My adventures with Tri-bear-atops
June 7, 2026
One month ago this weekend, I was at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to yap about horned dinosaurs, a tie-in to the new Bizarre Headgear exhibit. Some utter genius in the gift shop had set up what you see above: a Triceratops mask on a stuffed polar bear. This charmed me immensely, in part because it reminded me of one of my favorite memes:
That image lives rent-free in my head forever.
Tri-bear-atops also reminded me of Natalie Metzger’s squirrel wearing an Aquilops skull, a signed print of which lives rent-free in my office. (BTW this print and many other awesome things are available in Natalie’s shop at The Fuzzy Slug. Incidentally, I got to meet Natalie at NorWesCon 2018 and she is just as awesome and hilarious in person as you’d expect from her art. I myself am just as forgetful and procrastinatory as you’d expect from an 8-year-overdue endorsement.)
I loved Tri-bear-atops so much I put it in my talk, at the end when I was encouraging folks to see the whole museum and patronize the gift shop. I said in the talk — truthfully! — that I would have bought it but it wouldn’t fit in my carry-on, so someone else should do the right thing.
That advice landed closer than I expected — my brother Ryan and his family surprised me with it for my birthday! Not a recreation, not “inspired by”, they just went back to the museum and bought the OG Tri-bear-atops and socked it away for a month. A special shout-out to my nephew Eli, who bought the Triceratops mask with his own money, and who (in classic older brother fashion) assures me that his siblings Jewel and Isaac had nothing to do with it.
I feel like the genre of dinosaur-masks-on-things-that-aren’t-dinosaurs has legs. Chances are good that you’ll see more here in time.
One reason I was so happy to be invited to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to talk about horned dinosaurs is because the museum has two of the coolest ones on display: Aquilops, the smallest and earliest ceratopsian in North America, and Pentaceratops, one of the largest and latest. Naturally I had to check in on my baby, and its rather more imposing relative.
Here’s the Aquilops exhibit without any big hairy mammal heads mucking up the view.
The skull of Aquilops in three versions: the actual holotype fossil down below, a reconstruction of the distorted skull with the missing bits sculpted in by preparator and reptile-reconstructor extraordinaire Kyle Davies (see more of his work here), and a reconstruction of the skull as it might have looked before it went through the ravages of taphonomy.
And the holotype skull, OMNH 34557, by itself. If you’re wondering why I’m making with so many photos, it’s because my last attempt, 10 years ago, was not without criticism. I was still just rolling with an iPhone this time, but iPhones are a lot better these days, and I’m a less wretched photographer.
And just to the left of the Aquilops cabinet is the monster Pentaceratops with its 10.5-foot-long skull (3.2 meters).
The Pentaceratops is one of my favorite things in any museum. As a grad student back in the late 90s, I gave a lot of behind-the-scenes tours of the new museum as it was going up, and the Pentaceratops was a hit from the start. I actually preferred the view from the animal’s left side, now blocked by the wall behind it — the wide spread of the front and back legs made for a much more dynamic appearance. I should ask around and see if anyone has any photos of the skeleton from that side.
There was a plan kicking around back then to completely wall in the Pentaceratops except for a front viewing window, the idea being that it was the jewel of the collection and would be presented as if in a giant jewelry display case. That plan got nixed — correctly — because it would have precluded this head-on view, which lets you imagine your last moments before 7 tons of angry ceratopsian turns you into a Jackson Pollock painting. My only (and minor) unhappiness about this view is that darned spotlight to the left of the frill, which glares in photos.
You can scoot a smidge to the right and use the frill itself to block that light, but now you’re not quite looking at the animal head-on. Still, a heck of a nice view of a truly awesome critter. You can’t go wrong either way.
Unlike their cousins across the way in the “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit, who will only be on display until August 23, Aquilops and Pentaceratops are permanent fixtures at the museum. Check ’em out if you get the chance.
ALSO, since you had the impeccable good taste to click on a post about Aquilops:
The Aquilops merch train keeps rolling along, and coming down the pike is this life-size Dolores from Jurassic World Rebirth. I’ve seen fanboys online crying that the first life-size critter in the Hammond Collection line wasn’t a Compy or a baby Velociraptor. Ha ha, Aquilops FTW, theropods get back in line. Anyway, theoretically this thing will drop sometime this summer or fall. Chances are real good that its appearance on store shelves will not go unremarked here.
Last Friday night I was at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to talk about horned dinosaurs, for the launch of the “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit. But last Saturday I was there for “Curiousiday”, to talk about Sauroposeidon.
I was set up at the south end of the museum’s main hall, with a table and some specimens to show off. On the left here is a 1/8 scale 3D print of OMNH 53062, the holotype cervical vertebrae of Sauroposeidon. On the right is OMNH 1094, a cervical vertebra of Apatosaurus (or the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine) that was the first thing that Kent Sanders and I CT scanned back in the spring of 1998 after the vertebrae of what would become Sauroposeidon. And on the far right is a monitor showing the three best slices, a version of an image that I’ve used in many papers and blog posts, going all the way back to Tutorial 3 in the fall of 2007. Good old OMNH 1094 must surely rival OMNH 53062 as my most-figured specimen. I should tally up the occurrences and see who’s ahead.
Anyway: back to Sauroposeidon! Just outside the frame of the previous photo, the two larger jackets were on display, holding what I thought back when were cervicals 6, 7, and 8. That was based on a brachiosaurid identification, and a conservative estimate of 13 cervicals. Now it seems much more likely that Sauroposeidon is some kind of somphospondyl, and possibly a basal titanosaur. If so, it could have had anywhere from 13 to 17 cervicals, and there’s really no telling which four we have, other than they are probably from near the middle of the neck.
I believe that this is the first time that the original fossil material of Sauroposeidon has been on public display. Pretty darned cool! I got to show them off to a lot of visitors, and point out all kinds of neat anatomical details, like the numerous pneumatic fossae and subfossae and the overlapping cervical ribs.
And here I am yapping about Sauroposeidon, in a photo by curator Jacqueline Lungmus. Sauroposeidon-philes will recognize the slide as the quarry map, which appeared as figure 7 in Wedel & Cifelli (2005).
