Somewhat lamely, this is the only slide I had in about lighting. I left it up while I talked about the most important points, which are: Don’t use a flash unless you absolutely have to. If you can swing it, the common convention is to have specimens illuminated from the upper left.* If you have the time, it’s not a bad idea to bracket your Goldilocks shot with brighter and darker photos, by fiddling with your camera settings.

Let it never be said that we don’t take good care of our commenters. Heck, we’ll even degrade ourselves by blogging about theropods, if that’s what it takes to keep you all happy. Derp dah durr Today’s post is a response to this comment by Dean, asking for lateral view photos of the skull of Giraffatitan . Mike and I did get to spend some quality time with the T1 skull (a.k.a. “Old Toilet-Face”) when we were in Berlin in 2008.

Back in the early aughts Cal Acad did a huge exhibit simply titled, “Skulls”. It was extremely rad, and I could have been running a separate blog this whole time with nothing but photos from that exhibit. ( Update: the website for the exhibit is still going. Check it out.) I was just sorting through some old folders and found some favorites.

Yes, it’s bear skulls on the brain lately. I have nothing scientific to say here, I was just going through old files and found myself struck by the beautiful form and texture of the bones.

Many thanks to everyone who played pin-the-skull-on-the-carnivore. The answers are down at the bottom of this post, so if you’ve just arrived here and want to take the challenge, go here before you scroll down. To fill up some space, let me point out how crazy variable the skulls of black bears, Ursus americanus , are. Here’s the one I helped dig up, missing the occipital region.

In this image I have assembled photos of skulls (or casts of skulls) of six extant carnivores. I exclusively used photos from the Skulls Unlimited website because they had all the taxa I wanted, lit about the same and photographed from similar angles. The omission of scale indicators is deliberate. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to match these skulls with the animals they came from.

It’s a strange time of year for me. Teaching and SVP are both behind me, my tenure dossier is in (I’ll find out how that goes next April, probably), and for the first time in a while, I’m not shepherding any pressing manuscripts through the valley of potential rejection. Urgency has dissipated. Flights of fancy are very in right now. Take this post.

Anyone who’s found the SV-POW! Tutorials useful will also like the excellent, detailed osteology posts on Tom Carr’s newish blog Tyrannosauroidea Central. Highly recommended — especially for those, like me, who have a lot to learn about skulls. Composite skull of a subadult Albertosaurus libratus in right lateral view with the major openings and struts labeled. From the first of Carr’s blog entries, linked below.

I know it’s been quiet around here for a while. Mike and I have both been on vacation, and before that, we were both up to our necks in day-job work, and after we get back, we’ll be up to our necks in revising accepted manuscripts.

Another shot from my visit last month to the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City: the business end of a tegu ( Tupinambis ). Lots of cool stuff in this pic: heterodont dentition, wacky sclerotic ossicles, and some sweet neurovascular foramina along the maxilla. Someone should knock out a shrink-wrapped life restoration, a la All Todays .