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This is very belated, but back in the summer of 2014 I was approached to write a bunch of sections — all of them to do with dinosaurs, naturally — in the book Evolution: The Whole Story . I did seven group overviews (Dinosauria overview, prosauropods, sauropods, stegosaurs, ankylosaurs, marginocephalians, and hadrosaurs), having managed to hand the theropod work over to Darren.

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My last post (Unhappy thoughts on student projects at SVPCA 2015) was stupid and ill-judged. As a result of very helpful conversations with a senior palaeontologist (who was much more courteous about it that he or she needed to be), I have decided to retract that article rather than editing it further to clarify. I deeply wish I’d never posted it, and I offer my apologies to everyone I insulted.

Just over a year ago, in his write-up of the Edinburgh SVPCA, Matt included a photo of me standing in front of a Giant Irish Elk ( Megaloceros ), positioned so that the antlers seem to be growing out of my head. Matt finished his post with a background-free version of that photo, and commented: It has come to pass.

Well, I see that our ‘roadside dinos‘ category is in a sad state. Not from lack of posts, but because most of the so-called roadside dinos found therein are entirely too polished. Real roadside dinos are assembled by non-paleontologists armed only with scrap metal, welding equipment, The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs (again, the real one), and a dream.

I just found out — thanks to a tweet from abertonykus — that this exists: That’s me on top of the Giraffatitan , Matt to the right, and Darren swinging from its wattle. It’s the work of classicalguy on Deviant Art. He provides a poem and some brief commentary along with the original. There also one for the Tetrapod Zoology podcats, and one for Tom Holtz.