Well, this is rad. And adorable. Brian Switek, whom we adore, commissioned a fuzzy juvenile sauropod from Niroot, whom we adore, for his (Brian’s) upcoming book, My Beloved Brontosaurus , which I am gearing up to adore. And here is the result, which I adore, borrowed with permission from Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs. There is much to like here. Here’s my rundown: Small forefeet that are the correct shape: good.
Today our paper on sauropod neck anatomy is formally published in PeerJ.
Here are cervical vertebrae 2-15 of Diplodocus carnegii in right lateral view, from Hatcher (1901: plate 3). Click to embiggen, and then just gaze in wonder for a while. Wouldn’t that look smashing, printed, framed, and hanging on the wall? I wonder if I will ever stop finding new interesting things to think about in this image.
From field correspondent Brian Engh: A Brontomerus on the edge of a jumbled forest of partially knocked over trees.
Matt and I have been sniggering at the Lousy Book Covers tumblr (slogan: “Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD”). A couple of evenings ago, he wondered whether we could do better. And whether we could do it in half an hour. In no time at all, a competition was born. Here are the rules: You have 30 minutes total to create the cover from scratch.
My friend, colleague, and sometime coauthor Dave Hone sent the above cartoon, knowing about my more-than-passing interest in sauropod neurology. It was drawn by Ed McLachlan in the early 1980s for Punch! magazine in the UK (you can buy prints starting at £18.99 here). I know that this isn’t the only image in the “oblivious sauropods getting eaten” genre.
We’ve gotten a few complaints this year about how much time we’ve spent talking about open access instead of dinosaurs. Brian Engh is in the more-dinosaurs faction, but he doesn’t just whinge about our non-dino coverage, he does something about it. He writes: Awesome. Happy new year, sauropod fans. Enjoy this rearing Dicraeosaurus courtesy of Brian.
A few months ago, Matt and Darren saw a picture someone had done of an Apatosaurus with huge neck-flaps. Since they, they’ve tried to find it again but without success.
[Note added in press: Matt published his last post just as I was finishing this one up, so I am posting it without having read his beyond seeing that he also mentions All Yesterdays .] It was back at the Lyme Regis SVPCA in 2011 that I first saw the material that’s now available as the new palaeoart book All Yesterdays [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk]. It was the first talk of the conference, billed as an
