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.

Last night a thought occurred to me, and I wrote to Matt: Matt wrote back and gave me permission to write up his reply into an SV-POW! post, which you are now, obviously, reading. Here’s what he said. No, we’d have no idea about the flow-through lungs from fossils. In fact, it’s particularly bad for birds.

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: The big yellow sheet at the top is the nuchal ligament, which in many mammals provides axial tension for the cervical vertebrae, and which has been hypothesized (e.g. by Alexander 1985:13) to […]

Here’s a cool photo of an apatosaur cervical in anterior view. This is from R. McNeill Alexander’s wonderful book Bones: The Unity of Form and Function, which was published in 1994.

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! This is the work of our old friend Mark Witton, so we’ll let him explain it: More […]

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.