I love the composition of this photo, also by Jac Lungmus, in which the reconstructed neck and skull of Sauroposeidon loom overhead while I talk about the discovery of Sauroposeidon next to the actual fossils of Sauroposeidon and a 3D print of the Sauroposeidon vertebrae. More Sauroposeidon, anyone?
No? Okay, here’s a bunch of Aquilops stuff at the vertebrate paleontology table, including a cast of the actual fossil and a reconstructed skull, alongside the by-now-classic Brian Engh art and a couple of stills from Jurassic World Rebirth. There were many more goodies on display on the VP table, including casts of bones from Allosaurus anax (formerly Saurophaganax) and the Oklahoma Deinonychus.
I have skipped a ton of stuff that happened at Curiousiday. I believe every department in the museum had a table set up, except maybe genomics. The place was packed with cool stuff and interested visitors. Many thanks to Jac Lungmus, Jen Larsen, Kyle Davies, Greg Wilbert, Anne Seagren, and everyone else who made my fun day possible!
In a comment on the previous post, llewelly asked about a dinoceratan on display in the Bizarre Headgear exhibit. Here you go. Unfortunately I didn’t get a pic of the signage, so I’m not sure which taxon this is (Uintatherium? Eobasileus?), or which artist made the sculpture. Most of the sculptures in the exhibit are by Shane Foulkes. If anyone knows, sing out in the comments and I’ll update the post accordingly.
Finally, for the first time in nearly a decade, Giant Irish Matt has been spotted in its natural habitat (= inside a museum, natch). This pathetic freak is clearly bound for extinction.
An imposing view of a juvenile Utahceratops.
As threatened, I was in Oklahoma at the tail end of last week and over the weekend, mostly to give talks. My Friday evening public lecture was on horned dinosaurs, and it was tied in with the launch of a temporary exhibit called “Bizarre Headgear: Ceratopsians and the Evolution of Extraordinary Skulls”. I’ll cover the talks in another post; this one is about that exhibit.
From the museum’s central atrium, there are a couple of passages into the special exhibition gallery that houses “Bizarre Headgear”. My preferred way in is the second doorway, farther from the front of the museum, which puts you face-to-face with pterosaurs and hell pigs. This sets up the basic division of the room: mostly Mesozoic and mostly dinos to the left, mostly Cenozoic and mostly mammals to the right (with a few exceptions, like the Synthetoceras visible on the back wall).
From there, turn left and you’ll see horned dinosaurs and many other interesting critters. A lot of them.
Turn right and you’ll see a lot more non-dinosaurs, mostly extinct and extant mammals with a smattering of non-mammals.
I was there to yap about horned dinos, and the exhibit does not slack in this department, starting with this charming side-by-side skeletal reconstruction and lift restoration of Psittacosaurus. The sculpture is by Shane Foulkes, and it looks like a real animal.
A highlight of the exhibit for me is this case of early ceratopsians. From right to left (far to near in this photo) are cast skulls of Liaoceratops, Auroraceratops, Archaeoceratops, and Protoceratops. These are little Aquilops-alikes from Asia. Back in 2014, Farke et al. got this topology:
Psittacosaurus (Liaoceratops (Aquilops (Auroraceratops (Archaeoceratops + all more derived ceratopsians))))
and in 2024, Tanaka recovered these relationships for those same taxa (I’m dropping many others here):
Psittacosaurus (Liaoceratops (Archaeoceratops ((Aquilops + Auroraceratops) + (all more derived ceratopsians))))
I’d never seen so many of these adorable little weirdos in one place. Heck, I’d never even seen casts of Liaoceratops and Auroraceratops in person. So it was nice to get acquainted with the aunts and cousins of Aquilops.
The ceratopsian show continues with a pair of Protoceratops skeletons, followed by skulls of Zuniceratops, Diabloceratops, Kosmoceratops, and a cool Utahceratops with some soft tissue reconstructed. There’s also a mounted skeleton of Torosaurus, and the juvenile Utahceratops shown at the top of the post. This diversity of critters from across the ceratopsian tree was clutch when I helped lead a student tour on Monday. And it was nice to see a lot of animals that weren’t described when I was growing up, and that the average museum-goer might be less familiar with — Diabloceratops instead of Centrosaurus or Styracosaurus, Kosmoceratops and Utahceratops in place of Triceratops and Chasmosaurus.
The exhibit has a lot more than just skulls and skeletons. There are loads of sculptures, both life-sized fleshed-out heads and miniatures showing the whole animal, like this Pachyrhinosaurus. And lots of wall art. I believe all of the sculptures are by Shane Foulkes (and apologies if I missed anyone else). Most of the paintings are by Andrey Atuchin, but there is at least one Mark Hallett piece in the exhibit: Synthetoceras being menaced by an amphicyonid ‘bear-dog’.
The mostly-mammals, mostly-extant side of the exhibit is equally impressive. I’m including fewer photos from that side, because this is already a long post, but I counted at least 65 skulls of non-dinosaurs, including 3 proboscideans and 5 cetaceans. Invertebrates even get a look in, with some of the more baroquely-horned beetles. I nipped into the exhibit while it was still being set up to get some photos for my talk, like this awesome array of African bovids. All of these non-ceratopsians are there to put the evolution of bizarre headgear in dinosaurs into context, and to show that dinos were not incomprehensible monsters, but animals whose anatomy and ecology we can understand, or at least make pretty good inferences about. The signage is uniformly excellent — discreet, informative, and attractively laid out, with a consistent arrangement and color palette.
As long as we’re keeping score, I counted 5 mounted dinosaur skeletons, and 16 other dinosaur skulls. This exhibit is stacked. Every single person I talked to about it, including other paleontologists, staff, security guards, and museum visitors, volunteered something along the lines of “Holy cow, that is a lot of amazing stuff.” The sheer density and diversity of material on display has a qualitative impact, which gave me the feeling of walking through a cabinet of curiosities the size of a basketball court. I think it’s the most impressive temporary exhibit I’ve ever seen, and by far my favorite.
