Earlier this spring London and I got on a building dinosaurs kick, inspired by this post at Tumblehome Learning. I used a few of these photos as filler in this post, but I haven’t talked much about what we did and what we learned. Above is my first attempt at a wire skeleton for a papier mache dinosaur. Yes, despite being a dino-geek from the age of three on, I had never made a papier mache dinosaur before this spring.

A while back, I posted about a squirrel mandible that I’d acquired, and how ridiculously huge its incisor was. In that post, I rather naively said “the tooth literally could not be any bigger”. What a fool I was. Mammal-tooth specialist Ian Corfe has started a new blog, Tetrapod Teeth & Tales , and inspired by the SV-POW! squirrel he wrote a debut post about his vole mandible.

Hi folks, Matt here. This is a ridiculously busy week for me, for reasons that will become clear by the end of the post, so I’m bundling some news items.

Continuing the recent theme.

Our friends Tim and Michelle Williams moved into a local house a few months ago. In the garage, they found a jam jar containing the bones of a squirrel and the remains of its rotting flesh, dated 1985: presumably a zoologist lived in that house 28 years ago, began preparing a specimen, and moved out before finishing.

One of our anatomy students this year, Tess MacFife, was inspired by the other Dr. Wedel’s skull lecture and produced this excellent anatomy-inspired jack-o-lantern: Random passers-by probably thought this was some kind of bat/demon/Lovecraftian horror, but those in the know would recognize it as the human sphenoid bone in anterior view.

Check this baby out: I know, I know what you’re thinking. “Enough with the vulgar overexposed skull of this beast, Taylor”, you cry: “Show us its zygapophyses!” But of course. This is from the anterior part of the tail, in right lateral view: the vertebrae that you see here are the third to seventh of those that carry chevrons.

This is the second post on the Wedel lab’s recently acquired skull of Ursus americanus , the American black bear. The first installment covered ended with the disinterred-but-still-filthy skull bits sitting on my dining room table. This post covers putting the teeth back in, and just enough anatomy to justify putting up more cool pictures.

After three months as a paleontology grad student, this morning Vanessa I. Graff got to sink a shovel in the service of science. Now, it was a bear skull, deliberately buried in someone’s back yard, so technically today’s exploits fall under the heading of contemporary zooarcheology rather than paleontology, but we’ll take what we can get. This story has a backstory.