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 […]
Where all discerning paleontologists buy road trip junk food. This one is in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. I just got back home after a solid four weeks on the road, an epic peregrination from SoCal to Oklahoma to England to Oklahoma to SoCal. DinoCon 2025 was embedded mid-trip, which is why I haven’t gotten anything about it posted before now. I love driving across the American West.
One often hears it said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. For example, if you excavate some fossil sauropods and they don’t have preserved feathers, that not evidence that sauropods didn’t have feathers. Oh yes it is. This is an example of a mantra that’s short, catchy, and wrong.