We’re working on a series of posts that’s turning out to be a bigger project than we expected: more posts, and each one longer, than anticipated. Here’s a handy index in chronolog…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
6 posts published by Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel during October 2025| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Long-time SV-POW! reader Tyler Holmes came across a book with the very un-searchable title “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” — I tried to find it in the Internet Archive, but there are waaay …| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Back at the start of October I posted Necks: the lying liars that just keep lying, which included Coy Pearson’s beautiful photo of a Cooper’s hawk from behind, with its neck twisted a full 180 degrees to look at the camera. Not one but two people emailed me in response, with photos they’ve taken of […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Readers with good memories will remember that back in May last year I announced I would be one of the two participants in the plenary debate that closes the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was cast against type, proposing the motion “The open access movement has failed”, with preprint advocate Jessica […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
A few days ago I got a sensationally stupid email from one of those websites that most of us probably have a subscription to, but which I will not give the oxygen of publicity by linking to[1]. The subject line was: Your paper “NEURAL SPINE BIFURCATION…” is now an analogy. No; no, it’s not. Our […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free: Atterholt, Jessie; Burton, M. Grace; Wedel, Mathew J.; Benito, Juan; Fricano, Ellen; and Field, Daniel J. 2025. Osteological correlates of the respiratory and vascular systems in the neural canals of Mesozoic ornithurines Ichthyornis and Janavis. The Anatomical Record. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70070. If I […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Two recent photo posts on Mastodon reminded me how much necks lie. First, there’s this fine set of four photos of the same grey heron, by Zongora: From a distance, you might assume that the long-necked bird shown in the top two pictures is a different species from the short-necked bird in the bottom two, […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Just a quick update on the crowd-funding effort to publish the new diplodocoid volume as open-access papers at Palaeontologia Electronica. The drive now contains an offer that maybe it should have included from the start: “We promise to mention the names of the backers in the acknowledgements of at least one upcoming paper, if this […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Midnight in the museum In the yawning resonance Of empty space The great xylophone skeletons Play the lonely strains of Time Like cathedral organs Heralding the ends of ages. Time rushes on The final predator Implacable Like Dinichthys Cruising the crinoid beds Sounding one note: Everything dies. Change hammers all On the […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows that Matt and I are both all in on open access. What is the point of “publishing” something that not everyone can read? We always want our work to be available to the widest possible audience, so it’s a no-brainer that we won’t let it […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
One of the things that comes up over and over — on this blog, at conferences like DinoCon, on Q&A websites — is how to become a palaeontologist. As I’ve said before (at some length) the way to become a published palaeontologist is to publish papers about palaeontology. But that’s a very general, broad-stroke recipe, […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
I am often so far down the rabbit holes of my own work (and given that I work mostly on pneumaticity and weird stuff in neural canals, they are literally holes) that I do a very poor job of keeping…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
SV-POW! ... All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
9 posts published by Matt Wedel and Mike Taylor during July 2025| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
4 posts published by Matt Wedel during September 2024| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Today sees the publication of what is, OK, an interesting paper on how the serrated trailing edge of the flippers of the ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus may have enabled it to generate less turbulence…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
[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 ear…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
I’ll be sending this letter to the Royal Society, but I also want it out there in public, because I hope that more people will follow the lead set by Dorothy Bishop and Stephen Curry in putti…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
As we’ve often observed, it’s a funny thing that incredibly well-known dinosaur specimens can sit around for decades, or for more than a century, before someone notices something fascin…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Considering how much time I’ve spent playing around mounted sauropod skeletons, I cannot believe it never occurred to me to do this: This is the mounted Brachiosaurus skeleton in the United t…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
