On the excellent and convivial social network Mastodon, someone going by the handle “gay ornithopod” asked what turned out to be a fascinating question: What are your thoughts on how the coloration of sauropods would change as they matured? What would you expect to see for example on this guy in comparison with an adult?
Brian Curtice, a long-time sauropod jockey who now runs Fossil Crates, was briefly in Price, Utah, last Friday to drop off an Eilenodon skull at the Prehistoric Museum. While he was there he snapped some photos of a new “Dippy” exhibition — reproduced here with permission. The entrance to the exhibition.
…that we have somehow managed to not blog about yet. It’s figured by Foster et al. (2018: fig. 18E-F), which is a free download at the link below. Foster et al. referred it and the other Mygatt-Moore apatosaurine material to Apatosaurus louisae, which I’ve always thought was a reasonable move.
Mike D’Emic’s new paper The evolution of maximum terrestrial body mass in sauropod dinosaurs is out! Yay! Relevant to our interests! Obviously I want to read this paper, so I simply … 1. Go to the paper’s page at Current Biology. 2. It’s paywalled.
Haplocanthosaurus tibiae and dorsal vertebrae. Curtice et al. (2023: fig. 1). Brian Curtice and Colin Boisvert are presenting our talk on this project at 2:00 pm MDT this afternoon, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.
Sauropod vertebrae in anterior view exhibiting a spectrum of variation in the dorsoventral positions of the neurocentral joint. Wedel and Atterholt (2023: fig. 1). As described in the last post, Jessie Atterholt is presenting our poster on this project today, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.
BIG day today. The 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) is taking place in Salt Lake City this week. Normally I’d be there in a heartbeat, but my son is graduating from high school next week and I’m far too busy to get away.
Figure 1 from our 2021 paper on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus as I sketched it in my notebook (left) and as it got submitted (right). We shifted part F into a separate figure during the proof stage for complicated production reasons. This is one of those things I’ve always done, that I’ve never thought to ask if others did.
I spent last week bombing around Utah and western Colorado with Dave Hone, who was over from England to visit those states for the first time in his life.
Prompted by a post on Mastodon (which, like all Mastodon posts, I can no longer find), I asked ChatGPT to tell me about my own papers. The response started out well but quickly got much worse. I will indent my comments on its response. Q. What are some articles written by Michael P. Taylor?
Figure 1. Skeletal reconstruction of the unaysaurid sauropodomorph Macrocollum (CAPPA/UFSM 0001b) showing vertebral elements along the spine and putative reconstruction of the air sac systems involved.