Here’s another thing I’d never seen in person: a cast skull of a hammerhead shark. Just incredible. As the artist and author Ricardo Delgado, creator of the Age of Reptiles comics, often says, “Nature is the best creature designer.”
The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit is the brainchild of Rob Gaston, shown here with some bespectacled doofus for scale. Rob and the crew at Gaston Design do great work — I’ve got a couple of their casts right here in my home office as I type. Because I got to go behind the scenes while they were setting up, I got to say hi to Rob and congratulate him on such a fantastic exhibit. If you’re within striking distance of Norman, Oklahoma, between now and late August, go see it. It’s included with the extremely reasonable museum admission (max $12 for non-senior adults, even less expensive for everyone else), and hey, you get to see the whole rest of the museum, too. See the museum website for details.
Parting shot: some utter genius in the museum gift shop got into the spirit of things by putting a Triceratops mask on this stuffed polar bear. I love this unreasonably and it’s only because of carry-on luggage limitations that I didn’t bring it home with me. Maybe you will succeed where I fell short.
I’ll have more to say about my trip in another post (Sauroposeidon!), so here I’ll just say a quick thanks to the museum director, Dr. Janet Braun, for the kind invitation to come speak; to Assistant Director Laura Moon and all the staff for making my visit successful and enjoyable; and to vert paleo curator Dr. Jacqueline Lungmus and the VP staff and volunteers for letting me come play in their sandbox. It was a heck of a trip, and you’ll be able to read more about it real soon.
References
- Farke, A.A., Maxwell, W.D., Cifelli, R.L., and Wedel, M.J. 2014. A ceratopsian dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Western North America, and the biogeography of Neoceratopsia. PLoS ONE 9(12): e112055. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0112055
- Tanaka, Tomonori; Chiba, Kentaro; Ikeda, Tadahiro; Ryan, Michael J. 2024. A new neoceratopsian (Ornithischia, Ceratopsia) from the Lower Cretaceous Ohyamashimo Formation (Albian), southwestern Japan. Papers in Palaeontology, 10 (5).
Upcoming public talks about dinosaurs at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
April 21, 2026
Image courtesy of the SNOMNH
I’ll be at OU and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on May 8 and 9.
On Friday, May 8, I’m giving a lunch and learn thing for OU graduate students on how to make new discoveries in anatomy. That evening I’m giving a public talk on horned dinosaurs. Admission is free! Details here.
On Saturday, May 9, I’ll be back at the museum for the “Curiousiday: Collections Celebration”. One of the jackets of the Sauroposeidon holotype specimen will be on display in the museum’s public galleries, and I’ll be giving a couple of short talks about Sauroposeidon. Time for my talks is TBD, but probably something like 11:00 and 2:00. The first 25 visitors get in free, after that it’s regular museum admission ($12 for 18 and up, $10 seniors, $7 kids 4-17, free for babies and toddlers). Details here.
I don’t know yet if there will be a formal book signing, but if you have one of my books and would like it signed, I’ve never turned anyone down.
If you’re within striking distance of Norman, come on out, see the museum’s awesome fossils, and maybe put up with some geek banging on about dinosaurs and/or vandalizing your library.
In honor of the upcoming horned dinosaur talk, here’s a Triceratops I drew. More on that another time.
In search of rearing mounted sauropod skeletons
April 11, 2026
I’m pretty sure that our old friend the AMNH Barosaurus was the first sauropod skeleton even mounted in a rearing pose.
Taylor and Wedel 2016:Figure 1. Mounted cast skeleton of Barosaurus referred specimen AMNH 6341, in the entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History. Homo sapiens (MPT) for scale. Photograph by MJW.
(Does anyone know of an earlier one? That would be fascinating!)
But what other mounted sauropods have been placed in a rearing posture, with both forefeet off the ground? I know of four others. First, the rearing Diplodocus at the Museum of Science and Innovation in Tampa, Florida, that we discussed in detail in Taylor et al. (2023:80–82):
Taylor et al. 2023:Figure 10. Double Diplodocus mount at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), Tampa, Florida. Both individuals are identical, having been cast from the molds made by Dinolab from the concrete Diplodocus of Vernal. Photograph by Anthony Pelaez, taken between 1997 and 2017.
Strangely enough, the other three are all individuals of Camarasaurus, an ugly four-square sauropod whose centre of gravity was well forward of the acetabulum in normal posture, and which would have found rearing much more difficult than in diplodocids. My guess is that’s just because Camarasaurus is so abundant that there are a lot of mounted skeletons out there, and some have been mounted in rearing postures because, well, why not?
Here is one from the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre in Thermopolis:
Camarasaurus skeleton from the BS (Beside Sauropod) quarry, on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Photograph by CryolophosaurusEllioti, CC By. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WDC_-_Camarasaurus_skeleton.jpg
(I can’t find a good photo of this mount from the front or the side: if anyone can, please let me know in the comments.)
The next is in the US National Museum (USNM), otherwise known as the NMNH, otherwise known as the Smithsonian. It’s on the right of this photo:
Rearing Camarasaurus (right of photo, the smaller of the two sauropods) at the USNM/NMNH/Smithsonian. Photo by Ben Miller. https://sauropods.win/@extinctmonsters/109293854660129716
And finally, as I was putting this post together, I stumbled across this mount at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands:
Yet another rearing Camarasaurus, at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Photo by thedogg, CC By-SA. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WLANL_-_thedogg_-_Camarasaurus_(2).jpg
I know nothing about this one, and would welcome any details.
In fact, I don’t know much about any of the three rearing camarasaurs. Can anyone tell me, for example, when they went up? And whether the AMNH Barosaurus was a conscious inspiration?
And the $64,000 question: does anyone know of other rearing sauropod mounts?
References
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2016. The neck of Barosaurus: longer, wider and weirder than those of Diplodocus and other diplodocines. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e67v2 doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.67v2
- Taylor, Michael P., Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The Concrete Diplodocus of Vernal — a Cultural Icon of Utah. Geology of the Intermountain West10:65-91. doi: 10.31711/giw.v10.pp65-91
Tutorial 48: my museum collections kit
November 26, 2025
I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps me get the photos, notes, and measurements that I want. All of this is YMMV — I’m not trying to predict what will work best for you, but to explain what has worked for me, and why. I’m reasonably happy with my current setup, but even after 28 years of museum visits, I’m still finding ways to improve it. Hence this post, which will hopefully serve as a vehicle for sharing tips and tricks.
