-quick. It’s sitting proudly on display across the living room from me as I type this. When the folks at Breakdown asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, I felt like a kid who’d gotten the golden ticket. I’m excited to get to review the book, but even happier to live in a world where the book is in print again, from a publisher who cares about getting it right. I haven’t yet seen the reprinted book in the flesh — this review is based on digital files supplied by Breakdown — but based on the 40th anniversary edition of After Man my confidence is high. The new After Man has a thick, high-gloss cover, pages sewn in signatures, and excellent color reproduction, and I have every reason to expect the same from the 2025 edition of The New Dinosaurs.This book taught me the fundamentals of biogeography. Palaearctic Realm opening spread, pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.CONCEPT
I’m not sure how well-known it is that the conceptual engine of The New Dinosaurs is not merely “Hey whoa weird critters”, but using the idea of imaginary saurians to explain biogeography. In an interview with Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology (link), Dougal Dixon said regarding the success of After Man:
“It made me think… there’s a future in this. That is, in popular-level books that use fictitious examples of factual processes, there’s definitely room for a few more. And that’s why I came up with the idea for The New Dinosaurs. Again, I wanted to do the same sort of thing but, this time, I was aiming to create a popular-level book on zoogeography, using fictitious examples to show what the dinosaurs might perhaps be like if they hadn’t become extinct.”
In the same interview Dixon wonders to what extent the book achieved that aim, rather than being just a gee-whiz spec evo book. It worked for me! When I learned about biogeography in college, the concepts of “Nearctic” North America, “Palearctic” Eurasia, and so on were already familiar to me from The New Dinosaurs. Similarly, I’m pretty sure that I first learned the concept of biomes from After Man.As a lover of both turtles and sauropods, I was pre-adapted to be a Turtosaur stan. Pp. 42-43 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.WHAT ABOUT THOSE NEW DINOSAURS?
I’m not the first to point out that The New Dinosaurs was eerily prescient in many ways — Darren has touched on this at Tetrapod Zoology, and Riley Black wrote a nice piece on the topic of 2022, which seems only be available via Wayback Machine now (link; I heap vile curses on Scientific American for being the digital graveyard of so much good science writing). Some things for which we had little to no evidence for the 80s but which are now either well-established or at least up for discussion include:
fuzz
small arboreal dinosaurs, esp. with skin-wings (e.g., the Flurrit)
semi-aquatic dinosaurs
arctic dinosaurs
dwarf island dinosaurs
insect-eating dinosaurs
at least the specter of flightless terrestrial pterosaurs
To that list I’d add morphologically conservative sauropods. The awesome, glyptodont-analogue Turtosaur is an osteoderm-bedecked titanosaur taken to its logical conclusion, and there’s a little sidebar about a short-lived group of sprinting sauropods, but the sauropods in the book are all large-bodied, long-necked, long-tailed, mostly graviportal herbivores. Revisiting The New Dinosaurs for this review after a hiatus of some years, I was pleased to see that among the many radical evolutionary transformations postulated in other clades, the sauropods were all still recognizable sauropods, which nicely fits my ideas about the constraints on their bauplan.
Now, it’s both unrealistic and unreasonable to expect a book written in the mid-1980s to be scientifically up-to-date in 2025, and indeed there are many discoveries and developments in the past four decades that the book did not anticipate. Whole clades of dinosaurs that were known very imperfectly (therizinosaurs, rebbachisaurs) or not at all (alvarezsaurs, scansoriopterygids) when the book was created are now much better known both scientifically and popularly. To this we can add a vast ecological diversity of Mesozoic crocs, birds, squamates, and mammals. The sole mammal featured in the book is the semiaquatic Zwim, a small insectivorous placental, explicitly described as an outlier among the morphologically and ecologically conservative mammals. In the universe of The New Dinosaurs, arboreal, gliding, and digging mammals didn’t evolve in either the Mesozoic or the Cenozoic; in our own timeline, mammals were doing all of those things by the Late Jurassic at least. (Aside: I can’t remember if I’ve said this out loud anywhere, but the ecological diversity of Mesozoic mammals shouldn’t surprise anyone given that our surviving monotremes include an electrosensory swimmer and a spiny digger. The mere existence of platypuses and echidnas implies a whole zoo of ecological experimentation among early mammals.)
Similarly, we know a lot more about the biology of dinosaurs now. One thing that may jar modern dinosaur enthusiasts encountering the book for the first time is so many dinosaurs shown with very mammalian rear ends and skinny tails (depicted in the coelurosaurian arbrosaurs, in multiple hypsilophodonts and hadrosaurs, and even to some extent in the cover-adorning cutlasstooth), as opposed to the thick caudofemoralis-housing tails now known to be present in almost all non-avian dinosaurs. When I first encountered The New Dinosaurs at age 13, the furry dinosaurs blew my mind, and none moreso than the desert-adapted Taranter (see below). I suspect that the only integumentary surprise for readers now opening the book for the first time will be the absence of pennaceous feathers on any of the non-avian dinosaurs.
These observations are not intended as — and, I hope, could not be reasonably interpreted as — criticisms of the book. It is an artifact of the post-Deinonychus but pre-Sinosauropteryx Dinosaur Renaissance, not a forward projection of dinosaurs as we know them today but of dinosaurs as they were known back then. So here in 2025 the book rather mind-bendingly embodies the future (now) of the past (the 1980s) of the future (the Cenozoic) of the past (non-avian dinosaurs).Probably my favorite paintings in the book. Pp. 86-87 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.
I can’t do a review without mentioning the art. My opinion there hasn’t changed much since I was 13. Like After Man, the ideas in The New Dinosaurs sometimes outrun their visual execution. Most of the art is serviceable, some of the pieces really shine — the painterly work on the Paraso in particular has always impressed me — and a few are so flat and indifferently rendered that my eyes tend to slide past them. My initial impression, unchanged almost four decades later, was that the artists either only had experience painting mammals and birds, or the publisher game them the brief to render the alternative dinosaurs in the guise of mammals and birds. Weirdly, I find most of the black-and-white pencil sketches much more consistently well-executed than the full-color paintings; it’s hard for me to tell how much of that is real and how much is just my strong bent towards pencil sketches (about which see more here and here). Given that Dougal Dixon is himself a very gifted artist (see examples of Dixon’s work at his personal website and in various TetZoo posts: one, two, three), I’d love to see a version of the book someday that included his original sketches. Perhaps if there’s sufficient interest, such material could be included in a 40th anniversary edition of The New Dinosaurs, as Dixon and Breakdown Press did for After Man. One can hope. For now, let’s just say that the book runs on the strength of its ideas and the art mostly gets the job done.
I’ll close on a couple of high notes. First, I love the layout of the book, which is unchanged in the new edition. I find it interesting, drawing my eyes omnivorously around each spread, but uncluttered, with just the right amount of negative space to let each image and text block breathe. Also, and very fittingly for a book about zoogeography, the maps at the beginning of each section are fantastic, and would sit comfortably in a top-of-the-line science book today.CH-CH-CH-CHANGESThe reprinted book does have some nods to the passage of human time and the accumulation of scientific knowledge since 1988. There’s a new Author’s Introduction credited to Dougal Dixon, 2024, and on the following page this note:This is a facsimile reproduction of the 1988 first edition
of The New Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon.
Some of the text has been changed at the request
of the author to reflect scientific discoveries
made in the intervening years.
The changes have been made in a slightly
