Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer. I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute.

Here’s a funny thing I hadn’t given much thought to until recently: virtually all journals, even the born-digital variety, have pages in portrait mode for easy printing on 8.5×11 or A4 paper. And many offer a column-width option for figures.

Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total. When I wrote to thank him his reply included “I have thousands of questions about apatosaurus that I would like to ask you some day.” It seemed only fair to invite him to ask some of those questions, so we asked him to give us five and said we’d try to answer them.

The SVP 2024 abstract book dropped earlier this week. You can download it here.

I asked ChatGPT a very simple question: A man needs to cross a river. He has a goat with him, which he needs to take across. The boat is big enough to carry the man and only one other object.

This one hardly needs making. I found it by accident when we roasted a chicken this Sunday. As we were tearing the carcass apart like a pack of hyaenas, I noticed that one of the wings had a nice, distinct thumb claw. Here it is in a big plastic bowl in the kitchen — shown this way to emphasize its mundanity.

Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’ve gone almost 17 years without posting about a hypothetical sauropod dissection is quite beyond my capacity.

It is a measure of how scattershot our blogging is that we haven’t mentioned Adam Mastroianni or his blog Experimental History before now.

[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in early 2020, but…you know how that particular story turned out. I’m picking it back up again now because I’ve had the titular point reinforced on several trips and projects over the past couple of years.

Here’s a grab-bag of follow-up stuff related to our new paper on neural canal ridges in dinos (Atterholt et al. 2024, see the previous post and sidebar page). Neural canal ridges, or bony spinal cord supports?