A word about my program when I visit a collection, because not everyone needs or wants to do things my way. The closest museums with extensive sauropod collections are states away from where I live and work. If I’m in those collections at all, I’m traveling, and therefore on the clock. Time in collections is a zero-sum game: if I have the time to take 20 pages of notes, that could be 4 pages of notes of each of 5 specimens, 2 pages on 10, 1 page on 20, half a page on 40, etc. In practice, I usually make expansive notes early in the visit, one or two spreads per specimen with detailed sketches and exhaustive measurements of the most publication-worthy elements. I grade toward brevity over the course of the visit, and end with a mad desperate rush, throwing in crude sketches and rudimentary notes on as many newly-discovered (by me) specimens as possible. My collections visits are Discovery Time and Gathering Time, trying to get all the measurements and photographs I’ll want for the next year, or five, or forever. And, to the extent that I can suppress them, not Analysis Time or Graphing Time or Writing Time — I can do those things after hours and in my office back home, IF and only if I’ve spent my collections time efficiently gathering all the information I’ll need later.
The very first thing I do in any collection is a walking survey, to make sure I know roughly what specimens the collection contains and where to find them. For a sufficiently large collection — or even a single cabinet with 10 drawers of good stuff — I may draw a map in my notebook, on which I can note things I want to come back and document, and add new things as I find them.
Enough preamble, on to the gear. The first two or three entries here are in strict priority order, and after that things get very fuzzy and approximate.
1. Research Notebook
Seems obvious, right? Write stuff down, make sketches, capture the info that will be difficult or impossible to recapture later from photos. I have encountered people who don’t take a physical notebook, just a laptop or tablet, and take all their notes digitally. If that works for you, may a thousand gardens grow. For me, sketching is a fundamental activity — for fixing morphology in my mind, disciplining myself to see the whole object and its parts, creating a template on which to take further explanatory notes, and capturing the caveats, stray ideas, and odd connections that surround each specimen in a quantum fuzz in my mind (temporarily in my mind, hence the need for external capture). I also write priority lists in advance of specimens to document each day, and then cross them off, add new ones, and strike out duds with wild abandon in the heat of data collection.
I do a few specific things to increase the usefulness of my notebooks:
– Label the spines and covers with the notebook titles and years. These things live on the shelf directly over my desk, and I pull them down and rifle through them constantly. I also have notebooks for university service (committees, student advising, and so on), astronomical observations, and personal journaling, so “Research” is a useful tag for me.
– Number the pages, if they’re not already numbered, use the books chronologically from front to back, and create the table of contents retrospectively as I go — a tip I got from the Bullet Journal method.
– Paste a small envelope inside the back cover, if a pouch is not already built in, to hold all kinds of ephemera — index cards, scale bars, a bandage (just in case), stickers I acquire along the way, etc.
– Affix a section of measuring tape to the outer edge of the front or back cover. I got this tip from the naturalist John Muir Laws, whose Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is wonderfully useful and inspiring (UPDATE: that book is now covered in its own post, here). The scale-bar-permanently-affixed-to-research-notebook has been a game-changer for me. Do you know how many times I’ve accidentally left a scale bar on a museum shelf, and then gotten to my next stop and had to borrow or fabricate one? I myself lost count long ago. But never again. If I’m in a hurry, small specimens go straight onto the notebook to be photographed, like the baby apatosaurine tibia above, and the notebook itself goes into the frame with large specimens. (This comes up again — if possible, and it’s almost always possible, put the specimen label in the photo with the specimen. No reason not to, and sometimes a lifesaver later on.)
Behold the thinness of the eminently pocketable IKEA paper tape. Folding instructions, because this seems to bedevil some folks: hold up one end, fold in half by grabbing the other end and bring it up in front, then do that three more times. Finished product is 65mm long, 25.4mm wide, and about 1mm thick when folded crisply and left under a heavy book overnight.
2. Measuring tapes
I find the flexible kind much more convenient and useful than retractable metal tape measures. I like the 1-2mm thick plastic type used by tailors and fabric sellers, because they have just enough inertia to stay where I put them, or drop in a predictable fashion when draped over something sufficiently large, as when measuring midshaft circumference of a long bone.
I LOVE the little plasticized paper tapes that hang on racks, free for the taking, near the entrances of IKEA stores. I tear them off by the dozen when I go to IKEA, cram them in my pockets, fold them flat when I get home, and stash them everywhere, including in my wallet. A few specific reasons they’re great:
– Folded flat, they’re about the thickness of a credit card, so there’s just no reason to be without one. I usually have one in my wallet, another in the envelope at the back of my research notebook, a couple more stashed in my luggage, a couple more stashed in my car, desk, tookbox, nightstand, etc.
– I can write on them. Especially handy if:
– I’ve torn off a section to serve as an impromptu scale bar. Which I never hesitate to do, because they’re free and I have dozens waiting in my toolbox and desk drawers at any one time. Torn off bits also make good bookmarks, classier, more cerebral, and less implicitly gross than the traditional folded square of toilet paper.
– I give them away to folks I’m traveling with, or that I meet in my travels, and they’re usually well-received.
I would NOT have figured out all these laminae if I hadn’t had a way to make them stand out.
3. Writing instruments in various colors
Up until about 2018 my notebooks were always monochrome pen or pencil. Then I realized that color is an extremely helpful differentiator for Future Matt, so now I highlight and color-annotate willy-nilly.
4. Calipers
I borrowed the digital calipers from Colin Boisvert to get the photo up top, having forgotten my own at home. As a sauropod worker, I don’t need sub-millimeter accuracy all the time. But digital calipers have three exceedingly useful functions: measuring the thickness of very thin laminae and bony septa; measuring the internal dimensions of small fossae and foramina; and measuring the depth of fossae and of concave articular surfaces. I also have a little titanium caliper on a lanyard that goes with me most places.
