Another quick photo post from the road.

I gave my keynote talk last evening at the 28th Annual Tate Conference. I also passed out the handout shown above so people could have a handy reference for sauropod biology while I was talking. I have a link to a PDF version at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer it that way.

In opposition to my speech supporting the motion “the open access movement has failed”, here’s what Jessica Polka said in opposition to the motion.   The open access movement has not failed. It is in the process of succeeding. Indeed, over 50% of papers are now open access.

With my boy Colin Boisvert at BYU. He successfully defended his MS thesis, now he’s bound for OSU-Tulsa for doctoral work. You’ll hear more about his exploits reeeeaaaal soon. Fossil vending machine in the BYU Museum of Paleontology. All casts, except for the shark teeth and pieces of Campo del Cielo meteorite. They also have bigger casts for sale in the back. My brothers Venmoed me money for my birthday. BYU takes Venmo for fossil casts.

As I noted a week ago, to my enormous surprise I was invited to be one of the two participants in the plenary debate the closes the annual meeting of my long-term nemesis, the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

Show your love!

Show your love!

As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote on the misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him?

Here’s something I’m going to be yapping about in my keynote talk, “The sauropod heresies: evolutionary ratchets, the taphonomic event horizon, and all the evidence we cannot see”, at the 2024 Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference (link): how the fossil record of sauropods is probably wildly at variance with standing populations in life, at […]

I know this is hardly news any more, but here is a particularly spectacular example of a Large Language model (“artificial intelligence”) making mistake after mistake. My question: Who described Xenoposeidon, when and where? The LLM’s answer: Xenoposeidon was described by paleontologists Paul M. Barrett, David B. Norman, and Paul Upchurch in 2008.

I have a new paper out: Bas, A., Kay, K., Labovitz, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2024. New double and multiple variants of fibularis tertius. Extremitas 11: 111-118. This is a straight human anatomy paper, with a dual origin. But first let me tell you a little about the fibularis tertius muscle.