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.

[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.

If you want to find the paleontology and anatomy videos that Mike and I have done (plus one video about open access), they have their own sidebar page now, for your convenience and for our own. It’s, uh, just to the right of where your eyes are pointing right now.

My friend and frequent collaborator (one, two, three) Tito Aureliano invited me to give a talk on his YouTube channel, I suggested pneumaticity and gigantism, and here we are. There’s a decently lengthy Q&A, moderated by Tito, after the talk itself.

I have a new paper out in Acta Paleontologica Polonica, with Guillermo Windholz, Juan Porfiri, Domenica Dos Santos, and Flavio Bellardini, on the first CT scan of a pneumatic caudal vertebra of a rebbachisaurid: Windholz, G.J., Porfiri, J.D., Dos Santos, D., Bellardini, F., and Wedel, M.J. 2024.

Just a quick post about the genesis of the Brachiosaurus rib paper (Taylor and Wedel 2023) that I wrote about at the very end of last year. Although this is in some respects a minor paper, I’m fond of it because it fell into place so quickly and easily.

As we’ve often observed, it’s a funny thing that incredibly well-known dinosaur specimens can sit around for decades, or for more than a century, before someone notices something fascinating about them. One lesson to learn from this is the importance of collections — their creation, maintenance and accessibility. Another is of course to always look at the fossils we see.

New paper out today: Tito Aureliano, Aline M. Ghilardi, Rodrigo T. Müller, Leonardo Kerber, Marcelo A. Fernandes, Fresia Ricardi-Branco, Mathew J. Wedel. 2023. The origin of an invasive air sac system in sauropodomorph dinosaurs.

Last night a thought occurred to me, and I wrote to Matt: If birds had gone extinct 66 Mya along with all the other dinosaurs, would it ever have occurred to us that they had flow-through lungs?