I don’t remember now when I first noticed bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines. I imagine 2016 at the latest, because on our Sauropocalypse that year Mike and I saw examples at both BYU and Dinosaur Journey.

I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while. Maybe because blogging already feels distinctly old-fashioned in the broader culture. A lot of the active discussion migrated away a long time ago, to Facebook and Twitter, and then to other social media outlets as each one in turn goes over the enshittification event horizon.

New paper out today in PeerJ: Lei R, Tschopp E, Hendrickx C, Wedel MJ, Norell M, Hone DWE. 2023. Bite and tooth marks on sauropod dinosaurs from the Morrison Formation. PeerJ 11:e16327 http://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16327 This one had a long gestation.

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.

…that we have somehow managed to not blog about yet. It’s figured by Foster et al. (2018: fig. 18E-F), which is a free download at the link below. Foster et al. referred it and the other Mygatt-Moore apatosaurine material to Apatosaurus louisae, which I’ve always thought was a reasonable move.

Brian Curtice and Colin Boisvert are presenting our talk on this project at 2:00 pm MDT this afternoon, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.

Here’s a cool photo of an apatosaur cervical in anterior view. This is from R. McNeill Alexander’s wonderful book Bones: The Unity of Form and Function, which was published in 1994.

In the last post I showed the Brachiosaurus humerus standee I made last weekend, and I said that the idea had been “a gleam in my eye for a long time”. That’s true, but it got kicked into high gear late in 2021 when I got an email from a colleague, Dr. Michelle Stocker at […]

Last Thursday I gave a public lecture for the No Man’s Land Historical Society in the Oklahoma Panhandle, titled “Oklahoma’s Jurassic Giants: the Dinosaurs of Black Mesa”. It’s now on YouTube, on the No Man’s Land Museum’s channel.

I closed the last post by claiming that finding the infected bone in Dolly was “a crazy lucky break”. Here’s why: Another point made by Wood et al. (1992) concerns our perceptions of frailty and robustness. They were talking about archaeological populations, mostly from cemeteries, but the point is equally valid for non-human animals.