[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in early 2020, but…you know how that particular story turned out. I’m picking it back up again now because I’ve had the titular point reinforced on several trips and projects over the past couple of years.

Here’s a grab-bag of follow-up stuff related to our new paper on neural canal ridges in dinos (Atterholt et al. 2024, see the previous post and sidebar page). Neural canal ridges, or bony spinal cord supports?

New paper out, er, yesterday: Atterholt, J., Wedel, M.J., Tykoski, R., Fiorillo, A.R., Holwerda, F., Nalley, T.K., Lepore, T., and Yasmer, J. 2024. Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of postcranial neuroanatomy in dinosaurs. The Anatomical Record, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25558 This one started a bit over 10 years ago, on April 9, 2014.

If you live within striking distance of Norman, Oklahoma, and you have some time free next Monday and Tuesday, August 26 and 27, and you care enough about dinosaurs to be on SV-POW! reading this, then I have good news for you.

The world is full of wonderful animals, both extant and extinct, and they all have names. As a result, it’s fairly common for newly named animals to be given names already in use — as for example with the giant Miocene sperm whale “ Leviathan “ (now Livyatan ). BUt there are ways to avoid walking into this problem, and in a helpful post on the Dinosaur Mailing Group, Ben Creisler recently posted a summary.

Last time we talked about the evident hijacking of the PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. No-one seemed to know what had happened or how. I managed to track down Andre J. Veldmeijer, who was involved with the PalArch journals a while back. Based on my Facebook Messenger discussions with him, here’s what we now know: Andre is not involved any more with these journals.

Back in our annus mirabilis of 2013, one of the Wedel-and-Taylor papers was Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications (Wedel and Taylor 2013). We this published in PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology , which we chose because it was a small, open-access journal in our field that was obviously mission-driven and did not charge an APC.

TL;DR: This blog now has an ISSN (3033-3695), and each new post gets a DOI, usually a day or two after it’s published. Read on for the details. Over the years, we and others have cited a lot of SV-POW! posts in the formal literature.

It’s pretty amazing to realise we’ve been running SV-POW! for nearly seventeen years now, since 1st October 2007. And it’s astonishing, and gratifying, and even a tiny by humbling, to see how popular it’s been in its niche. That niche has turned out to be a bit bigger than we could have imagined, and I am delighted to say that earlier today we notched up our five millionth view!

If you want to find the paleontology and anatomy videos that Mike and I have done (plus one video about open access), they have their own sidebar page now, for your convenience and for our own. It’s, uh, just to the right of where your eyes are pointing right now.

My friend and frequent collaborator (one, two, three) Tito Aureliano invited me to give a talk on his YouTube channel, I suggested pneumaticity and gigantism, and here we are. There’s a decently lengthy Q&A, moderated by Tito, after the talk itself.