Trunk vertebra of a tuna ( Thunnus ), OMNH RE 0042, showing paired bony spinal cord supports 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? I got into the habit of calling the inwardly-projecting bony prominences in the neural canals of sauropods and other

Bony spinal cord supports (arrows) in caudal vertebrae of several specimens of Camarasaurus . (a) Right lateral view of neural canal with broken vertebral arch, clearly exposing a bony spinal cord support (MWC 5496). (b) Anterolateral oblique view of the neural canal of the third caudal vertebra (SUSA 515) with a broken vertebral arch displaying a bony spinal cord support.

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.

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.

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 […]

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. To quote from a sampling in a long-delayed in-press manuscript: I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how little pushback I’ve had from editors when citing SV-POW! posts.

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.

BYU 11505, a caudal vertebra of a diplodocid from Dry Mesa, in posteroventral view. Note the paired pneumatic foramina on the ventral surface of the centrum. 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.

BYU 12613, a very posterior cervical (probably C14 or C15) of a diplodocine sauropod, probably Kaatedocus or Diplodocus , from Dry Mesa, original fossil and 50% scale 3D print.