different typeface to make their presence clear.I really like having the updates in a different typeface; it’s the publishing equivalent of making sure that the cast and sculpted bits can be distinguished from real bone in a mounted dinosaur skeleton. Along the same lines, a minor but pleasing thing for anyone comparing both versions of the book is that the pagination hasn’t changed; the ever-contentious Lank is still on page 34, and so on.How do I know when I got the first edition of The New Dinosaurs? Because, bless my geeky little heart, I inscribed each of my dinosaur books with my name and the date of acquisition.
So what’s updated? Mostly the front matter, with a few tweaks elsewhere in the book. The section on “The Great Extinction” (pp. 6-9) has been heavily revised to present the evidence for the impact hypothesis. In the “What is a Dinosaur” section (pp. 10-11), the left-hand page has been overhauled and now features a phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs and their outgroups rather than the hub-and-spokes “bubblegram” of the original book, in which saurischians, ornithischians, pterosaurs, and crocs all arose independently from thecodonts. The following right-hand page hasn’t been edited at all as far as I can tell. This creates a minor disjunct; the passage, “It is possible that warm-blooded dinosaurs may have had fur or down” appears unchanged on page 11, but on the revised page 10 the evolution of feathers in theropods has already been established as observed fact.
The following section, “The New Tree of Life” (pp. 12-15), is really, really new. Not only does it follow the fate of various vertebrate groups into a hypothetical mass-extinction-free Cenozoic, as in the original book, but the underlying relationship diagram has been substantially overhauled to somewhat better reflect current thinking on dinosaur evolution. I say “somewhat” because there are some peculiarities: tyrannosaurs and ornithomimids are on a common branch, separated from all other theropods; oviraptorosaurs are allied with a big swath of coelurosaurs that are in turn separate from therizinosaurs, maniraptorans, alvarezsaurs, and birds.
Not only is the phylogenetic arrangement a little odd, the fates of several clades and their surviving representatives (in the alternative Cenozoic) have changed from the original book. The Gourmand was originally a specialized scavenging tyrannosaur, but predatory tyrannosaurs apparently survived as well (according to the bubblegram; none were featured in the original book). In the new edition, all tyrannosaurs died out in the mid-Cenozoic and were replaced by abelisaurs that spread north from Gondwana. The Gourmand art is unchanged, but it is now described as an abelisaur, which is fine. With its long, low body, short hind limbs, and absent forelimbs, the Gourmand arguably reads better as an abelisaur than a tyrannosaur anyway, even if its scavenge-then-snooze biology is pulled from Lawrence Lambe’s sleepy post-prandial Gorgosaurus of the early 20th century.
There are a few other such phylogenetic reassignments, and they don’t all completely cohere. In the original book, Madagascar is a dinosaurian Australia, home to a relictual fauna of titanosaurian sauropods and Megalosaurus (not some generalized megalosaurid or megalosauroid, but good old William-Buckland-approved Megalosaurus, albeit as the new species M. modernus). This is now Megalodontosaurus, a carcharodontosaur; according to the revised text, abelisaurs and carcharodontosaurs both made it to Madagascar, but only the carcharodontosaurs survived. To fictionally wipe out the theropod clade that actually diversified in Madagascar (abelisaurs) and replace it with a clade with zero known Malagasy representatives (carcharodontosaurs) is, to say the least, an odd choice for a book founded in zoogeography.The Mountain Leaper in the 1988 original (left) and the new 2025 edition (right). Note that the hands have been edited out of both the color art and the black and white sketches. I’m pretty sure the two standing Mountain Leapers have had raised feet removed as well. Differences in color and so on are down to my imperfect photography and photo-editing. P. 61 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.
In the original book, the Northclaw and the Mountain Leaper were generalized coelurosaurs, but now they are a therizinosaur and an alvarezsaur, respectively. According to the revised text, some therizinosaurs reverted to carnivory and those are the only ones that have survived. The Mountain Leaper is now described as an alvarezsaur, and its art is changed — the original art showed multi-fingered hands, which wouldn’t do for an alvarezsaurid, so the hands (and I think at least one raised foot) are painted over in the color art and simply erased from the accompanying pencil diagram. As far as I could tell, this is the only animal in the book to have its art revised. The fish-eating Dip, a small theropod (p. 76), is now described as being descended from ornithomimids rather than the Mountain Leaper, its first-edition forebear. But in the Dip’s description the parenthetical reference to page 61 is still to the Mountain Leaper, which is now an alvarezsaur and not an ornithomimosaur (some phylogenies find alvarezsaurs allied with ornithomimosaurs, but in the revised book the two clades are quite separate).
Am I picking nits? Most assuredly, and not because I don’t like the book but precisely because I do. For me the updates to the text fall between two stools; the new edition of the book is not a perfect time capsule reproduction of the first edition, but neither have the minor edits been integrated thoroughly enough to make a cohesive whole. Given that the book was never going to be completely up-to-date without a clean-sheet redesign, I think it would have been more elegant to leave it untouched, in all of its mid-80s glory. But I’m an old, pedantic curmudgeon, and in all honesty the edits are few and minor and unlikely to corrode anyone’s enjoyment of the book. In the interest of doing my due diligence as a reviewer, I may have already given them more attention than anyone else ever will.
In any case, Dougal Dixon himself is quite well-acquainted with the problem of always-advancing science inevitably outrunning any fixed publication. In the Afterword, subtitled “The Survival of Dinosaurs in Literature”, a paragraph has been added about Jurassic Park. It concludes with these lines (p. 111):
“Unfortunately for both the book and the films, dinosaur science moves on so quickly that many of the details have become very dated. The book has hypsilophodonts climbing trees (no longer believed) and the film has Velociraptor without the feathers we now know it to have possessed. Unfortunately, that is the fate faced by all writers who stray into the genre.”The woolly Taranter so surprised me as an adolescent that I still have feelings about it today. Pp. 52-53 in The New Dinosaurs. (c) Dougal Dixon and Breakdown Press 2025.VERDICT
So should you get the book? Of course! Certainly if you were curious enough to slog through this whole post. The New Dinosaurs is a stone classic, one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution, and almost four decades on it still has the power to delight, astonish, and provoke. I look at some of the new dinosaurs and think, “That’s too conservative” or “That’s too far out”, but then I remember that elephants’ closest living relatives are sirenians and they share their zoogeographic province with big flightless sprint-birds and bone-crushing feliforms and barely-endothermic eusocial rodents and flat tortoises that can inflate their shells to wedge themselves into cracks in the rocks, and I decide that my handle on “too conservative” or “too far out” is extremely poorly calibrated. As Ursula K. Le Guin observed, science fiction is not about the future, it is about the present, viewed “at certain odd times of day in certain weathers”.
Ultimately, The New Dinosaurs has given me things to think about for 36 years. I was born in the 1970s but grew up during what now seems like a golden age of semi-technical dinosaur books in the 1980s. I still have all of those books, and on occasion I dip into one or another for nostalgia. The New Dinosaurs is one of the very few I’ve revisited as a working scientist, to hold up against our ever-evolving understanding of the past and see how well my dinosaurometer is calibrated. The new edition costs £29.99 (about $40 as of this writing), but having this particular time machine on my bookshelf is nearly priceless. Here’s that link again — go do the right thing.CODA: OTHER TIMES AND PLACES
It seems to be speculative evolution season. C.M. Kosemen’s All Tomorrows is being published in an expanded English-language print edition on August 25 (link), and Gert van Dijk’s Wildlife on the Planet Furaha will likely be available later this year (author’s announcement, publisher’s page). If I missed any other developments in this area, sing out in the comments.
Parting shot: you do have a 40th anniversary edition of After Man, right? If not, kindly sort yourself out (link).

