Long-time readers may remember that back in 2013, Matt and I played a game where we each designed a cover, in half an hour, for a book whose name was randomly generated.

Back in 2013, we showed you Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch “The Giant & Company”, featuring a giant Apatosaurus with a shaggy beard running along its neck.

I have probably spent more time looking at Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time than any other work of art. Sneaking off to the Wallace Collection in London and just looking at the Dance was my comfort activity while living in London – a time that was not exactly devoid of its trials. It’s not, by any measure, great art, insofar as such judgments can be made with any objectivity.

On the excellent and convivial social network Mastodon, someone going by the handle “gay ornithopod” asked what turned out to be a fascinating question: My first response was that we can only say it’s not unusual for extant animals to change colour through ontogeny, so the null hypothesis would have to be that at least some sauropods (and other dinosaurs) did the same. But I don’t think we have any information on the specific coloration.

This is one of those things I’ve always done, that I’ve never thought to ask if others did. When you’re putting together a talk, or making a complicated figure, do you storyboard it first with a pen or pencil? I usually do, and have done since I started way back when.

I was going to write a bit more about my recent paper The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (seriously, go and read it, you’ll like it, it’s fun). But then something more urgent came up. And here it is! {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20828 attachment-id=“20828”

I have a long-running Raspberry Pi camera project to capture images of the view from a window (more details here). A recent post on mastodon, which showed a keogram, encouraged me to take my PiCam images and turn them into art. The finished product This is the finished wall art, printed on canvas. Ready to hang on the wall.

Darren, the silent partner at SV-POW!, pointed me to this tweet by Duc de Vinney, displaying a tableau of “A bunch of Boners (people who study bones) Not just paleontologists, some naturalists and cryptozoologists too”, apparently commissioned by @EDGEinthewild: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20314 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20314” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/10/08/im-not-100-sure-what-this-is-but-it-exists/twenty-one-naturalists/”

Remember this classic XKCD comic?

Back in May, Amy Schwartz posted a photo of a starling that shethat had ringed that morning: Impressed by the subtlety of the coloration, I wondered what would happen if I increased the colour saturation.