Consider a small sauropod of length x , as shown on the left above. Its mass is proportional to x cubed, it stands on leg bones whose cross-sectional area is x squared, and it ingests food through a gullet whose cross-sectional area is x squared. Now consider a larger sauropod of length 2 x , as shown on the right above.

I’m currently working on a paper about the AMNH’s rearing Barosaurus mount. (That’s just one of the multiple reasons I am currently obsessed by Barosaurus .) It’s a fascinating process: more of a history project than a scientific one. It’s throwing up all sorts of things. Here’s one. In 1992, the year after the mount went up, S. O. Landry gave a talk at the annual meeting of American Zoologist about this mount.

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. There’s a point I want to make here, that I also made in the talk: we can’t predict the value of natural history collections.

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New paper out: Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves.

Remember this classic XKCD comic?

The idea that DataCite exists only to provide DOIs is deeply embedded in repository thought processes and this idea needs to evolve. The research community needs to think about DataCite (and other elements of the global research infrastructure) as powerful resources for describing and connecting the myriad of resources that make up the modern research world.

I made this for my own amusement, and thought you guys may as well get to benefit from it, too.

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