2025-07-27 22:52:43 GMT

Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists
In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form:
[NOUN]
Learn how this amazing [whatsit] allowed the rise of civilization, informs every aspect of our daily lives, and may hold the key to our future.
where the noun in question might be salt or wood or math or clouds or daydreaming or whatever. It’s not enough to write an engaging book on Topic X without somehow, by tortuously overreaching, making it the underpinning of life itself.
If we ever do an SV-POW! book, I’ll be sorely tempted to put on the back cover: “Could understanding diapophyseal laminae improve the health of your spleen? Open this book to find out!”This cast of a juvenile apatosaur femur really does hold the key to your future: get your eyes back on the dang road!

2025-07-04 23:22:20 GMT

The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus
(This was buried in Part 5 of my 2011 review of the Sideshow Apatosaurus maquette, but it’s long deserved to be a post of its own, and now it is. I’m not adding anything new here, just extracting and reposting the relevant bits, for reasons that will become clear in a future post. — MJW)
The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus is something Heinrich Mallison pointed out in the second of his excellent Plateosaurus papers (Mallison 2010: fig. 3).
Heinrich’s thoughts on articular cartilage in dinosaurs are well worth reading, so once again I’m going to quote extensively (Mallison 2010: p. 439):
Cartilaginous tissues are rarely preserved on fossils, so the thickness of cartilage caps in dinosaurs is unclear. Often, it is claimed that even large dinosaurs had only thin layers of articular cartilage, as seen in extant large mammals, because layers proportional to extant birds would have been too thick to be effectively supplied with nutrients from the synovial fluid. This argument is fallacious, because it assumes that a thick cartilage cap on a dinosaur long bone would have the same internal composition as the thin cap on a mammalian long bone. Mammals have a thin layer of hyaline cartilage only, but in birds the structure is more complex, with the hyaline cartilage underlain by thicker fibrous cartilage pervaded by numerous blood vessels (Graf et al. 1993: 114, fig. 2), so that nutrient transport is effected through blood vessels, not diffusion. This tissue can be scaled up to a thickness of several centimeters without problems.
An impressive example for the size of cartilaginous structures in dinosaurs is the olecranon process in the stegosaur Kentrosaurus aethiopicus Hennig, 1915. In the original description a left ulna (MB.R.4800.33, field number St 461) is figured (Hennig 1915: fig. 5) that shows a large proximal process. However, other ulnae of the same species lack this process, and are thus far less distinct from other dinosaurian ulnae (Fig. 3B, C). The process on MB.R.4800.33 and other parts of its surface have a surface texture that can also be found on other bones of the same individual, and may indicate some form of hyperostosis or another condition that leads to ossification of cartilaginous tissues. Fig. 3B–D compares MB.R.4800.33 and two other ulnae of K. aethiopicus from the IFGT skeletal mount. It is immediately obvious that the normally not fossilized cartilaginous process has a significant influence on the ability to hyperextend the elbow, because it forms a stop to extension. Similarly large cartilaginous structures may have been present on a plethora of bones in any number of dinosaur taxa, so that range of motion analyses like the one presented here are at best cautious approximations.
One of the crucial points to take away from all of this is that thick cartilage caps did not only expand or only limit the ranges of motions of different joints. The mistake is to think that soft tissues always do one or the other. The big olecranon in Kentrosaurus probably limited the ROM of the elbow, by banging into the humerus in extension. In contrast, thick articular cartilage at the wrists [of sauropods] probably expanded the ROM and may have allowed the strong wrist flexion that some artists have restored for sauropods. I’m not arguing that it must have done so, just that I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that it may have.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
To see that chunk in context and read more about cartilage in dinosaurs, see the original post — here’s that link again. Throwing in the references to Bonnan et al. (2010) and Holliday et al. (2010) because they’re still relevant, foundational studies.References
Bonnan, M.F., Sandrik, J.L., Nishiwaki, T., Wilhite, D.R., Elsey, R.M., and Vittore, C. 2010. Calcified cartilage shape in archosaur long bones reflects overlying joint shape in stress-bearing elements: Implications for nonavian dinosaur locomotion. The Anatomical Record 293: 2044-2055.
Holliday, C.M., R.C. Ridgely, J.C. Sedlmayr and L.M. Witmer. 2010. Cartilaginous epiphyses in extant archosaurs and their implications for reconstructing limb function in dinosaurs. PLoS ONE 5(9): e13120. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013120
Mallison, H. 2010. The digital Plateosaurus II: An assessment of the range of motion of the limbs and vertebral column and of previous reconstructions using a digital skeletal mount. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 55 (3): 433–458.

