Naturally I was grateful when Cary invited me to be part of the team working on Dolly, the diplodocid with lesions in its neck vertebrae (Woodruff et al. 2022; see previous posts on Dolly here and here). I was also intellectually excited, not only to see air-filled bones with obvious pathologies, but also for what those pathologies could tell us about Dolly and other sauropods. That’s the part of our new paper I want to unpack in this post.

Back in at least 2008 — maybe earlier — I kept all the bones from our good-sized Christmas turkey. Of course, it’s missing the head, neck and feet, but otherwise it’s pretty much all there.

Dolly the dinosaur - pathological vertebrae by WitmerLab at Ohio University 3D Navigation basics All controls Orbit around Left click + drag or One finger drag (touch) Zoom Double click on model or scroll anywhere or Pinch (touch) Pan Right click + drag or Two fingers drag (touch) Orbit navigation Move camera: 1-finger drag or Left Mouse Button

I was at the SVP meeting in Albuquerque in 2018 when Cary Woodruff called me over and said he had something cool to show me. “Something cool” turned out to be photos of infected sauropod vertebrae from the Morrison Formation of Montana. Specifically, some gross, cauliflower-looking bony lesions bubbling up in the air spaces on the sides of the vertebrae.

It warmed my crooked little heart to see Mike Taylor, noted sauropodologist and disdainer-of-mammal-heads, return mammal skulls to the blog’s front page yesterday. Naturally I had to support my friend and colleague in this difficult time, when he may be experiencing confusing feelings regarding nasal turbinates, multi-cusped teeth, and the dentary-squamosal jaw joint.

These are out as I consider how to reorganise my office. The pig skull came from a hog-roast, and was very crumbly by the time I had prepped it out. It’s subsequently had an accident when it fell off a loudspeaker in my youngest son’s room, so it’s not the pig it once was.

Many aspects of scholarly publishing are presently in flux. But for most journals the process of getting a paper published remains essentially the same as decades ago, the main change being that documents are sent electronically rather than by post. It begins with the corresponding author of the paper submitting a manuscript — sometimes, though not often, in response to an invitation from a journal editor.

Our lungs are made up of millions of tiny bags. Breath in, fill the bags with fresh air, breathe out, empty the bags of spent air. But bird lungs are very different.

Last time, we looked briefly at my new paper Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted (Taylor 2022). As hinted at in that post, this paper had a difficult and protracted genesis. I thought it might be interesting to watch the story of a published paper through its various stages of prehistory and history.

Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of Diplodocus ? in May 2011, but it was submitted as a preprint in 2015.

This is super cool: my friend and lead author on the new saltasaur pneumaticity paper, Tito Aureliano, made a short (~6 min) video about the fieldwork that Aline Ghilardi and Marcelo Fernandes and their team — many of whom are authors on the new paper — have been doing in Brazil, and how it led to the discovery of a new, tiny titanosaur, and how that led to the new paper. It’s in Portuguese, but with English subtitles, just hit the CC button.