I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that Xenoposeidon is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial disagreement about one of the autapomorphies that I proposed in the revised diagnosis: “Neural arch slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character was also in the original Xenoposeidon

We have good descriptions of the proximal parts of the cervical ribs for lots of sauropods.

You know the drill: lotsa pretty pix, not much yap. Our first stop of the day was the Fruita Paleontological Area, which has a fanstastic diversity of Morrison animals, including the mammal Fruitafossor and the tiny ornithopod Fruitadens . Plus it’s a pretty epic landscape, especially with the clouds and broken light we had this morning. I found a bone!

That last one really hurts. Here’s the original image, which should have gone in the paper with the interpretive trace next to it rather than on top of it: The rest of the series. Papers referenced in these slides: Taylor, M.P., and Wedel, M.J. 2013b. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10): e78214. 17 pages.

On that last slide, I also talked about two further elaborations: figures that take up the entire page, with the caption on a separate (usually facing) page, and side title figures, which are wider than tall and get turned on their sides to better use the space on the page.

[This is part 4 in an ongoing series on our recent PLOS ONE paper on sauropod neck cartilage. See also part 1, part 2, and part 3.] Weird stuff on the ground, Big Bend, 2007. Here’s a frequently-reproduced quote from Darwin: It’s from a letter to Henry Fawcett, dated September 18, 1861, and you can read the whole thing here.

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.

Continuing the recent theme.

Okay, before some wag makes this point, the gator is missing a good chunk of its tail, so this is more like the left half of the anterior two-thirds of a gator. But that would make a lousy title. We might have more to say about this in the future, but for now, I’m going to let this 1000-word-equivalent speak for itself. Many thanks to Elizabeth Rega for the use of the gator.

Earlier this month I was amazed to see the new paper by Cerda et al. (2012), “Extreme postcranial pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs from South America.” The title is dramatic, but the paper delivers the promised extremeness in spades.