2025-07-01 21:35:43 GMT

Baffled by diplodocoids? Need a comprehensive introduction? You’re in luck!
It crept out quietly under cover of darkness, but I’m pleased to say that today saw the publication of a new paper:
Van der Linden, Tom T. P., Michael P. Taylor, Amy Campbell, Brian D. Curtice, René Dederichs, Lucas N. Lerzo, John A. Whitlock, D. Cary Woodruff and Emanuel Tschopp. 2025. Introduction to Diplodocoidea. Palaeontologica Electronica 28.2.a27 (49 pages). doi: 10.26879/1518
As you can see, there are nine authors, and this is one of those papers where each one of them earned his or her place by contributing substantially. It’s a paper with many sections: the introduction, an overview of the history of diplodocoid research, a sketch of diplodocoid phylogeny, sections on each major group (Rebbachisauridae, Dicraeosauridae, Apatosaurinae, Diplodocinae, and “other”), a morphological survey, a review of ecology and ontogeny, a biogeographical survey, thoughts on life appearance, and a terrifyingly exhaustive bibliography.Van der Linden et al. 2025: Figure 5. Transformation of the cranial bones in diplodocids with noted trends from Whitlock et al. (2010) and Woodruff et al. (2018). Skulls are modified after Woodruff et al. (2018).
(Figure 5, shown above, is interesting to me. The diplodocid skull shapes shown in the middle and on the right are both hugely familiar to me — wired straight into my hindbrain — but it had simply not occurred to me that they might be growth stages.)
I’m pleased that this paper is at Palaeontologia Electronica — the original open-access palaeontology journal. Despite my annoyance at their low-resolution illustrations (but see the unofficial supplementary information for the full-resolution versions), it’s an important journal not just in our scholarly field but in the history of open access. I’m glad to finally have this notch on my bedpost, after at least one failed attempt.
My main contribution was the historical background section — which will come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with my 2010 paper, or the recent works on the Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023) and the Carnegie Diplodocus (Taylor et al. 2025). I also wrote the overview of apatosaurines, and the bit in the morphology section about cervical vertebrae, and contributed Figures 2 and 3.
This paper is the first chapter in an in-progress special volume about diplodocoids, in which each chapter appears in Palaeontologia Electronica as it’s ready, rather than waiting for all of them to be ready before any are published. I say “first” in the sense that it would appear first in a printed volume because it’s the introduction. But at least one other paper in the collection has already been published: A new diplodocine sauropod from the Morrison Formation, Wyoming, USA (Van der Linden et al. 2024), and a couple more are in review already. (Matt and I had hoped at one point to get our Giant Barosaurus paper into this volume, but we weren’t able to hit the deadline.)
Anyway, this paper is a pretty comprehensive introduction to a very important clade of the most awesome dinosaurs, and I hope much of it is fairly readable to laymen. Enjoy!References
Taylor, Michael P. 2010. Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review. pp. 361-386 in: Richard T. J. Moody, Eric Buffetaut, Darren Naish and David M. Martill (eds.), Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: a Historical Perspective. Geological Society of London, Special Publication 343. doi: 10.1144/SP343.22
Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West 10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi:10.2992/007.091.0104
Van der Linden, Tom T. P., Emanuel Tschopp, Roland B. Sookias, Jonathan J. W. Wallaard, Femke M. Holwerda and Anne S. Schulp. 2024. A new diplodocine sauropod from the Morrison Formation, Wyoming, USA. Palaeontologia Electronica 27.3.a50 (79 pages). doi:10.26879/1380
Van der Linden, Tom T. P., Michael P. Taylor, Amy Campbell, Brian D. Curtice, René Dederichs, Lucas N. Lerzo, John A. Whitlock, D. Cary Woodruff and Emanuel Tschopp. 2025. Introduction to Diplodocoidea. Palaeontologica Electronica 28.2.a27 (49 pages). doi: 10.26879/1518

2025-06-26 07:55:27 GMT

Super-brief, content-free Aquilops update
Gotta say, watching Scarlett Johansson making eyes at Aquilops is not getting old. Screengrab from this clip, the good stuff starts about 6:19. This short clip from the Tonight Show is also pretty great.
Aaaand Halloween costume: sorted. I already have everything I need!
(…except the lifelike Aquilops puppet. Dammit.)
I may get back to posting actual science when I’m not drowning in summer anatomy teaching. Three days to go.

