Geobulletin alpha

Things to Make and Do, part 31: redneck CT-scan 

For reasons that would be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse, I recently found myself in need of a hemisected turkey cervical. Happily, I own five skeletonised turkey necks, so it was with me the work of a moment to select a candidate. But now what? How to hemisect it? We have  discussed plenty of

New paper: Dolly, the dinosaur with a sauro-throat 

I was at the SVP meeting in Albuquerque in 2018 when Cary Woodruff called me over and said he had something cool to show me. “Something cool” turned out to be photos of infected sauropod vertebrae from the Morrison Formation of Montana. Specifically, some gross, cauliflower-looking bony lesions bubbling up in the air spaces on

What’s the difference between a cervical and dorsal vertebra? 

In mammals — certainly the most-studied vertebrates — regional differentiation of the vertebral column is distinct and easy to spot. But things aren’t so simple with sauropods. We all know that the neck of any tetrapod is made up of cervical vertebrae, and that the trunk is made up of dorsal vertebrae (subdivided into thoracic

Help me, stats people! 

I have several small ordered sequences of data, each of about five to ten elements. For each of them, I want to calculate a metric which captures how much they vary along the sequence. I don’t want standard deviation, or anything like it, because that would consider the sequences 1 5 2 7 4 and

Xinjiangtitan has the longest preserved neck of any lifeform to date 

We’re way late to this party, but better late than never I guess. Wu et al. (2013) described Xinjiangtitan shanshanesis as a new mamenchisaurid from the Middle Jurassic of China. At the time of the initial description, all of the dorsal and sacral vertebrae had been uncovered, as well as a handful of the most

Happy Christmas! Here’s why giraffes have short necks! 

On 22nd December 2020, I gave this talk (via Zoom) to Martin Sander’s palaeontology research group at the University of Bonn, Germany. And now I am giving it to you, dear reader, the greatest Christmas present anyone could ever wish for: It’s based on a 2013 paper written with Matt Wedel, which itself goes back

Cool URIs don’t change 

It’s now 22 years since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote the classic document Cool URIs don’t change [1]. It’s core message is simple, and the title summarises it. Once an organization brings a URI into existence, it should keep it working forever. If the document at that URI moves, then the

Hey, Mike! Why haven’t you been blogging much lately? 

Well, one reason is the utterly rancid “block editor” that WordPress has started imposing with increasing insistence on its poor users. If there is one thing that world really doesn’t need, it’s a completely new way of writing text. Seriously, WordPress, that was a solved problem in 1984. As Henry Spencer very nearly said back

Werner Janensch, Wannabe, Lovefool 

Here’s how I got my start in research. Through a mentorship program, I started volunteering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in the spring of 1992, when I was a junior in high school. I’d been dinosaur-obsessed from the age of three, but I’d never had an anatomy course and didn’t really know what

Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 6: what happens to Supersaurus now? 

Since the previous installment of this epic, we’ve taken two brief digressions on how little importance we should attach the colours of bones in our photographs when trying to determine whether they’re from the same individual: cameras do lie, and in any case different bones of the same individual can age differently. Since then —

Diplodocus skull and first three cervicals in 3D 

Here’s a bit of light relief, in the middle of all those looong posts about Supersaurus and its buddies. When Matt and I were at NAMAL on the last day of the 2016 Sauropocalypse, we took a bunch of tourist shots. Two of them were of a skull and first three cervical vertebrae from what

Things to Make and Do, Part 25b: what to do with your bird vertebrae 

If you followed along with the last post in this series, you now have some bird vertebrae to play with. Here are some things to do with them. 1. Learn the parts of the vertebrae, and compare them with those of other animals Why are we so excited about bird vertebrae around here? Mostly because

Pelican cervico-dorsal transition, backlit 

What it says on the tin. This is a specimen from the UCMP comparative collection. I was just going to post this photo with zero commentary, but I can’t help myself. Note that on the two vertebrae in the middle, the crista transverso-obliqua (what in non-avian dinos would be the spinopostzygapophyseal lamina or SPOL) rises

Sauroposeidon, the early years: my first drawing 

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

Is everything we know about sauropod phylogeny nonsense? 

Out today: a new Turiasaurian sauropod, Mierasaurus bobyoungi, from the Early Cretaceous Cedar Mountain formation in Utah. This comes to us courtesy of a nice paper by Royo Torres et al. (2017), [Because this paper is in Nature’s Scientific Reports, it inexplicably has a big chunk of manuscript chopped out of the middle, supplied separately, not […]

Mike’s adventures on the Wall at Dinosaur National Monument 

Not much to say this time – the pictures tell the story for now. It was a pretty transcendental experience, as I imagine it must be for anyone who loves dinosaurs, or has a pulse. A huge thank-you to Dan Chure, the Park Paleontologist for the Monument, who conveyed us safely up and down the

Why do we have so few complete, undistorted sauropod necks? 

Since I posted my preprint “Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted” and asked in the comments for people to let me know if I missed any good necks, the candidates have been absolutely rolling in: The Kaatedocus siberi holotype SMA 0004 (thanks to Oliver Demuth for pointing this out) The Futalognkosaurus dukei holotype MUCPv-323 (thanks

The 14 beautiful cervicals of Kaatedocus 

Well, I’m a moron again. In the new preprint that I just published, I briefly discussed the six species of sauropod for which complete necks are known — Camarasaurus lentus (but it’s a juvenile), Apatosaurus louisae (but the last three and maybe C5 are badly damaged), Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis (but all the vertebrae are broken and distorted), Shunosaurus lii,

Early Cretaceous titanosauriform cervical UMNH 21054, or, “Hello again, beautiful” 

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we’re keenly aware that some of our fans are just here for the hardcore sauropod vertebra action. These folks start to shift in their seats when we put up too many posts in a row on open access or rabbits or…okay, mostly just OA and bunnies. If that’s you – or,

Tutorial 4b: Saurischian vertebral laminae and fossae redux, by Adam Marsh 

[Hi folks, Matt here. I’m just popping in to introduce this guest post by Adam Marsh (UT Austin page, LinkedIn, ResearchGate). Adam is a PhD student at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, currently working for a semester as a Visiting Student Researcher at my old stomping ground, Berkeley’s UCMP.  Adam’s been working at Petrified Forest