I’ve been in contact recently with Matt Lamanna, Associate Curator in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History — which is obviously the best job in the world.

We’ve shown you the Apatosaurus louisae holotype mounted skeleton CM 3018 several times: shot from the hip, posing with another massive vertebrate, photographed from above, and more. Today we bring you a world first: Apatosaurus from below. Scroll and enjoy!

Yes, we’ve touched on a similar subject in a previous tutorial, but today I want to make a really important point about writing anything of substance, whether it’s a scientific paper, a novel or the manual for a piece of software. It’s this: you have to actually do the work. And the way you do that is by first doing a bit of the work, then doing a bit more, and iterating until it’s all done.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we like to show you iconic mounted skeletons from unusual perspectives.

I have a new article out in the Journal of Data and Information Science (Taylor 2022), on a subject that will be familiar to long-time readers.

Long-time readers may recall that back in 2009, I was quote-mined in the television documentary series Clash of the Dinosaurs (1, 2, 3). Turns out, such misrepresentations are not that uncommon, and now there’s a whole feature-length documentary about the problem, titled Science Friction . The trailer is above, and the film’s homepage is here. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime Video and on Tubi (maaaybe for free?

I have long intended to write a paper entitled Why Elephants Are So Small, as a companion piece to Why Giraffes Have Short Necks (Taylor and Wedel 2013). I’ve often discussed this project with Matt, usually under the acronym WEASS, and its substance has come up in the previous post, and especially Mickey Mortimer’s comment: That is exactly what the WEASS project was supposed to consist of: a list of many candidate limitations on how big animals

Consider a small sauropod of length x , as shown on the left above. Its mass is proportional to x cubed, it stands on leg bones whose cross-sectional area is x squared, and it ingests food through a gullet whose cross-sectional area is x squared. Now consider a larger sauropod of length 2 x , as shown on the right above.

I’m currently working on a paper about the AMNH’s rearing Barosaurus mount. (That’s just one of the multiple reasons I am currently obsessed by Barosaurus .) It’s a fascinating process: more of a history project than a scientific one. It’s throwing up all sorts of things. Here’s one. In 1992, the year after the mount went up, S. O. Landry gave a talk at the annual meeting of American Zoologist about this mount.

Last Thursday I gave a public lecture for the No Man’s Land Historical Society in the Oklahoma Panhandle, titled “Oklahoma’s Jurassic Giants: the Dinosaurs of Black Mesa”. It’s now on YouTube, on the No Man’s Land Museum’s channel. There’s a point I want to make here, that I also made in the talk: we can’t predict the value of natural history collections.