2025-06-06 02:16:42 GMT

a-QUILL-ops, birthday, Lego sets, etc.
First, before the world drowns in madness, it’s a-QUILL-ops, like a quill pen. Not AWK-wuh-lops, like Aquafina.
Second, I made good use of my recent birthday and went to the Lego store at the local mall.
Shortly thereafter:
The little custom figure that comes in the 76972 “Raptor Off-Road Escape” set is *tiny*, and I love it:
Speaking of my birthday, a fair few of you out there in the paleosphere contributed to the birthday book that Jenny put together for me. Thank you, sincerely!
I’m ridiculously fortunate to have so many great friends and colleagues.
Best. Birthday. EVAR!!
Jenny also managed to surprise me with this imaginext Aquilops, which I (A) did not know existed, and (B) would have not expected before June 11, which I believe is when most of the non-Lego Jurassic World Rebirth toys are becoming available. It…has some design choices, all right. But I suppose when a dinosaur is known from a partial skull, reconstructed based on relatives from another continent, turned into a movie character, and then toddler-ified in plastic, some latitude is expected. I’m just stoked that there will be little kids who grow up loving this weird little cat-ceratops — and maybe the attention will translate into more fieldwork and more fossils. Fingers firmly crossed.
Parting shot: hearing Scarlett Johansson breathily talk about one of ‘my’ dinosaurs was not on my bingo card for 2025. Or ever. But here we are.

2025-05-21 00:33:10 GMT

Aquilops-ing intensifies
The second trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth is out today, and there’s my baby at 1:35!
I am completely certain that at some point the tide of Aquilops-themed merch will overwhelm my ability to keep up — not to mention your interest in keeping up with this blog — but for now I am happily in squee-land. Fortunately Mike is keeping the site turning over with some actual science content. Seriously, go read his new Diplodocus paper, it is fascinating and almost absurdly well-written throughout.
Spotted in the wild at my local grocery store.
I didn’t know that Blackberry Dr Pepper existed, and I’m still not 100% convinced that it should, but who am I to turn down sugary soda in such an attractive can? I’m particularly charmed by the silhouette with size facts near the bottom.
What else? There’s a plausibly “life-size” baby Aquilops puppet coming along sometime in June. Still no word on the surely-inevitable-pretty-please actually-life-size plush Aquilops of my dreams, but if it happens, you’ll see it here.
Back to counting the days until the Aquilops Lego sets drop on June 1….

2025-05-15 19:58:22 GMT

Whatever happened to the Munich Diplododcus?
Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic Diplodocus around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich. The first nine were all mounted, and most still stand in their original museums. (The London cast has moved around a lot and currently resides in Coventry; the Russian cast has a very strange history and is now in Moscow.)
But what happened to the Munich cast? The story is in Taylor et al. 2015:68 — our new paper! — and it’s strange enough that I’m just going to quote verbatim.
The remaining Diplodocus was completed, boxed, and shipped to Munich’s Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie in November and December of 1934, completing an exchange for fossils received from Germany five years previously (Carnegie Institute 1934:40). On arrival, however, the cast was not mounted, but instead stored in the basement of the Alte Akademie, which also housed the rest of the paleontological collections. The replica was long assumed to have been destroyed during World War II, specifically during a British Royal Air Force bombing in April 1944, along with the Spinosaurus aegyptiacus holotype BSP 1912 VIII 19 and other dinosaur remains from Egypt. However, the cast had been removed from the building before the bombing raid, and while the elements themselves were not destroyed, the record of where they had been moved to was lost. It now seems the cast was taken to an abandoned convent on the outskirts of Munich. It is believed that a group of hippies, holding parties in the convent during the 1960s, found some cast bones, took them home, and attracted the attention of authorities who then discovered the crates (sources who wish to remain anonymous, pers. comm. 2022). At any rate, the cast was returned to the Munich museum in 1977 but has remained in storage ever since. Calls for it to be mounted as one of the attractions of a new museum at the Nymphenburg castle came to nothing, partly because the museum authorities favored a lighter and stronger resin cast over the maintenance-intensive plaster one.
In a perfect world, I would like to illustrate this post with photos of the Munich Diplodocus, still in its basement at the time of writing. I do have a few such photos; but the person who sent them to me said that the museum prefers that they not be made public, so I’m going to sit on them. Toss in the fact that much of what we found out for the paper was a personal communication from someone who doesn’t want to be named[2], and the whole thing feels rather mysterious.
I just hope that some day, Louise[3] Carnegie’s final gift will find a home worthy of it, on public display.
[1] Well, OK.Maybe not everyone, but probably most people who read this blog.
[2] I don’t even know myself who that person is: Ilja Nieuwland, one of the co-authors, made the relevant contact.
[3] Yes, Louise. The Munich donation was made in 1934, fifteen years after Andrew Carnegie’s death, and was made possible only by financial assistance from his widow Louise. It was in her honour that Apatosaurus louisae was named. What a great legacy.
References
Carnegie Institute. 1934. Thirty-seventh annual report of the
Carnegie Museum. Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.
Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91.

