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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.

1. VARIATION You know what’s variable? Apatosaur cervicals. Top: NSMT-PV 20375, cervical 7 in anterior and left lateral views (Upchurch et al. 2005). Middle: YPM 1861, cervical ?13, in posterior and left lateral views (Ostrom & McIntosh 1966). Bottom: YPM 1980, cervical 8 in anterior and left lateral views (Ostrom &

Here at SV-POW!, we love bifurcated cervical ribs.

As iconic as Brachiosaurus altithorax is, it’s known from surprisingly little material.

I was cleaning out my Downloads directory — which, even after my initial forays, still accounts for 11 Gb that I really need to reclaim from my perptually almost-full SSD. And I found this beautiful image under the filename csgeo4028.jpeg. The thing is, I have no idea where this image came from.

Eighteen months ago, I noted that the Carnegie Museum’s Diplodocus mount has no atlantal ribs (i.e. ribs of the first cervical vertebra, the atlas). But that the Paris cast has long atlantal ribs — so long the extend past the posterior end of the axis. There were two especially provocative comments to that post.

Pneumatic dorsal ribs in a selection of ornithodiran taxa. Clades that lack pneumatic ribs have been omitted, including non-dinosaurian dinosauromorphs, ornithischians, all early diverging sauropodomorphs, and numerous sauropods. The only included clade for which dorsal rib pneumaticity might be synapomorphic is Titanosauriformes.