New paper out today, in Geology of the Intermountain West (free at this link): Boisvert, Colin, Bivens, Gunnar, Curtice, Brian, Wilhite, Ray, and Wedel, Mathew. 2025. Census of currently known specimens of the Late Jurassic sauropod Haplocanthosaurus from the Morrison Formation, USA.

Jessie Atterholt and I are helping one of our students write up a pathological dinosaur bone (you’ll definitely hear more about this in time), and we needed a good example paper for our student to use as a model. We chose several, but for me the standout was Scott et al. (2015), and that’s the one I’m focusing on here.

Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus , basing it and its type species H . priscus on the adult specimen CM 572.

Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History led me to this post at Nothing Human, and poking around there led me to another good’un: “Shallow feedback hollows you out”. That post really hit for me, and it made me think about SV-POW!

Newly out in VAMP: Danison, Andy D., Wedel, Mathew J., Barta, Daniel E., Woodward, Holly N., Flora, Holley M., Lee, Andrew H., and Snively, Eric. 2024. Chimerism of specimens referred to Saurophaganax maximus reveals a new species of Allosaurus (Dinosauria, Theropoda). Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology 12:81-114.

Check out the new paper by Jerry Harris, “What exactly is a nuchal ligament and who exactly has one?” This is one of those papers that fires on lots of cylinders for me: it’s interesting, it’s useful, and holy crap, the work that went into it is humbling. Note that of the 75 pages in the PDF, only about the first 20 are text, and the rest comprise two massive, exhaustively-researched and exhaustively-referenced tables. It’s free at VAMP.

I happened to be reading back over Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen, when something caught my eye in the example photo we used of how to capture the label and appropriately positioned scalebar along with the specimen: BYU 20178, cervical vertebra from an apatosaurine sauropod in ventral view, anterior to the left.

For our wedding anniversary last year (30 years!), Fiona gave me the very wonderful Lego 21320 kit, Dinosaur Fossils, which builds into impressive skeletons of Tyrannosaurus , Triceratops and Pteranodon . This is a truly great kit and I’d encourage anyone to go out and find one.

Back in 2013, John Conway was doing some paintings and Darren Naish was drawing lots of animals for a book. I chipped in to help with their artwork and some back and forth ensued. All this happened on Twitter, and I wrote it up in an SV-POW! post with lots of embedded tweets. But with the progressing enshittification of Twitter (I refuse to call it X), that post is rendering less and less well, and at some point will probably fail completely.

We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a profoundly fallible AI summary, we could read a summary written by the actual authors, who know the material inside out? We can, of course.