Michelle Stocker with an apatosaur vertebra (left) and a titanosaur femur (right), both made from foam core board. In the last post I showed the Brachiosaurus humerus standee I made last weekend, and I said that the idea had been “a gleam in my eye for a long time”. That’s true, but it got kicked into high gear late in 2021 when I got an email from a colleague, Dr. Michelle Stocker at Virginia Tech.

Building life-size standees of big dinosaur bones has been a gleam in my eye for a long time. What finally pushed me over the edge was an invitation from Oakmont Outdoor School here in Claremont, California, to come talk about dinosaurs.

I’m also teaching in two anatomy courses and in the process of moving residences (hence bins and boxes and whatnot), so the timing’s…not great. But needs must when the devil drives. Further bulletins as events warrant.

I’m sure you’ve seen things like ChatGPT in the news: programs that can carry out pretty convincing conversations. They are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and are frequently referred to as being Artificial Intelligence (AI) — but I really don’t like that designation as it implies some understanding.

For some bizarre reason, I have only today discovered Sauropoda Central — a sauropod blog written by someone who goes only by the name “Davidow”, but whose introductory post reveals that he is occasional SV-POW! commenter Vahe Demirjian. It’s a solid blog full of meaty, sauropodolicious nourishment.

Micro-computed tomography of the vertebrae of the basalmost sauropodomorph Buriolestes (CAPPA/UFSM 0035). (A) silhouette shows the position of the axial elements. Artist: Felipe Elias. (B), three-dimensional reconstruction of the articulated cervical vertebral series and the correspondent high-contrast density slices in (D–I). Diagenetic processes partially compromised the internal structures in these cervicals.

Some quick backstory: lots of sauropods have long, overlapping cervical ribs, like the ones shown here in Sauroposeidon (diagram from this old post): These long cervical ribs are ossified tendons of ventral neck muscles, presumably longus colli ventralis.

I was googling around some photos, confirming to myself that turtles don’t have cervical ribs, when I stumbled across this monstrosity (and when I use that word I mean it as a compliment): The specimen is from the collection amassed by Caroline Ponds, formerly a reader in Zoology at Oxford, who picked up most of […]

Just to wash our mouths out after all the theropod-related unpleasantness yesterday: What we’re seeing here, in glorious 3D, is the 7th cervical vertebrae of BYU 1252-18531.

Over on Mastodon (sign up, it’s great!), Jim Kirkland posted a baby Utahraptor caudal vertebrae for #FossilFriday.

While I was thinking about Diplodocus atlas ribs, I was reminded of the ribs on the atlas of a diplodocine skull-and-three-cervicals exhibit that Matt and I saw at MOAL(*) back in the heady days of the Sauropocalypse.