Last night a thought occurred to me, and I wrote to Matt: If birds had gone extinct 66 Mya along with all the other dinosaurs, would it ever have occurred to us that they had flow-through lungs?

This is one of those posts where the title pretty much says it all, but here’s the detailed version.

Our old friend Ray Wilhite sent us this glorious photo of a horse neck that he dissected recently, with permission to post here: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20849 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20849” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2023/03/13/the-equine-interspinal-ligaments-of-ray-wilhite/equine-neck-dissection-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/equine-neck-dissection-1.jpg” orig-size=“4080,3072” comments-opened=“1”

{.aligncenter .wp-image-20834 .size-large loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20834” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2023/03/03/an-arresting-image-of-an-apatosaur-vertebra/amnh-apato-c6-alexander-1994-plate-28/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/amnh-apato-c6-alexander-1994-plate-28.jpg” orig-size=“1694,2312” comments-opened=“1”

I was going to write a bit more about my recent paper The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (seriously, go and read it, you’ll like it, it’s fun). But then something more urgent came up. And here it is! {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20828 attachment-id=“20828”

Last time, I told you about my new paper, The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023), and finished up by saying this: “But Mike, you ask — how did you, a scientist, find yourself writing a history paper? It’s a good question, and one with a complicated answer. Tune in next time to find out!” Paper 1 The truth is, I never set out to write a history paper. My goal was

… and I’m guessing that if you read this blog, you like at least one of these things.

I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt. I discovered SMTM through its fascinating discussions of scurvy and citrus-fruit taxonomy.

This recent news story tells of a cane toad found in Australia that weighs six pounds.

I was a bit shaken to read this short article, Submit It Again! Learning From Rejected Manuscripts (Campbell et al. 2022), recently posted on Mastodon by open-access legend Peter Suber. For example: Let’s pick this apart a bit. “Because they recently published a similar article” ? What is this nonsense.