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.

In lieu of the sauropod neck cartilage post that I will get around to writing someday, here are some photos of animals London and I saw at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum this Sunday morning. In chronological order: Mountain lion, Puma concolor Black bear, Ursus americanus , which taxon has also graced these pages (and my desk) with its mortal remains.

convincing genetic engineers that everyone would look better if they had sauropod tails. If you have no idea what I’m on about, go check out XKCD.

Those familiar with Lull (1919: plate II: figure 2) will recognise this as “vertebra Q” of the Barosarus lentus holotype YPM 429, in ventral view. Stay tuned for more exciting Barosaurus -related news! References Lull, R. S. 1919. The sauropod dinosaur Barosaurus Marsh. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 6 :1-42 and plates I-VII.

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.

Yesterday I asked whether anyone could identify this specimen: There was an interesting range of suggestions, but I suppose no-one will be surprised to hear that Darren Naish was the first to make real progress, saying “Hey, that’s a loooong pelvis… I smell macropod.” From there it was a short leap to William Miller asking “Could it be that wallaby from way back in Things to Make &

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.

Back in 2010, SVPCA was held in Cambridge. (It was the year that I gave the “why giraffes have short necks” talk [abstract, slides].) While we were there, I took a lot of photos in the excellent Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, which was just across the courtyard from the lecture theatre where the scientific sessions were held.