Preparing a talk is a time-consuming process, and there’s no question that getting the slides ready is where the bulk of that time goes.  But unless you understand exactly what it is that you’re going to talk about, even the best slides won’t rescue your talk from mediocrity, so before you fire up PowerPoint, go and read part 1 of this tutorial, on finding the narrative.  Seriously.

Matt just wrote this, in an email exchange.  It struck a chord in me, and I thought it deserved a wider audience: Rats. Cervical vertebra V (from an unknown position in the anterior part of the neck) of the STILL undescribed Tendaguru brachiosaurid NHM R5937, "The Archbishop", in right lateral view. The posterior portion is missing in action.

Every now and then, you come across a sauropod skull so beautiful, it’s almost enough to distract you from the vertebrae that it was attached to.  One such is the Giraffatitan brancai skull HMN T1, which you’ve seen here before if you’ve been around for a while.

People who’ve been paying especially close attention may have noted than on four separate occasions in the last eighteen months, I’ve casually referred to our old buddy HMN SII as the paralectotype specimen of Giraffatitan brancai .

Sorry for the very short post. We have some longer stuff planned, but we’ve been too busy to kick it out this week, and I wanted to leave you with something cool to ponder over the weekend. Here’s the ilium of Giraffatitan overlaid on that of Brontomerus , scaled to the same acetabulum diameter ( Giraffatitan is HMN J1, left ilium, modified from Janensch 1961: pl. E, fig.

When you last saw this rhea neck, I was squeezing a thin, unpleasant fluid out of its esophagus. Previous rhea dissection posts are here and here; you may also be interested in my ratite clearing house post. We did that dissection back in 2006. Since then I finished my dissertation, got a tenure-track job, and moved twice. The rhea neck followed me, living in a succession of freezers until last spring.

Here’s another dual-purpose post (part 1 is here), wherein I use some of Brian Engh’s cool art to riff on a related topic (with kind permission–thanks, Brian!). Back when he was first planning his awesome Sauroposeidon life restoration, Brian sent these head studies: (Note that Brian’s ideas were still evolving at this point, and he roofed the nasal chamber with a keratinous resonating chamber instead of the inflatable sac seen in

These are happy times for me. Dinosaur rap god and burgeoning paleoartist Brian Engh, AKA The Historian Himself, has finished a new life restoration of Sauroposeidon . Here’s a smallish view, just to give you a taste; for the high resolution awesomeness, check out Brian’s post here.

This post is nearly three weeks late — it’s based on a piece of artwork that appeared on 25 September, and which I wanted to write about immediately.

For reasons that seemed good to me at the time, I took my best shot at photographing the right cervical rib from cervical vertebra 3 of my ostrich, Veronica [see earlier Part A, Part B and Part C for context].  I thought you might like to see the result, so here it is: Third right cervical rib of subadult female ostrich (Struthio camelus), total length 23 mm. (Total length of the rib, I mean, not total length of the ostrich.) Left column: