A couple of months ago, Darren (the silent partner in the SV-POW!

I have a new paper out today in PeerJ: “Ecological correlates to cranial morphology in leporids (Mammalia, Lagomorpha)”, with coauthors Brian Kraatz, Emma Sherratt, and Nick Bumacod. Get it free here. I know, I know, I have fallen from grace. First Aquilops, now rabbits. And, and…skulls!

Here are three fun things to do with Aquilops , in descending order of how much gear they require.

A friend’s daughter owned a pet corn snake, and a hamster. About a month ago, the former got into the latter’s cage — and in a reversal of the usual course of such events, sustained some nasty injuries. As snakes often do, it struggled to recover, and the wound seems to have necrotised.

A while back, Ben Miller reminded me that when I posted about the old Yale “ Brontosaurus ” skull, I promised: So how did the YPM come to make such a monstrosity? What was it based on? Tune in next time for the surprising details! I told him at the time that I’d soon get around to writing a post. But before I did, he wrote a post on this himself: Bully for Camarasaurus . And it’s excellent.

After the sheep skull ten days ago, here is Logan the wallaby in all his glory: As always, click through for the full-sized version (6833 × 5082).

Remember I picked up those three sheep skulls (and some other bones, including a complete neck) from a shallow pit in a field near where we live? Here is first of the skulls, cleaned up and photographed in orthogonal views. It’s interesting to compare it to the pig skull from way back: Sheep and pigs are both perfectly well-behaved artiodactyls, but their skulls are dramatically different.

Just a quick photo-post today. A couple of months ago, walking around the fields near our house, I found a broad shallow pit with a lot of a sheep skeletal elements in it. I took my youngest son out on an expedition, and we rescued the good material. I’ve cleaned up the first two (of three) skulls. Here is the smaller of the two — which is also more complete, and the big one has lost its nasals.

How can it be? All credit to the Yale Peabody Museum for having the courage to display this historically important object in their public gallery instead of hiding it in a basement. It’s the skull from the original mount of the Brontosaurus (= Apatosaurus ) excelsus holotype YPM 1980.

Here’s a working version of that link. Working link. Working links: Falkingham (2012) on photogrammetry for free Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 1 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 2 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 3 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 4 The rest of this series. Reference Powell, Jaime E.  2003.