Another nice display from the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City (previous MoO posts here and here). Check out the really gnarly ones that are indeed growing right through the bones of the face. That must have sucked. We’ve covered rodent teeth here a few times before (one, two)–more than is probably right, for a blog ostensibly about sauropod vertebrae.

I guess pretty much all researchers must suffer from Imposter Syndrome every now and then — the sense of not really belonging, not knowing enough, not getting enough done to justify our position.

My spouse, Vicki, the other Dr. Wedel, is a physical and forensic anthropologist. And she’s one of a very small number of scientists who have (a) learned something new about the human body, and (b) used it to help identify dead people.

Folks, I just got this email from open-access guru Peter Suber (quoted with permission): Has anyone else seen this? Is it something we should be worried about? Does anyone know what we can do to stop it? (BTW., for what it’s worth I can assure anyone else who’s seeing this warning that it can be ignored. There’s no malware here.)

…a master and an apprentice. Here’s how the Wedel Lab rolls on Halloween: Check out that padawan braid. It’s official, I have the world’s coolest grad student. Although Vanessa’s choice of lightsaber is a bit worrying. Great danger I foresee in her training.

(This is sort of a riff on the recent post, Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on, which you might want to read first if you haven’t already.) Something that has been much on my mind lately is the idea that if you don’t go too far, you don’t know how far you should have gone.

Just noticed this over on ScienceBlogs: SV-POW!sketeer Darren’s Naish’s other blog Tetrapod Zoology has — rightly — often featured strongly in the Readers’ Picks sidebar; but this is the first time I’ve seen it, or indeed any blog, completely monopolise the list.

There’s recently been a rash of requests for PDFs on the VRTPALEO mailing list.  Or maybe “plague” would be a better word.

A bit frightening to realise it’s been more than a month since the last SV-POW! post.  We have some excuse for that: I am just back from a fortnight’s holiday with my family, and shortly before that Matt was at a conference in Uruguay.  Still, a whole month? And this post is going to be disappointingly short and off-topic — it’s just a bit of housekeeping really.

SV-POW! is, as I’m sure you know, devoted to sauropod vertebrae. But occasionally we look at other stuff… and you might have noticed that, in recent months, we’ve been looking at, well, an awful lot of other stuff. I’m going to continue that theme here and talk about salamanders. Yeah: not sauropods, not sauropodomorphs, not saurischians, and not even dinosaurs or archosaurs. But salamanders. Don’t worry, all will become clear.