Here’s something I’m going to be yapping about in my keynote talk, “The sauropod heresies: evolutionary ratchets, the taphonomic event horizon, and all the evidence we cannot see”, at the 2024 Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference (link): how the fossil record of sauropods is probably wildly at variance with standing populations in life, at least in terms of sizes and maturity of the individuals that got fossilized.

Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of Diplodocus ? in May 2011, but it was submitted as a preprint in 2015.

Here’s a nice thing: friends and relatives just assume (correctly) that I will want whatever dead animals they find. So I was not completely surprised when I got a call from my brother Ryan (pillager of the Earth) asking if I wanted a dead mouse he’d found mummified at the back of an unused cupboard.

I know, I know: a pig skull is not a vertebra, and it’s not from a sauropod. On the other hand, it is a cool zoological object, and every home should have one. I’m going to show you, in glorious technicolour, how I made a pig skull in under 24 hours at a cost of £3 and some silver, using only implements I had lying around.

This figure is stolen from Wedel et al. (2000:fig. 5). A shows the first 11 cervical vertebrae* of Sauroposeidon in articulation. B shows how the holotype specimen, OMNH 53062, must have disarticulated, and C shows it as it was found. Shaded vertebrae and bits of vertebrae were not found. The thickness of the cervical ribs is greatly exaggerated for clarity.