September | 2024 | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
4 posts published by Matt Wedel during September 2024| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
4 posts published by Matt Wedel during September 2024| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
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. Every time you […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
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! From left to right: beer, […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
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. Among other things, it was a great chance for the three of us to get together, for the first time since the 2019 SVPCA on the Isle […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
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. (This is in the context of scholarly papers being fed to their LLM.) Folks, when you send […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
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. Adapted because I have […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
A review of sorts, of questionable objectivity. Forty-eight minutes, so grab some popcorn and settle in. Or run screaming. Up to you!| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
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. In addition to Mike’s talk on the Carnegie Diplodocus and its various […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
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. Knowlton” on the behavior of wood turtles (Clemmys insculpta) and box turtles (Terrapene carolina). The source given in the references is: Knowlton, Josphine Gibson. […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Adam Mastroianni’s blog Experimental History is consistently fascinating. In a recent article on whether conversations end when people want them to, he makes this point, very much in passing: Journal articles […] must simultaneously function as a scientific report, an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure, a plea to the journal’s […]| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form: [NOUN] Learn how this amazing [whatsit] allowed the rise of civilization, informs every aspect of our daily lives, …| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
7 posts published by Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel during July 2025| 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
4 posts published by Matt Wedel and Mike Taylor during June 2025| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
Most regular readers will know about DinoCon, a two-day semi-technical/semi-popular conference being run by SV-POW!’s own Darren Naish. (Darren is very much a silent partner here, and is much…| 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
The paper Taylor, Michael P., and Matthew J. Wedel. 2023. Novel pneumatic features in the ribs of the sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 68(4): 709–718. doi:1…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
This morning, I was invited to review a paper — one very relevant to my interests — for a non-open-access journal owned by one of the large commercial barrier-based publishers. This has…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
After P.A.S.T president Gilles Danis commented on our post about the Chicago airport Brachiosaurus mount, I got into an interesting email conversation with him. Here, posted with his kind permissio…| Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week
