Order up! Sauroposeidon is stitched together from orthographic views of the 3D photogrammetric models rendered in MeshLab. Greyed out bits of the vertebrae are actually missing–I used C8 to patch C7, C7 to patch C6, and so on forward. The cervical ribs as reconstructed here were all recovered and they are in collections, but they’re in several jackets and boxes and therefore not easily photographed.

Here’s a working version of that link. Working link. Working links: Falkingham (2012) on photogrammetry for free Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 1 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 2 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 3 Mallison photogrammetry tutorial 4 The rest of this series. Reference Powell, Jaime E.  2003.

Link from second slide. Other posts in this series. Reference: Osborn, Henry Fairfield, and Charles C. Mook. 1921. Camarasaurus , Amphicoelias and other sauropods of Cope. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History , n.s. 3 :247-387, and plates LX-LXXXV.

Somewhat lamely, this is the only slide I had in about lighting. I left it up while I talked about the most important points, which are: Don’t use a flash unless you absolutely have to. If you can swing it, the common convention is to have specimens illuminated from the upper left.* If you have the time, it’s not a bad idea to bracket your Goldilocks shot with brighter and darker photos, by fiddling with your camera settings.

Recently I had the opportunity to give a talk on photographing specimens and preparing illustrations in Jim Parham‘s phylogenetics course at Cal State Fullerton. Jim is having each student (1) write a description of a specimen, (2) run a phylogenetic analysis, and (3) do some kind of calibration on their tree. I think that’s rad.

Back in the early aughts Cal Acad did a huge exhibit simply titled, “Skulls”. It was extremely rad, and I could have been running a separate blog this whole time with nothing but photos from that exhibit. ( Update: the website for the exhibit is still going. Check it out.) I was just sorting through some old folders and found some favorites.

Here’s a nice thing: friends and relatives just assume (correctly) that I will want whatever dead animals they find. So I was not completely surprised when I got a call from my brother Ryan (pillager of the Earth) asking if I wanted a dead mouse he’d found mummified at the back of an unused cupboard.

Well, I see that our ‘roadside dinos‘ category is in a sad state. Not from lack of posts, but because most of the so-called roadside dinos found therein are entirely too polished. Real roadside dinos are assembled by non-paleontologists armed only with scrap metal, welding equipment, The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs (again, the real one), and a dream.

Yes, it’s bear skulls on the brain lately. I have nothing scientific to say here, I was just going through old files and found myself struck by the beautiful form and texture of the bones.

Many thanks to everyone who played pin-the-skull-on-the-carnivore. The answers are down at the bottom of this post, so if you’ve just arrived here and want to take the challenge, go here before you scroll down. To fill up some space, let me point out how crazy variable the skulls of black bears, Ursus americanus , are. Here’s the one I helped dig up, missing the occipital region.