5. Small brush on a carabiner
This is the newest addition to the kit. I got the idea from Matthew Mossbrucker at the Morrison Museum in Morrison, Colorado. Colin and I visited him in September, immediately before our week-long stint in the collections at Dinosaur Journey. Matthew keeps a little brush carabinered to his belt at all times, and the utility was so instantly obvious that when Colin and I rolled into Fruita later that same day, I went to the hardware store and got my own. Cheap, weighs nothing, clips to anything, compact enough to cram in a pocket, good for lab and field alike. Genius!
6. Scale bar
Yes, I have my scale-bar-enhanced research notebook and my hoarder stash of IKEA paper tapes, but good old-fashioned scale bars are still useful, and I use them constantly. And lose them constantly, hence my multiple redundant backup mechanisms.
(Aside: I can’t explain why I hold onto some objects like grim death, but let others fall through my fingers like sand grains. I’ve only lost one notebook of any kind in my entire life — set it on top of the car while packing and then drove off [grrrr] — so I have no problem investing in nice notebooks and treating them like permanent fixtures. But I can’t hang onto pens and scale bars to save my life, hence my having gravitated to Bic sticks and IKEA paper tapes.)
7. Index cards
I try to get as much information into each photograph as possible. Ideally alongside the specimen I will have:
– a scale bar at the appropriate depth of field;
– the specimen tag with the number, locality, and other pertinent info;
– my notebook open to my sketch of the specimen, for easy correlation later (I don’t do this for every single view, just the ones that I think are particularly publication-worthy, or have info I’m likely to forget later);
– anything else I might want — serial position, anatomical directions, whether the photo is part of an anaglyph pair, and so on — written on an index card, which being a standard size will itself serve as an alternate/backup scale bar.
8. Pencil case
To hold all the smaller fiddly bits you see in the photo up top. I can’t now fathom why, but I resisted getting one of these for a loooong time. I was young and foolish then. Pretty useful all the time, absolutely clutch when it’s 4:58 pm and I’m throwing stuff in bags, caught between the Scylla of working as late as possible and the Charybdis of wanting to be polite to whatever kind, patient person is facilitating my visit. That is also when the pocket in the back of the notebook comes in especially handy.
Headlamp in action, casting low-angle light on a pneumatic fossa on the tuberculum of this sauropod rib. Note also the scale bar, elevated on a specimen box to be the same depth of field, and the notebook open to my sketch of the specimen.
9. Artificial lighting
This was another very late discovery for me — I don’t think I was regularly bringing my own lights prior to 2018. For me, portable, rechargeable lighting is useful in many circumstances and absolutely critical in two: casting low-angle light to pick out subtle pneumatic features, as in the photo above, and lighting up big specimens that I don’t have the time, energy, or space to pull off the shelves, as in the photo below.
I’m particularly taken with the big orange fan/light combo. It charges using a USB-C cable, has four settings for fan speed (handy when it’s hot, humid, or just oppressively still) and three for light intensity, a rotating hook that folds flat, and a USB power-out socket for charging phones, headlamps, fitness trackers, and what have you. I use it practically every day whether I’m on the road or not.
Magnetic flashlight hanging from steel shelving to illuminate Camarasaurus cervical vertebrae in the Utah Field House collections.
Whether it’s a hook or a magnet, some kind of mechanism for suspending a light at odd heights and angles is super useful. I usually have a strong flashlight with an integral seat-belt cutter and window-smasher in the door pocket of my car, and its magnetic base makes it omnidirectionally functional in collections spaces, which are usually liberally supplied with steel in the form of shelving and cabinets.
Haplocanthosaurus CM 879 caudal 2 in left lateral view, with rolled-up paper neural canal visualizer and scale-bar-stuck-to-flashlight.
Sometimes I use a bit of blue tack to stick a scale bar to a flashlight, to create a free-standing, truly vertical scale bar that I can rapidly place at different distances from the camera. Beats leaning the scale bar against a stack of empty specimen boxes or a block of ethofoam (which in turn beats nothing at all).
What else?
USUALLY — Laptop
Not for recording notes or measurements — all of that goes into the notebook, which I scan and upload new stuff from every evening. Mostly for displaying PDFs of descriptive monographs, and hugely useful in that regard.
MAYBE — Monographs
When I have the freedom (= baggage allowance) to do so, I find it handy to bring hardcopies of descriptive monographs, both for quick reference and so I can photograph specimens alongside the illustrations. Doesn’t even have to be the same specimens, just comparable elements. In the photo above, MWC 7257, a partial sacral centrum of Allosaurus from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, is sitting next to a plate from Madsen (1976), illustrating the same vertebra in a specimen from Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. Thanks to Colin Boisvert for bringing the specimen to my attention — I’ve got a longstanding thing for sacrals — and for loaning me his copy of Madsen (1976) for this photo.
OUT — Camera and tripod
I suspect that some folks will shake their heads in mute horror, but after a couple of decades of lugging dedicated cameras and tripods everywhere, I stopped. For the past few years I’ve been rolling with just my phone, which is objectively better than any dedicated camera I owned for the first half of my career. Sometimes I brace it in an ad hoc fashion against a chair or shelf or cabinet, but mostly I just shoot freehand. For my purposes, it does fine, and any minor improvements in field curvature or whatever that I’d get from a dedicated camera don’t outweigh the logistical hassle. Again: YMMV!
Over to you
So, that’s what I roll with right now. It was different six months ago, and will almost certainly be a little different six months hence, hopefully as a result of people responding to this post. With all that said: what’s in your kit?
P.S. Many thanks to Matthew Mossbrucker and Julia McHugh for their hospitality and assistance in their collections, and to Colin Boisvert for being such a great travel companion, research sounding board, and generous loaner-of-things-I’d-forgotten. The Wedel-Boisvert Morrisonpocalypse 2025 deserves more blogging.
New paper: pneumatic diverticula and blood vessels in the neural canals of the toothed birds Ichthyornis and Janavis
October 11, 2025
New paper out this week, open access like usual, go get it for free:
If I recall the sequence correctly, Jessie Atterholt met Dan Field at one of the recent Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution (SAPE) meetings. Between them they spun up the idea of looking for evidence of paramedullary diverticula (PMDs) in the neural canals of some fossil birds that Dan and his collaborators and students had been studying, namely Ichthyornis and Janavis, both toothy ichthyornithines from the Late Cretaceous. This was not long after Jessie and I had our paper on PMDs in extant birds published (Atterholt and Wedel 2022), and we were interested in chasing PMDs down the tree. At the same time, Dan and his former student, Juan Benito, had a big war chest of CT scans of Ichthyornis and Janavis. So the actual work for this project was very similar to the work for Atterholt and Wedel (2022): lots of hours in front of a computer, flipping through stacks of CT slices. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Skeletal reconstruction of Ichthyornis from Marsh 1880
Ichthyornis you know, it’s one of the toothed birds that O.C. Marsh described in the 1870s, after basically buying the specimen out from under E.D. Cope, one of the many inciting incidents of the Bone Wars. For most of my career I simply could not keep Ichthyornis and Hesperornis straight. It has always been perversely confusing to me that the flightless swimming bird is not named “fish bird”, and the gull-like flying bird is not named for Hesperus, or Venus, a thing actually up in the sky. The “fish bird” was the flyer and the “Venus bird” was the flightless swimmer. It’s just plain backwards. (Before anyone pushes their glasses up their nose in the comments, yes, I know that Hesperornis is intended as “western bird”. Both taxa are from the West. Still confusing.)
The much larger Janavis (right) compared to the more-completely-known Ichthyornis (left). From Benito et al. (2022: fig. 1).
Janavis I was not familiar with prior to this project. It’s the sister taxon of Ichthyornis, only named in 2022 by Benito et al. Janavis was big, too, with an estimated wingspan of 5 feet, about the same as the largest extant gulls (or for me, an Oklahoma farmboy, a really big hawk). The vertebrae of Janavis are cuh-ray-zee pneumatic, totally honeycombed inside and fairly Swiss-cheesy in places on the outside, edging up to the frankly unbelievable anatomy of pelicans. Or shoebill storks, about which more in a sec.
Jessie Atterholt, Grace Burton, and me at the LACM in August, 2024. Sorry about the unfortunate non-sauropods in the background.
Grace Burton, one of Dan’s current PhD students, came over to SoCal last year to do some research at the LACM and work with Jessie and me on the IchyJan project (it only took me about half a dozen emails to realize that I was too lazy to type “Ichthyornis and Janavis” the thousand or so times I’d need to). The three of us had an enjoyable visit to the LACM Ornithology collection to find comparative specimens, some of which we ended up figuring in the new paper. And Jessie and Grace spend a LOT of time looking through CT scans. I got in on some of that, but really, Jessie and Grace did almost all the heavy lifting with both the research and the writing, so it’s only just that they’re the first two authors. This was mostly an Atterholt joint from the get-go anyway. If my interest in weird neural canal anatomy is a roaring bonfire, Jessie’s is more like the Sun.
One of the cervical vertebrae of the shoebill stork, Balaeniceps rex, LACM 116167. Check out the “bone foam” of pneumatic foramina inside the cervical rib loop and on the side of the centrum.
Of the new coauthors I picked up on this project, one is close to home: Elle Fricano, who works alongside Jessie and me as one of the anatomy faculty at WesternU. We ended up needing to scan some specimens at WesternU with our microCT machine, and Elle did virtually all of the scanning and interp, so we brought her on as an author. Elle’s own research is mostly on the evolution of the cranial base and ear region in humans and other primates, but she’s gotten into pneumaticity with a very nice paper on the human maxillary sinus (Fricano et al. 2025). She also works as a forensic anthropologist, and earlier this year she passed her forensic board exams to became the 176th Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology — the 176th ever (full list here) — and one of only 124 active board-certified forensic anthropologists in the world. That is a heck of an achievement for anyone, but especially for someone on the tenure track, with a heavy teaching load, research, committee service, and a family. Am I bragging on my colleague? Heck yes. When a fire burns down a neighborhood out here, Elle is one of the people who goes and sifts bone shards out of the ashes and does her best to give the survivors some closure (not to mention helping investigate other deaths, ones that Nature had less of a hand in). That work is not without its costs, and I’m a little in awe of anyone who chooses to do it.
Hypothesized reconstructions of respiratory, vascular, and neurological structures in the neural canals of Ichthyornis dispar and Janavis finalidens. (a) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) cervical 11 showing likely arrangement of paramedullary diverticula (green) and paired extradural ventral spinal vessels (pink) relative to the spinal cord (yellow). (b) Janavis (NHMM RD 271) indeterminate mid-thoracic vertebra 1 showing likely arrangement of the extradural dorsal spinal vein (blue) relative to the spinal cord (yellow). Atterholt et al. (2025: figure 5).
Anyway: neural canals in fossil birds. We were hunting for hard evidence of pneumatic diverticula inside the neural canal, ideally unambiguous foramina opening into clearly pneumatic spaces in the neural arch or centrum. We found those foramina, and lots of other weird stuff besides. Some of the vertebrae of Ichthyornis and Janavis have bilobed neural canals, and from comparisons with extant birds we’re pretty sure the upper lobe held a big venous sinus. Crocs have one, too, in their bilobed neural canals. Most of the critters that fall evolutionarily between crocs and birds don’t have bilobed neural canals, but they may still have had big venous sinuses that simply failed to leave diagnostic traces — the curse of pneumaticity researchers extended to blood vessels.
Some of our CT scans of extant birds show that upper lobe being shared by both a big venous sinus and pneumatic diverticula, and the upper lobe is sometimes expanded into what Jessie and I nicknamed the “pneumatic attic”: a large space of variable geometry that very often has big pneumatic foramina opening into the transverse processes, postzygapophyseal rami, or neural spines. You can see the “pneumatic attic” with the pneumatic diverticula restored in a vertebra of Ichthyornis in Figure 5, above. Virtually everything we found in Ichthyornis and Janavis could be lined up 1-for-1 with an identical geometry or topology in one or another extant bird, which made us feel better about our interpretations.
