One often hears it said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. For example, if you excavate some fossil sauropods and they don’t have preserved feathers, that not evidence that sauropods didn’t have feathers. Oh yes it is. This is an example of a mantra that’s short, catchy, and wrong.

Matt’s staying with me for a few days, and we’re working into the night trying to put a stake through the heart of a long-running project. He just left the room to take a quick break, and I snapped this photo of the work area. We have everything we need!

Matt and I are just back from the first DinoCon, a British dinosaur convention hosted at Exeter University by Darren Naish (the silent partner at SV-POW!) and colleagues.

Click it. Save it. Sorted. #DinoConUK

Straight from Elesevier’s own mouth, in a letter sent by a “Customer Experience Champion” in response to Professor Iris Van Rooij’s enquiry: Rights of papers are owned by the publishers hence, there is no consent needed from authors.

Here’s a new slide that wasn’t in my talk last summer. Mike and I are working on our respective talks for DinoCon 2025 — a timely concern, since Mike presents next Saturday and I’m on next Sunday. My talk will be an adapted and upgraded version of the keynote talk I gave at the Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference last summer.

A review of sorts, of questionable objectivity. Forty-eight minutes, so grab some popcorn and settle in. Or run screaming. Up to you!

The DinoCon brochure — really a conference guidebook, with schedule, speaker list, vendor list, maps, etc. — is a free download here. Art by Natalia Jagielska. DinoCon is right around the corner, the weekend of August 16-17. The speaker lineup looks fantastic, and the vendor lineup looks like it will execute a Chicxulub on my wallet. On the speaker side, I’m happy to see sauropods getting so much representation.

Easty, resident Terrapene carolina triunguis at Casa Adams Wedel, sometime gnawer of rat skulls, whose recent exploits will be detailed in future posts. In Archie Carr’s encyclopedic “Handbook of Turtles: The Turtles of the United States, Canada, and Baja California”, first published in 1952, he quotes favorably and at length the observations of “Mrs.

Adam Mastroianni’s blog Experimental History is consistently fascinating.

Let’s start with the information you need most: Dougal Dixon’s speculative evolution classic The New Dinosaurs, which imagines the biota of today if the K-Pg extinction event had never happened, is being reprinted in a handsomely-produced new edition from Breakdown Press.