2025-05-08 10:30:15 GMT

Everything you always wanted to know about the Carnegie Diplodocus (but were afraid to ask)
I’m really delighted today to announce the publication of my, and my co-authors’, new paper on the Carnegie Diplodocus:
Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi: to follow.
Taylor et al. 2025: Figure 13. Skeletal atlas of the Carnegie mount of Diplodocus as originally erected in 1907, with bones color-coded according to the specimen they belonged to or were cast or sculpted from. Modified from a skeletal reconstruction by Scott Hartman, used with permission. Bones are colored as follows: CM 84 (most of the skeleton), yellow; CM 94 (right scapulocoracoid, lower right hindlimb, much of the tail and some chevrons), sculpted left tibia, red; CM 307 (the rest of the tail), not pictured; CM 662 (sculpted braincase, right humerus, radius and ulna), green; AMNH 965 (sculpted forefeet and carpus), purple; CM 21775 (left humerus, radius and ulna), cyan; CM 33985 (left fibula and lateral metatarsals), orange; USNM 2673 (sculpted remainder of skull), gold. White elements were sculpted, but the specimens on which these sculptures were based are not definitively known, though are most likely the corresponding CM 84 elements from the other side. Hyoids, clavicles, interclavicle, sternal ribs, and gastralia were all omitted from the mounted skeleton. Source of chevrons past the first seven is uncertain. See Table 2 and text for details.
“But Mike”, you say, “surely the Carnegie Diplodocus is the single best-known sauropod in the world? Didn’t Ilja Nieuwland (2019) write the definitive book about it only six years ago?”
And you’re not wrong. Lots has been written about the history of this specimen, not least my own paper on the concrete cast in Vernal, Utah (Taylor et al. 2013). And yet, surprisingly little has been written about the actual science of this keystone specimen: nothing very substantial, really, since Hatcher’s (1901) original monograph and Holland’s (1906) follow-up.
As I recounted in How the Concrete Diplodocus paper came to be, this new paper initially arose from one seemingly simple question which I wanted to be able to answer in the Concrete Diplodocus paper: what actual bones were the Carnegie casts taken from. And the answer turned out to be complicated. (That answer is summarised in the caption to Figure 13, above.)
As I started trying to figure this out, I got into correspondence with Matt Lamanna, the Carnegie’s very helpful curator of vertebrate palaeontology, and it quickly became apparent that Matt’s substantial contributions warranted co-authorship. Through Matt, I also got in touch with Amy Henrici, then the Carnegie’s collection manager for VP (now retired); and then with Linsly Church, a curatorial assistant in the same department. Both Amy and Linsly also went far beyond the call of duty, so joined the authorship. Meanwhile, as I was working on the brief historical introduction of the paper, I kept finding new rabbit-holes, and got so much help from Ilja Nieuwland that that section grew substantially and he, too, ended up as a co-author. So we ended up with five of us working on this thing, as it grew from a brief note to 27 deliciously detailed pages with 22 illustrations. (Lots of other people helped, too: see the acknowledgements.)Taylor et al. 2015: Figure 16. Right forefeet of the Carnegie Diplodocus and its casts, all in approximately anterior view. A, the feet as originally mounted in 1905 (in the London cast), 1907 (in the first iteration of the Carnegie Museum original-material mount), and subsequent casts, as supervised by Hatcher and Holland and executed by Coggeshall. This photograph shows the right forefoot of the Paris mount, which is unchanged since its original mounting. This forefoot material, sculpted from the camarasaurid specimen AMNH 965, has elongate metacarpals splayed in a semi-plantigrade posture, with multiple phalanges on each of the three medial digit and large unguals on digits I, II, and III. Photograph by Vincent Reneleau (MNHN); B, the right forefoot of the Berlin mount, as remounted in 2006 by Research Casting International, supervised by Kristian Remes. This consists of the original casts mounted in 1908 by Holland and Coggeshall, reposed in a more modern digitigrade posture, with superfluous phalanges and unguals discarded (see text). Photograph by Verónica Díez Díaz (MfN); C, the forefeet of Galeamopus (= “Diplodocus”) hayi HMNS 175 (formerly CM 662), casts of which were used in the Carnegie mount between 1999 and 2007. Note the much shorter metacarpals, the fully digitigrade posture, the reduction in phalangeal count, and the single large manual ungual on digit I. Photograph by Jeremy Huff (TAMU); D, the present forefeet of the Carnegie mount, modelled in 2007 after those of WDC-FS001A, then thought to belong to Diplodocus carnegii (Bedell and Trexler 2005) but currently thought to belong to an as-yet unnamed basal diplodocine (Tschopp et al. 2015:229–230). Note the resemblance to the diplodocine forefoot in part C, with short metacarpals, digitigrade posture, reduced phalangeal count, and a single large manual ungual. Photograph by Matthew C. Lamanna.
It turns out there was still plenty of history to be uncovered, and that some well-known parts of the story aren’t quite right after all. Also, that the composition of the Carnegie mount has changed a lot through the years — something that has not been publicly documented until now. And no-one really knows even how long this dinosaur is.
We dug into all of this, with the hope that the new paper would become a one-stop-shop for anyone who needs to know anything about this keystone specimen. It’s been a joy to work on (and especially to work with Matt L., Amy, Linsly and Ilja), and I hope you will enjoy reading it.
(A note on the venue of publication: I went against my usual policy of open-access venues only because the museum’s in-house journal, Annals of the Carnegie Museum, seemed so historically appropriate for this work. I liked the idea of following the footsteps of Hatcher and Holland — even if their early-1900s monographs were in the now discontinued Memoirs rather than the Annals. In fact, the Annals is not even paywalled: there is no online version at all hosted by the publisher (which is the museum itself). It is a print-only journal. So you can consider the PDF on my own website to be the definitive electronic copy.)
Oh, and we have a sidebar page about the new paper, containing full-resolution copies of all 22 illustrations.References
Hatcher, John Bell. 1901. Diplodocus (Marsh): its osteology, taxonomy, and probable habits, with a restoration of the skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 1:1-63.
Holland, W. J. 1906. Osteology of Diplodocus Marsh with special reference to the restoration of the skeleton of Diplodocus carnegiei Hatcher presented by Mr Andrew Carnegie to the British Museum, May 12 1905. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 2(6):225-278.
Nieuwland, Ilja. 2019. American dinosaur abroad: a cultural history of Carnegie’s plaster Diplodocus. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN:978-0822945574. doi:10.2307/j.ctvh4zh5n
Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West 10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91. doi: to follow.

