We’ve seen a lot of raptors with their heads turned 180 degrees recently. Jerry Harris dropped me a line to remind me that flamingos are also perverts when it comes to neck posture.

Here are a couple more backwards-headed raptor photos, courtesy of ceratopsian palaeontologist and home-brewing consultant Andy Farke: Here’s what he had to say about them: Your recent post spurred me to snap these photos of a burrowing owl doing backwards head things.

None of these were intended by their creators to be about research; even Marie Curie’s line was about her education. But each of them touched a nerve for me. Also, since they’re not explicitly about research, you may find them applicable to other areas of life as well, whether you’re a researcher or not.

Do it yourself. I don’t mean that as a descriptive phrase. It’s a complete sentence, in the imperative. Do it yourself. Pick up the pencil, pen, stylus, paintbrush, airbrush, mouse, keyboard, scissors, rolling  pin, hammer, drill, wrench, saw, welding torch, sewing needle, instrument, guitar pick, pickaxe, shovel, dumbbell, jump rope, paddle, piton, hiking pole.

Chet Gottfried got in touch after he read Yet more lying necks: Backwards Birds edition, nearly two months ago now, with some more of his photos. Here they are, with his permission: What’s going on here? As I wrote the Chet, “Interesting that this degree of twisting is common in raptors.

The dawn of a new era: AMNH FR 34089, a caudal vertebra of the giant extinct croc Thecachampsa , backlit to show the neural canal ridges. This is not just my favorite specimen with NCRs, it’s one of my favorite images of any fossil ever. Photo by William Jude Hart. New paper out: Hart, W.J., Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First occurrences of neural canal ridges in Crocodylia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 70(4): 749–753.

We’ve written plenty about the problems with what is now ubiquitously called “artificial intelligence”: see for example These new “artificial intelligence” programs don’t know what they’re talking about, Another day, another catastrophic “AI” failure, If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well, What LLMs are really […]

Ha ha, I lied. Book Week will continue until morale improves. Mike has made the point to me more than once that there are papers I could and probably should write, but haven’t, because they’re things that I just assume everyone else knows.

I have been a fanboy of prominent animal physiologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen for a long time. I first encountered his papers back in the late 90s, working on my MS thesis at OU. I realized that vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods implied, among other things, that I had better get to reading about birds.

Drawing is how I understand things best, and it’s one of the ways I teach myself new subjects. My top advice for anyone wanting to be a paleontologist is “learn how to write” and “learn how to draw”, which really boil down to, “practice writing and drawing”. You only get better by doing.

I put these Book Week posts into sequence with a level of forethought about one notch above pure randomness, but a felicity emerged. It’s useful for me to cover The Last Days of the Dinosaurs after the previous three books, each for a particular reason.