We want to introduce a new, work-in-progress book on spatial data visualization in R using the tmap package. The current version of the book, titled Spatial Data Visualization with tmap: A Practical Guide to Thematic Mapping in R , is available online at https://tmap.geocompx.org/. This blog post provides an overview of the book, its current status, and how you can get involved in its development.

A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1]. The subject line was: Your paper “NEURAL SPINE BIFURCATION…” is now an analogy. No; no, it’s not.

New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free: Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070.

Two recent photo posts on Mastodon reminded me how much necks lie.

Just a quick update on the crowd-funding effort to publish the new diplodocoid volume as open-access papers at Palaeontologia Electronica.

Midnight in the museum In the yawning resonance Of empty space The great xylophone skeletons Play the lonely strains of Time Like cathedral organs Heralding the ends of ages.     Time rushes on The final predator Implacable Like Dinichthys Cruising the crinoid beds Sounding one note: Everything dies.

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows that Matt and I are both all in on open access. What is the point of “publishing” something that not everyone can read?

One of the things that comes up over and over — on this blog, at conferences like DinoCon, on Q&A websites — is how to become a palaeontologist. As I’ve said before (at some length) the way to become a published palaeontologist is to publish papers about palaeontology.

Very nice photo of Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops skeleton from DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk. I am often so far down the rabbit holes of my own work (and given that I work mostly on pneumaticity and weird stuff in neural canals, they are literally holes) that I do a very poor job of keeping up with what’s going on in the broader dinosphere.

Dave Hone and me with a Sinclair brontosaur somewhere in Utah, back in May of 2023. I started my recent UK adventure in the city of London, where my son and I stayed for a couple of days with my friend and colleague Dave Hone and his partner Connie.

In 1962, Richard Frank Kingham — a student at Woodward School Washington, D.C. — wrote a four-page paper, with three further pages of line drawings, about the Early Cretaceous sauropod Astrodon (Kingham 1962). It was published in the Proceedings of the Washington Junior Academy of Sciences (which to no-one’s great surprise does not seem to […]