2025-05-02 08:45:38 GMT

Being an anatomist probably made me a better person
I realize that the titular statement is open to misinterpretation so let me head that off at the pass:
I’m not saying this prescriptively, like you should learn anatomy to become a better person (you should learn anatomy because it’s accessible and it rules), or that knowing anatomy makes people better. I’m also not saying this distributively, like anatomists are better people than non-anatomists. I’m saying it in the narrowest, most literal, and most personal sense: I think I (and possibly no-one else ever) am now at least a slightly better person than I used to be because of my experience with human anatomy.
Here’s my thesis, which only occurred to me for the first time in my life yesterday: marinading in a job where I am forcibly confronted with the fact that humans are physically pretty darned variable under the hood, and thinking a lot about that fact and writing about it, has made it a lot easier for me to accept that humans are probably even more* variable in terms of their personalities and brain chemistries and psychological and emotional drives and preferences and tolerances, and I think that acceptance has made me a little more compassionate.** (Along with educating myself about the various spectra that people fall on, myself included, and finally taking stock of the Godzilla-sized footprints that ADHD has left all over my career and my personal and professional relationships — about which much more another time, probably.)
* More variable than we are physically because our brain chemistries and emotional states are changing all the time, faster than we’re remodeling our bones or making new capillaries.
** This is a relative statement and not a very strong one. I still have plenty of chunks of unexamined and un-remodeled stupidity inside. And plenty of people have upped their compassion without being prodded by data.
This dovetails productively with another of my favorite lines of thinking, which is pondering how little actual evidence we have for almost everything. Galileo’s telescopes had notoriously narrow fields of view. I’ve built replicas (you can get kits online 4 cheap) and such telescopes are pretty frustrating to use, like peering at the night sky through a drinking straw. There’s an obvious analogy with paleontology, where we often have only a handful of bones of one individual of a species that must have included billions or trillions of individuals across its entire temporal range — a particularly haunting thought for someone cursed with an interest in variation. But I think metaphorically that’s how almost all science is: peering at a universe that is effectively endless in its complexity through a series of drinking straws.
That narrowness-of-evidence is applicable to daily life, in terms of making assumptions about other people’s motives and intentions. Probably that person did not cut me off in traffic because they’re a selfish a-hole deliberately trying to show dominance or run me off the road, they were just occupied by thinking about their ailing parent or how they’re going to afford the next little stretch or whether they’ll have any time to spend with their kids by the time they get dinner on the table, and made an innocent mistake. (I’m not saying that excuses their incautiousness whilst directing two tons of steel and glass at 70mph; this is about the calculation going on in my head in the wake of the near miss.) And so on. I can talk with a close friend for hours, and neither of us will express ourselves perfectly, and each of us will interpret the conversation differently, and remember it differently, and that’s just how life is. Maybe the best we can do is become aware that we’re still — always — peering at the world and at each other through drinking straws.
So I think:
People are not just different from each other, but surprisingly so, and probably in more directions than we even have words for yet; and
Individually each of us has very few lines of evidence regarding other people’s internal lives, and the ones we do have are buggy and inaccurate.
…and mashing those two thoughts together makes me want to ask a lot more questions, listen more carefully to the answers, entertain more possibilities, jump to fewer conclusions, default more often to being patient, humble, and forgiving, and maybe above all, to commit fewer failures of kindness. Happily, those also seem like good traits to cultivate as an anatomist and paleontologist.
I’m not saying there aren’t unrepentant jerks in the world. There are plenty, and some of them are having a moment. But most of the folks I interact with aren’t unrepentant jerks, and it’s pretty cool that science gave me a couple of new ways of thinking about that, and of remembering that I probably look like an unrepentant jerk sometimes through other people’s straws.
The photo up top is of a bee in my garden. I don’t know what it was thinking, but I’m willing to venture that it was some variation of “Whoo-hooo, lavender baby!” And incidentally, at least here in southern California lavender is pretty bulletproof if you give it some level of water above ‘complete neglect’, and it’s fun to run your hands through because then they smell nice. So if you take nothing else away from this post, try growing yourself some lavender. Bees love it!

2025-04-09 00:50:10 GMT

Eleanor reacts to the dire wolves
This is our dog Eleanor. She’s a Great Pyrenees/German Shepherd mix, just over one year old. We rescued her last September — some heartless jerkbag had dumped her out out of a moving vehicle in a random neighborhood. Fortunately she was unhurt, but she needed a home, and here we are.
I love her more than I love most people, and it’s only by deliberate exercise of will that I’ve waited this long to put any pictures of her up on this blog. But now I have an excuse!
As you’ve probably heard by now, the company Colossal Biosciences is claiming to have brought back the dire wolf by editing a gray wolf genome. The story made the cover of Time, and you can read that popular article here.
I am not above staging cute pics of Eleanor, but in this case it wasn’t necessary: this is a completely un-staged photo of her watching a video about the dire wolves. Which is pretty crazy, because in six-plus months she’s hardly ever shown any interest in anything on a screen.
Do I have thoughts about the de-extinction of the dire wolf, and the looming de-extinctions of woolly mammoths and thylacines and whatnot? In general I’m all for it. I understand that some folks have principled objections, and that’s fine; like any human enterprise, none of this is going to be perfect, not in planning or execution or outcome; but ultimately these critters are extinct because of us, directly or indirectly, and if we can fix that, even approximately and imperfectly, I’m here for it. Also, I probably couldn’t stop it if I wanted to, so if I’m wrong, not much is gonna break.
Parting shot:
For an animal lover I’ve posted surprisingly little about pets — our box turtle Easty has made it in a couple of times, and our kitty Moe made a cameo appearance in this pig-head post. We’ll see if that holds now that I’m cohabitating with the very photogenic Mademoiselle Floueffeur de Floueff.

2025-04-04 05:57:12 GMT

The Royal Society is dead
A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand.
Eight weeks ago, Steven Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk’s activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society’s code of conduct. That letter has been co-signed by 3494 other UK academics, but has not to my knowledge received even the courtesy of a reply.
A few days later, a second fellow, Andrew Millar, also resigned his Fellowship.
Around the same time, I also sent my own letter to the Royal Society, which has also no recieved a reply.
A month ago, the Society met to discuss “the principles around public pronouncements and behaviour of fellows”, but the only outcome was an anaemic statement that didn’t even mention Musk. As a result, Kit Yates, associate editor at the Royal Society’s journal Open Science, resigned his post.
Fiona Fox, a fellow of the Royal Society and chief executive of the Science Media Centre was quoted as worrying that “ejecting Musk from the Royal Society would be seen as a political move.” This strikes me as incredibly naive. At a time when the USA is gleefully destroying its own scientific infrastructure, with Musk at the head of the charge, doing nothing is a political move.
It simply isn’t possible for a society to both “recognise, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity” (as its mission statement claims) and enjoy the patronage of someone who is doing the exact opposite.
And that was going to be the final line of this post, until a few days ago, when I saw this: Royal Society decides not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk. The Guardian quotes a cowardly letter from society president Sir Adrian Smith:
The view of council is that making judgments on the acceptability of the views and actions of fellows, particularly those that might be regarded as political, could do more harm than good to the society and the cause of science in general.
This is, of course, complete nonsense. The point is not, and has never been, that Musk is unpleasant or personally disliked. As the careful letters of Bishop, Curry and others have all pointed out, Musk is flagrantly and unambiguously in contravention of the society’s own Code of Conduct.
And it seems quite clear that “do more harm than good to the society” means that the society is scared of not getting any of that delicious Musk money.
So the Society has made its choice. It prefers the fellowship of Musk — who in the last few months has possibly done more to impede the progress of science worldwide that literally any other person in history — over that of actual scientists.
Unsurprisingly, I will not submit any of my papers to Royal Society journals, as I have done in the past, and I urge others to take the same step. Similarly I will no longer be providing peer reviews for Royal Society journals, and I urge every other scientist also to withhold voluntary professional labour. And I will no longer contribute to their conferences, and urge others to join me in this.
I want to be clear: this is not a protest or a boycott. I’m under no illusion that withdrawing my very minor contributions will make the slightest bit of difference to Society policy when the resignation of actual fellows hasn’t affected anything. It’s simply that I’ve given up on the society — I’m not throwing good effort after bad. The Royal Society of 2025 is simply not an organization that I want to have anything to do with in any capacity.
In short, the Royal Society is dead. Three hundred and sixty-five years of history, and it’s ended it as a beard for a fascist. What an utterly utterly shameful end for a once-great society.
doi:10.59350/ndeyh-vq64

