As we noted yesterday, the humerus of the Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P25107 is inconveniently embedded in a plaster jacket — but it wasn’t always. That’s very strange. I have an idea about that which I’ll come to later. Anyway, although the humerus is now half in a jacket and fully inside a cabinet, we can see it from all angles thanks to the cast that’s part of the mounted skeleton outside the Field Museum.

In the comments on Matt’s post about the giant new Argentine titanosaur specimens, Ian Corfe wondered why Benson et al. (2014) estimated the circumference of the humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax instead of just measuring it. (Aside: I can’t find that data in their paper.

You’ve probably seen a lot of yapping in the news about a new “world’s largest dinosaur”, with the standard photos of people lying down next to unfeasibly large bones. Here’s my favorite–various versions of it have been making the rounds, but I grabbed this one from Nima’s post on his blog, The Paleo King.

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“In the public interest” is an article that was published in C&RL News back in July/August 2005. It’s Sharon Terry’s first-person account of being the parent of children with a pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE), a genetic disease.

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On Monday we visited the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, the Cleveland-Lloyed dinosaur quarry, and sites in the Mussentuchit member of the Cedar Mountain Formation. Many thanks to Marc Jones for the photos.

My camera had a possibly-fatal accident in the field at the end of the day on Saturday, so I didn’t take any photos on Sunday or Monday. From here on out, you’re either getting my slides, or photos taken by other people.

[NOTE: see the updates at the bottom. In summary, there’s nothing to see here and I was mistaken in posting this in the first place.] Elsevier’s War On Access was stepped up last year when they started contacting individual universities to prevent them from letting the world read their research.

I actually have no photos from Saturday morning. One of the vans had a flat tire, and we didn’t have enough reserve capacity in the other vans for everyone from the afflicted van to go on, so a handful of people had to go back to Green River. My talk wasn’t finished and I needed time to work on it, so I was one of the volunteers who went back to town.