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.

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: As you can see, Darren, Matt and I (as well as long-time Friend Of SV-POW!

They grow up so fast, don’t they? Matt and I, with our silent partner Darren, started SV-POW! fifteen years ago to the day, as a sort of jokey riff on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This is old news, for those who have been following NASA’s Perseverance rover since before it left Earth, and it’s also not my find–my friend, colleague, and sometime co-author Brian Kraatz send me a heads-up about it this morning.

What if I told you that when Matt was in BYU collections a while ago, he stumbled across a cervical vertebra — one labelled DM/90 CVR 3+4, say — that looked like this in anterior view?

These things just catch my eye, I can’t help it. Note that the corkscrew features a distinct medially directed femoral head, the bulge in the lateral margin of the proximal portion that is characteristic of titanosaurs, and a straight shaft.

The stupidest head

Here’s a piece of signage from the wonderful Dinosaur National Monument, which we visited on the 2016 Sauropocalypse. And in close-up: This is the first and only time I’ve been encouraged to touch real dinosaur bones on the basis that a cast of them was too fragile.

I’ll see your face-of-the-blessed-virgin-in-a-waffle and raise you the fourth dorsal vertebra of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype BM.R.2181 (formerly HMN S II) in a dandelion leaf: I saw this lying on the ground as my friend Nataley was playing a short set at a festival, and it immediately made me think of this:

You’ll remember that we’ve been playing with CM 555, a subadult apatosaurine of indeterminate species, though John McIntosh assigned it to Brontosaurus (then Apatosaurus) excelsus.