Paired ventrolateral channels in Ichthyornis dispar, and examples of similar structures in extant avians. (a) Ichthyornis (ALMNH 3316) axis; note that the channel on the right has just given rise to a neurovascular foramen. (b) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) vertebra 11. (c) King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus, LACM 99854) thoracic vertebra. (d) Ichthyornis (ALMNH 3316) sacral vertebra. (e) Blue petrel (Halobaena caerulea) sacral vertebra. (f) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) indeterminate caudal vertebra 1. (g) Ichthyornis (KUVP 25472) indeterminate caudal vertebra 2. (h) Common loon (Gavia immer, LACM 112761) caudal vertebra. (i) Antarctic prion (Pachyptila desolata) caudal vertebra. Atterholt et al. (2025: figure 4).
One thing that needs more work is the frequent occurrence of small, paired troughs at the ventrolateral corners of the neural canal, not only in Ichthyornis and Janavis but in many extant birds as well. These troughs often bud off little vascular foramina that we can trace down into the centrum, so we’re pretty sure the troughs held blood vessels in life. A lot of vertebrates have a ladder-like arrangement of arteries in their neural canals, which could be the source of these troughs, but they might also have been produced by little basivertebral veins, which birds otherwise seem to lack. Why don’t we we just inject some dead birds, dissect them, and find out, you maybe wondering. Well, we’re gonna, at some point, but that’s at least another whole paper’s worth of work, and possibly several. We’d rather just go look up the answer, but as far as we and our reviewers could tell, no-one has ever written about these troughs and their contents before (if you know otherwise, please sing out in the comments!).
So once again, Jessie and I find ourselves needing to do novel anatomical research on living animals, partly because it’s worth doing in its own right, but also so that we can make progress on the paleontological questions that got us into this in the first place. It’s awfully hard to make informed paleobiological inferences when so much basic anatomy remains to be documented for the first time, even in extant critters. As I keep saying, a lot of this is work that anyone with sufficient time and curiosity could do, much of it inexpensively. So if you find this stuff intriguing, we’d love to have more explorers out here where the pneumatosphere intrudes into the neural-canal-iverse.
I was up inside the Utah Field House Diplodocus three weeks ago, logging pneumatic structures that no-one had documented in 125 years. More on that another time. Many thanks to John Foster for the ladder and the permission.
As for Jessie and me, this is our fifth neural-canal-related paper (see the evolving list here). We keep kicking them out the rate of one per year, which is nice and sustainable and unlikely to stop anytime soon. According to my to-do list, she and I have at least another 15 collaborative papers planned. Not all of them are about neural canals, but still… I reckon we’d better get to it.
REFERENCES
- Atterholt, Jessie, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. A computed tomography-based survey of paramedullary diverticula in extant Aves. The Anatomical Record 306(1): 29-50. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24923
- 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.
- Benito, Juan; Kuo, Pei-Chen; Widrig, Klara E.; Jagt, John W. M.; Field, Daniel J. 2022. Cretaceous ornithurine supports a neognathous crown bird ancestor. Nature. 612 (7938): 100–105. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05445-y.
- Fricano, Ellen E.I; Nguyen, Joseph; Hallal, Ryan; and Llera Martín, Catherine J. 2025. Under the surface: Correlates with maxillary sinus shape. Journal of Anatomy. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.14283
- Marsh, O.C. 1880. Odontornithes: a monograph on the extinct toothed birds of North America. United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 201 pp.
Midnight in the Museum
September 27, 2025
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 anvil of eons
Carnivores and civilizations
Long of tooth
Weak of spirit
Wracked by rot and riot
Collapse.
Their carcasses play host
To new generations
That strip the drying flesh
And flaunt their youth
Beneath the philistine stars
That warmed the nebulae
Before the phoenix-fusion birth
Of brash young Sol.
I feel a distant call
The silent whistle screaming
Of my genes
Seeking always
To jump this fragile ship of life
And flee down the generations
Until I am lost
Expended
Forgotten.
The tyrant kings smile knowingly:
“You too shall pass”
And continue their stately voyage
Into eternity.
The circle closes
The revolution complete
And morning spreads her wings
To the far horizon.
I do not fear the dawn
Or the age to come
For I have basked
On desert sands
Drinking life like heat
And felt the mighty Tethys
Washing over my feet.
Notes
In 1998-2001 I was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, with night-owl tendencies and all-hours keycard access to the old museum collections, a defunct WWII-era gymnasium where dinosaur skeletons were prepared and test-assembled, and the new building — now the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History — where they were being installed, ancient bones going up on skeletons of new steel. I wrote this in 1998 or 1999; perhaps fittingly, its precise origin is now lost in time. I’d no doubt say it all rather differently now, but 50-year-old me will yield the floor to the 20-something who penned this, not least because he wrote me into existence as well. Oh, and if I didn’t swipe the expression “xylophone skeletons” directly from Ray Bradbury’s Dinosaur Tales, it was at least heavily inspired by Bradbury.
Photos, top to bottom:
Diplodocus, Utah Field House of Natural History, Vernal, UT
Pteranodon, Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, Woodland Park, CO
Something toothy, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, NY
Clouds over Mygatt-Moore Quarry, Rabbit Valley, CO
Ripple rock, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, CO
This Saturday is Aquilops Day!
July 17, 2025
This Saturday, July 19, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History is hosting Aquilops Day.
Before Jurassic World Rebirth was released, I was interviewed by the folks at the SNOMNH about Aquilops. Andy Farke and I got quoted a few places (here, here, and here). I was really happy to see Scott Madsen get some attention (here) — if he hadn’t found and prepped the fossil, Aquilops wouldn’t be a thing, and we’d know a lot less about the earliest ceratopsians in North America.
It was nice to see that one quote of mine get around, but the rest of the interview was just sitting in email, so I got permission from the SNOMNH folks to post it here.
When the specimen was first discovered in the field what did the team think it was initially? Were they looking for anything specific in the area?