2025-02-18 20:19:08 GMT

Burn it all down
Clarivate is the content-hoarding corporation that owns ProQuest, the Web of Science and EndNote, among many other services widely used in academia. Plus a ton of content. Today’s announcement, “Introducing ProQuest Digital Collections, a new library subscription offering unparalleled breadth, value and access”, sounds nice, doesn’t it? And the first few paragraphs are certainly full of praise for the changes they’re making.
Those changes amount to: libraries will no longer be able to buy books. Specifically:
Customers can continue to purchase content via perpetual archive license through December 31, 2025, after which this content will be available via subscription only.
You will only be able to rent content, not buy it.
I am quite sure this is not what the authors of books now controlled by Clarivate had in mind.
I think it’s too late for the commercial scholarly publishing sector to turn itself around — in truth it was probably already too late a decade ago, but I and others have fooled ourselves that maybe the good people at these corps can do something. They can’t. Commercial scholarly publishing is owned and controlled by terminal-stage capitalists, and is consequently all about increasing the next quarterly figures — not just ignoring the needs of researchers, but even the medium- and long-term finances of the companies.
In short, the commercial scholarly publishing industry is owned by people who are quite prepared to burn it all down so long as they get rich doing it.
And I think the only response is for us to burn it down first.
The difference is, we’ll replace it with something better.
doi:10.59350/qe20a-7t467

2025-02-11 21:11:35 GMT

Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk
I’ll be sending this letter to the Royal Society, but I also want it out there in public, because I hope that more people will follow the lead set by Dorothy Bishop and Stephen Curry in putting pressure on the Royal Society to grow a backbone.
Dear Royal Society of London,
You exist to support the advancement of science. Your ability to do this effectively is largely due to the respect your society is held in, due to its long history and numerous eminent Fellows.
In 2018, Elon Musk was elected a Fellow of the Society, not due to any scientific achievements of his own but due to his financial involvement with the achievements of others. At the time, his fellowship was questionable but understandable.
Since then, Musk’s behaviour in every field has been the antithesis of that described by the Society’s Code of Conduct: “selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership”. I surely do not need to outline the ways in which his exploitative and malicious behaviour has egregiously and repeatedly contravened these standards.
Now Musk is an influential member of a US presidential administration that is actively impeding the progress of science on a scale not seen since the darkest days of the USSR, through censorship, catastrophic defunding, dismantling of infrastructure, and withdrawal from international coalitions. Added to this, his vindictive personal behaviour in targeting individuals contravenes every standard of decency.
At present, the Royal Society is seen to be standing behind Musk, its Fellow, effectively cheering him on. This cannot stand. The reputation of the society, carefully built across 365 years, is at stake. No-one can respect a society that retains Musk as a Fellow. The resignation of Dorothy Bishop, in protest at Musk’s continuing fellowship, should have sent waves of shame through the Society. That it has not meaningfully responded to her resignation should be a cause of further shame.
The choice now facing the Society is stark: retain the goodwill of a billionaire; or retain the respect of the scientific community. It is not possible to do both.
Yours with all due respect,
Dr. Michael P. Taylor
University of Bristol, UK.
[email protected]

2023-10-20 18:39:48 GMT

What’s up with your crazy-ass hands, Utahraptor?
Utahraptor is a “giant” dromaeosaurid from Utah, described by Kirkland et al. (1993). Famously, its existence was part of the reason that the people making Jurassic Park felt at liberty to make their “Velociraptor” individuals not only much bigger than the turkey-sized Velociraptor proper, but also than than sheep-sized Deinonychus.
Here’s a mounted skeleton, right in the state of Utah — specifically, at the Prehistoric Museum in Price, which you will recall is currently exhibiting the Concrete Diplodocus.
(Photo from the Prehistoric Museum’s own site.)
I didn’t register the skeleton back when Matt and I visited in 2016. Maybe it wasn’t even up back then, or maybe we were too distracted by the Camarasaurus pit. But anyway, when I saw the photo above, my immediate thought was Holy Heck What’s Up With Your Hands??! It looks more like a giant Scansoriopteryx.
So for a few days, I thought, well, that’s just what Utahraptor hands are like, and the word has somehow failed to register how morally wrong that is. But then I saw this photo of another Utahraptor mount, this in from the BYU Museum of Palaeontology (from Wikipedia):
(Yes, Matt and I were also at the BYU Museum in 2016, and Matt has been there on numerous other occasions. Somehow we never noticed the stinkin’ theropod.)
And this one has perfectly cromulent hands.
So what’s the deal here? Is the Price mount Just Plain Wrong?References
Kirkland, James I., Robert Gaston and Donald Burge. 1993. A large Dromaeosaur (Theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of Eastern Utah. Hunteria 2(10), 16 pages.
doi:10.59350/5yxcy-xkn46