I’m really delighted today to announce the publication of my, and my co-authors’, new paper on the Carnegie Diplodocus : Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1) :55–91. doi: to follow .

I realize that the titular statement is open to misinterpretation so let me head that off at the pass: I’m not saying this prescriptively, like you should learn anatomy to become a better person (you should learn anatomy because it’s accessible and it rules), or that knowing anatomy makes people better. I’m also not saying this distributively, like anatomists are better people than non-anatomists.

This seems to have gone under the radar: Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy. It’s a memo from Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH (the United States’ National Institutes of Health): Well, this is tremendous news. The NIH is the biggest single funder of health research in the USA, and making all the work that it funds immediately open access is a huge win.

This is our dog Eleanor. She’s a Great Pyrenees/German Shepherd mix, just over one year old. We rescued her last September — some heartless jerkbag had dumped her out out of a moving vehicle in a random neighborhood. Fortunately she was unhurt, but she needed a home, and here we are. I love her more than I love most people, and it’s only by deliberate exercise of will that I’ve waited this long to put any pictures of her up on this blog.

A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand. Two months ago, Stephen Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk’s activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society’s code of conduct.

Here’s a short post on another 5PVC presentation: Raber et al. (2025) on a musculoskeletal lesion in an apatosaur femur. At the Utah Field House in Vernal, there’s a partial skeleton of an apatosaur from just north of Dinosaur National Monument. It’s nicknamed the “Soft Sauropod” because the bone is softer than the matrix, which made preparation a bit of an adventure.

When our paper on neural canal ridges came out last year (Atterholt et al. 2024), I hoped that it would inspire other people to go peer inside neural canals and discover a lot more of them. My wish was granted, and quickly.

I’m kidding, of course. It will continue no matter what. Loads of more and better photos of the upcoming Aquilops Lego sets — yes, sets, plural — thanks to the Brothers Brick. What’s that other thing included in this jeep-and-raptor set? It’s a teensy widdle Aquilops of teensiness! And it’s pretty darned accurate! I don’t see a lot of room for improvement at minifig scale.

Aquilops turned 10 years old in December. For all of that time, I’ve been waiting for Aquilops toys. I mean COME ON people, it’s an adorable little cat-ceratops, the only one of its kind so far in North America, how do we have multiple toys of Kaprosuchus and no Aquilops yet?

Clarivate is the content-hoarding corporation that owns ProQuest, the Web of Science and EndNote, among many other services widely used in academia. Plus a ton of content. Today’s announcement, “Introducing ProQuest Digital Collections, a new library subscription offering unparalleled breadth, value and access”, sounds nice, doesn’t it? And the first few paragraphs are certainly full of praise for the changes they’re making.

Here’s a Mastodon thread from a year ago. Just a quick check on how ChatGPT’s getting on … Me: Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when? ChatGPT: The species Brachiosaurus brancai was reassigned to its own genus, Giraffatitan, by the paleontologist Michael Janensch in 1914.