I wasn’t on the expedition in the summer of 1997 when Scott Madsen discovered the Aquilops type specimen — everything I know about this I learned from Scott and from Dr. Cifelli later. I did go out to the Cloverly Formation with the OMNH crew in the summer of 1998. To answer those questions in reverse order: even in 1998 we were looking for anything and everything. I did a lot of prospecting that summer with Scott and the rest of the crew, just walking outcrops for hours in hopes of finding either fossil skeletons or a promising microsite, someplace that preserved a lot of tiny bones and especially teeth that we could retrieve by screenwashing the sediment. Dr. Cifelli had been very successful getting tiny teeth of early mammals, lizards, snakes, and more from microsites in the Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah and, to a lesser extent, from the Antlers Formation in southeast Oklahoma, and we were hoping to replicate that success in the Cloverly. But we also were not going to turn down larger fossils like skulls and skeletons.
According to Scott’s account of the discovery (link), everyone initially assumed it was a Zephyrosaurus, a small plant-eating dinosaur distantly related to duckbills. It was only during the process of preparing the skull out of the surrounding rock that Scott found the beak and realized that it was an early horned dinosaur — the earliest anywhere in the world outside of Asia.
Table centerpiece at my birthday party last month.
It’s more rare or unusual to find a dinosaur’s skull relatively intact isn’t it? Do we know or can we guess what circumstances caused this specimen’s skull to be preserved without the rest of its body?
It does often seem like feast or famine with dinosaur skulls. There are numerous dinosaurs for which we have most of the skeleton but no skull, and some others for which we have a skull but nothing else. For relatively large-headed animals like Aquilops, the skull and the body are basically two big masses connected by a weaker linkage — the neck. It’s common for the head to become separated from the body after death, as the carcass is moved around by scavengers or simply by flowing water. The same thing happens to human bodies in forensic situations.
My better half, Jenny Adams, with a plush Aquilops.
What adaptations did Aquilops and other early ceratopsians have that made it so successful? What environmental pressures caused such a small, unassuming dinosaur to eventually evolve into some of the largest land animals that ever lived?
Ceratopsians had nifty teeth that could efficiently cut up plants, like walking around with paired sets of garden shears in their mouths. And to power those shears, they had enlarged attachments for jaw muscles at the backs of their skulls, which were the first beginnings of the frills that things like Triceratops and Pentaceratops would take to such flamboyant lengths later on. But even the little cat- and pig-sized ceratopsians were pretty successful, based on the high diversity of early ceratopsians in China and Mongolia — the ancestors and cousins of Aquilops.
The combination of big jaw muscles, shearing teeth, sharp beak, and pointy skull bits worked well across a wide range of body sizes, from little tiny things like Aquilops to the later rhino- and elephant-sized horned dinosaurs. I think it’s particularly interesting that even in the Late Cretaceous, generally Aquilops-like small ceratopsians such as Leptoceratops were still thriving alongside giants like Triceratops. So it’s not the case that big ceratopsians replaced small ceratopsians, rather that the range of successful body plans expanded to include big multi-horned four-leggers. But the little ones were still doing fine, more than 40 million years after Aquilops existed.
My Aquilops t-shirt was a birthday present from Andy Farke. I didn’t even know the other one existed until Jenny got it delivered.
How accurate do you think Aquilops’ representation will be on the big screen? What would be the biggest challenge in realistically portraying Aquilops in film — locomotion, coloration or something else?
We have a lot of advantages when it comes to reconstructing the little early ceratopsians. From Asia we have multiple complete skeletons of close relatives of Aquilops, like Psittacosaurus, and some of those have fossilized impressions of the skin, including scales, color patterns, even protofeathers or “dinofuzz”. So we can reconstruct those animals with a lot more certainty than we can most of larger and more famous dinosaurs like Spinosaurus or Dilophosaurus. There isn’t a single Dilophosaurus in the world in which the tippy-top of the skull is intact, so we still don’t know the full shape and extent of the head crest (more on that here).
From the footage I’ve seen in the trailers, I think the moviemakers did a pretty darned good job with Aquilops. The body proportions look good, the colors and movements are plausible, nothing set off any red flags for me. I do wonder about disposition. A lot of small plant-eaters today are pretty skittish, and they can fight aggressively when cornered — think about the attitude of a bantam rooster, or an angry goose. My guess is that a live Aquilops would be so good at hiding that humans moving through its environment would never even see it. But for the sake of getting to see “my” dinosaur on the big screen, I’m glad the moviemakers went another way.
If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
One more question for fun… if you were consulted about creating this dinosaur’s on-screen persona, what kind of personality do you think it would or should have had? Nervous? Intelligent? Are there any modern animals that might have a similar personality?
When Dr. Farke, who was the lead author on the Aquilops project, and I were coordinating with Brian Engh, who did all of the art for the paper and the press release, we wanted to show a person holding an Aquilops to give a sense of scale. One of the things we talked about is that living animals with beaks or sharp teeth have a tendency to bite when they feel threatened. The core ceratopsian superpower was having very powerful jaw muscles pushing scissor-like teeth and a wickedly sharp beak. One of Brian’s preliminary sketches showed an Aquilops jumping out of a person’s arms and nipping their fingers on the way. As much as I love the idea of an adorable, friendly “cat-ceratops”, I think a real-life Aquilops would have no problem kicking, scratching, and especially biting if it got cornered by a human. Imagine a raccoon with the head of a snapping turtle — would you want that in your backpack?
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
One thing occurred to me after the interview, and after I saw the movie: the filmmakers may have gotten Dolores’s personality more correct than I thought. In the movie, the island had been uninhabited by people for 17years, and presumably Dolores is younger than that. She’d have no reason to fear people, and given the wiiiide variation in animal personalities, it wouldn’t surprise me if some Aquilops were more inquisitive than skittish. I still don’t think I’d want a cat-sized biting machine in my backpack; as Xavier says in the movie, “That may or may not be a terrible idea.”
So anyway, if you’re in or near central Oklahoma this weekend, you could do a lot worse than swinging by the Sam Noble Museum to enjoy Aquilops Day. I myself am planning on giving a short virtual presentation there — watch this space for more. EDIT: my talk, “Bringing Aquilops to Life”, will run from 1:00-1:15 PM, Central Daylight Time.
And since I’ve linked to more than one YouTube video already in this post, go watch Gabriel Santos’s awesome short on Aquilops — it’s good for you.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
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