Christine Argot of the MNHN, Paris, drew our attention to this wonderful old photo (from here, original caption reproduced below): © Paleontological Museum, MoscowIn the beginning of XX century, the Severo-Dvinskaya gallery (named after prof. Amalitsky) became the gold basis of the exhibition hall of ancient life in the Geological Museum of St-Petersburg.

The links in the first slide: GIMP Unsharp mask tutorial Fast and easy color balancing Mike’s post on desaturating the background in specimen photos is here, and previous posts in this series are here.

Previous posts in this series are here.

Previous posts in this series: Part 1: Intro and Stromer Part 2: Taking good photos Part 3: Backdrops and lighting And the rest of the series is here.

[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.

I was very pleased, on checking my email this morning, to see that my and Matt’s new paper, The neck of Barosaurus was not only longer but also wider than those of Diplodocus and other diplodocines, is now up as a PeerJ preprint! Taylor and Wedel (2013b: figure 6). Barosaurus lentus holotype YPM 429, Vertebra Q (C?13). Top row: left ventrolateral view.

We’ve blogged a lot of Bob Nicholls‘ art (here, here, and here) and we’ll probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We don’t have much choice: he keeps drawing awesome things and giving us permission to post them. Like this defiantly shaggy Apatosaurus , which was probably the star of the Morrison version of Duck Dynasty . Writes Bob: Well, I think it’s awesome.

I was at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in March to look at their Apatosaurus material, so I got to see the newly-mounted baby apatosaur in the “Clash of the Titans” exhibit (more photos of that exhibit in this post). How much of this is real (i.e., cast from real bones, rather than sculpted)? Most of the vertebral centra, a few of the neural arches, some of the limb girdle bones, and most of the long bones of the limbs.

I recently handled the revisions on a paper that hopefully will be in press very soon. One of the review comments was “Be very careful not to make ad hominem attacks”. I was a bit surprised to see that — I wasn’t aware that I’d made any — so I went back over the manuscript, and sure enough, there were no ad hom s in there. There was criticism, though, and I think that’s what the reviewer meant.

Last time, I asked if anyone has dorsal-view photos of the cervical vertebrae of Diplodocus . No responses yet, and I do urge you to chip in if you have any ideas. But here’s something to keep us positive: Apatosaurus cervicals! This is Plate 1 from Upchurch et al.’s (2005) excellent descriptive monograph of a specimen of Apatosaurus ajax , NSMT-PV 20375.