Welcome to 2017! Let’s start the year with a cautionary tale. I’ll leap straight to the moral, then give an example: it’s very easy to reach the wrong conclusion about fossils from photos. That’s because no single photo can give an accurate impression of distortion.

I’m back in Oklahoma for the holidays, and anytime I’m near Norman I pop in to the OMNH to see old friends, both living and fossil. Here’s the Aquilops display in the hall of ancient life, which has been up for a while now.

In the summer of 2015, Brian Engh and I stopped at the Copper Ridge dinosaur trackway on our way back from the field. The Copper Ridge site is 23 miles north of Moab, off US Highway 191. You can find a map, directions, and some basic information about the site in this brochure.

Back at the start of September, I noted that Tschopp and Mateus (2016) had published a petition to the ICZN, asking them to establish Diplodocus carnegii as the type specimen of the genus Diplodocus — a role that I argued it already fulfils in practice.

So I came across this tweet from Laurent Gatto, who’s head of the Computational Proteomics Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK: https://twitter.com/lgatt0/status/802189887860592640 My immediate reaction was not to retweet. Why? Because I am not comfortable recommending rejection (or acceptance!) of something I’ve not seen.

Fig. 14. Vertebrae of Pleurocoelus and other juvenile sauropods. in right lateral view. A-C. Cervical vertebrae. A. Pleurocoelus nanus (USNM 5678, redrawn fromLull1911b: pl. 15). B. Apatosaurus sp. (OMNH 1251, redrawn from Carpenter &McIntosh 1994: fig. 17.1). C. Camarasaurus sp. (CM 578, redrawn from Carpenter & McIntosh 1994: fig.

Oh man, 2016, you are really working on my nerves. Sometimes it’s a positive balm to hold a piece of an animal dead and gone for 145 million years, or stare at a thousand vertical feet of sandstone, and know that we are all ants. These lovelies here intrigue me deeply.

I’ve been writing for Sky & Telescope, the American astronomy magazine, for a year now. My first feature article was published last December (details here), my second came out this April (ditto), and my latest is in the current (December 2016) issue, which should be hitting newsstands this week.

We keep selling out of books, which is a nice problem to have, but still a problem for people who want books.

The interview that I did for Jisc was conducted via Skype, by the very able Michelle Pauli.

Quick heads up: Mark Hallett and I are both at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Salt Lake City. Tomorrow afternoon (Friday, October 28) at 4:15 PM we’ll be signing copies of our book, The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants.