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).
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.
Matt’s DinoCon 2025 adventure
August 27, 2025
Where all discerning paleontologists buy road trip junk food. This one is in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
I just got back home after a solid four weeks on the road, an epic peregrination from SoCal to Oklahoma to England to Oklahoma to SoCal. DinoCon 2025 was embedded mid-trip, which is why I haven’t gotten anything about it posted before now.
I love driving across the American West. Give me a thousand miles of interstate and a couple of days to myself and you’ll rarely see me happier or more well-adjusted.
My brain is still buzzing, from DinoCon and from the rest of the trip, but here are some of my personal highlights in no particular order:
1. Venue generally — all the conference areas on the University of Exeter campus were very walkable, and the Great Hall had tons of space and lots of doorways, which made it easy to get in and out of from multiple directions, quietly, even during talks. The vendor space was nice, and having dorms and a pub on site was excellent.
Kieran Satchell fixin’ to hold court. Past Matt did not know that he was about to get his face rocked off.
2. Speakers — great, diverse set, appreciated seeing so many women and early-career folks, and people that have had different pathways into paleontology (researchers, educators, artists, people in entertainment, students, etc.). Hillary Maclean’s talk was the absolutely perfect way to kick off the conference, and set a really wonderful tone for everything that followed (irritatingly, I got no photos). I’ll have more to say on a couple of standout talks in a future post.
I’ve been admiring Dougal Dixon and his work for four decades, so getting to meet this kind, gracious, curious, enthusiastic, wonderful person was a lifetime dream come true.
3. Vendors — freakin’ amazing. Highlights for me were getting to meet Dougal Dixon, Andy Frazer (Dragons of Wales, Novosaurs, etc.), Sean Hennessey (Speed Thief), Alex Pritchard (DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk), and Katrina van Grouw (Unfeathered Bird, Unnatural Selection), in addition to catching up with old friends like Mark Witton, Georgia Witton-Maclean, Bob Nicholls, and Toni Naish. I’d corresponded with Natee Himmapaan and David Krentz but not met them in person, so it was nice to finally close those loops. And Nathan Barling — I’ve been meaning to blog about Dr. Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs for ages, and I got to gush at Nathan for a few minutes over how rad that book is. I got books signed by Dixon, Frazer, Hennessey, Naish, and Witton, but I was a lightweight compared to some in that department. The evening art exhibition was fantastic; Mike and I wandered around taking it all in, and it gave us a lot to think and talk about. If you were there and I didn’t meet you — and I know I missed a few folks from busyness, brain fog, general overwhelmedness, etc. — I’m sorry, and I hope we can catch up next year.
Lots of official DinoCon stuff, some of it personalized by me. No-AI pin by Andy Frazer is available in his shop.
4. Brochure — all the swag was great, including the badges and lanyards, but the brochure was a real high point for me, for these specific reasons: I love the A5 size and form factor, so much more convenient than anything larger or smaller; print quality and paper quality were excellent, so it felt good in the hand and like a high-quality artifact; layout with schedule on the middle fold and maps at the back (and on the back) was super convenient, especially for one-handing when carrying an armload of books and art; and finally having room for notes. This is peak conference guidebook design; no need to rethink, just keep making them like this, and other conferences take notice.
Still a few spaces left, but laptop real estate is getting tight. Blue Lias sticker was another DinoCon acquisition, courtesy of Kieran Satchell.
5. Official themed art for the conference — I like that this existed, and I thought that Natalia Jagielska‘s art hit the right note for the type of event this was, so well done all around. I was particularly taken with what I can’t help seeing as her Union Jack azhdarchid; that piece adorns the laptop I’m typing this on, courtesy of the official DinoCon 2025 sticker pack. Speaking of: loved the stickers and pins and so on, I’m a helpless victim for all of that, as Mike can attest.
As the self-nominated Aquilops Ambassador, I left a few Aquilops Funko Pops with various parties in the UK, and put one in the auction.
6. Auction and Quiz — turns out Darren Naish is really good at working a room, and keeping the tone light, even when he was (mock) exasperated by this or that. Both events were enjoyable and hilarious. My plea for the future: don’t find a more professional or even competent auctioneer, just keep making Darren do it. It’s unarguably the right move.
What the kids refer to as a grip of Mark Witton’s art.
Needless to say, I enjoyed myself tremendously. I did have one minor problem that I’d never had the opportunity to experience before: sheer exhaustion from all the dinosaurian awesomeness. At most conferences the dinosaur bits get one day, maybe a day and a half max, and although many of the vendors will be catering to the dinosaurati, it’s not all dinosaurs all the time. DinoCon was just that, and although it was exhilarating, I collapsed into bed each night on the thinnest of fumes (and thinnest of wallets).
Mike and Fiona kindly let me disgorge my DinoCon loot onto their dining room table. I did manage to get it all safely home to SoCal, with only a little necromancy and some slight warping of the spacetime continuum.
But heck, I’ve got in the neighborhood of 50 weeks to recover. By the time DinoCon 2026 rolls around, I’ll be more than ready to do it all again.
The SV-POW!sketeers cracking each other up, as is our wont. This photo was taken just before the one at the top of Mike’s recent post.
One of the major highlights of the trip was just getting to hang out with Mike and Darren. I hadn’t been to the UK since SVPCA 2019, so it was well overdue. I’ve known them both as pen pals for a quarter-century now, and as good friends and colleagues for over 20 years, and looking back I can see the Godzilla-sized footprints their scholarship and companionship have left in my life and my career. That’s a humbling amount of good fortune.
Probably my favorite photo from the trip. Fiona, Mike, me, and Jenny watching the sunset from the trampoline in the Taylors’ back garden.
Also perfectly lovely: getting to stay with Mike and Fiona before and after the conference. Their place is my home away from home. Rivers of English tea flow invisibly beneath the surface of many of my papers, courtesy of the Taylors, and it’s past time I publicly acknowledged that.
I have more to say about the trip — about Mike’s talk, book signings and art acquisitions, not one but two close encounters with Aquilops, and more — but science is calling so those posts will have to wait a bit. Stay tuned.
Come hear Matt and Mike at Darren’s DinoCon!
June 24, 2025
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 better known for his own blog Tetrapod Zoology, and of course for his technical work.)
The first ever DinoCon will be this summer — Saturday 16th & Sunday 17th August at the University of Exeter. It’s the successor to the popular TetZooCon, which ran from 2014 to 2024, but with more of a focus on palaeontology in particular.
What you may not know is that both Matt and I — and of course Darren — will be giving talks:
- From 1:30 to 2:30pm on Saturday, I’ll be presenting The Untold Story of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Lincoln SVPCA attendees got a very truncated version of this in 2023, and there’s a less rushed version of that talk on YouTube, but I have so much more to say!
- From 11am to noon on Sunday, Matt will be talking about The Sauropod Heresies. You can get a bird’s-eye view of the ideas he’ll be presenting from his account of the 2024 Tate conference, where he was the keynote speaker, and from the six-pager that was described as his talk’s “abstract”.
- And Darren will of course be everywhere — opening the conference, introducing talks, participating in panels.
DinoCon also features yet another major talk on sauropods: Tess Gallagher on diplodocid skin from 11:30-12:30pm on the Saturday. And lots more good stuff: you can get all the details from the web-site.
Matt and I are really excited about this. (I assume Darren is, too!) I know most of you aren’t in England, but for those who are, I think this would be a great event. We’d love to meet some of you there.
Tate 2024 road update
June 7, 2024
With my boy Colin Boisvert at BYU. He successfully defended his MS thesis, now he’s bound for OSU-Tulsa for doctoral work. You’ll hear more about his exploits reeeeaaaal soon.
Fossil vending machine in the BYU Museum of Paleontology. All casts, except for the shark teeth and pieces of Campo del Cielo meteorite. They also have bigger casts for sale in the back.
My brothers Venmoed me money for my birthday. BYU takes Venmo for fossil casts. That’s how I got a wee apatosaur femur for a road trip buddy.
With my other boy Julian Diepenbrock at the University of Wyoming Geological Museum. He showed me some of the sauropod material he’s writing up for his dissertation. It’s gonna blow yer danged minds.
That last cervical rib on the left is pretty intact, and really unfused. Hello, not-skeletally-mature B. parvus! UW 15556, formerly CM 563. Why yes, there is a lot of reconstruction going on. W4TP (not mine).
Pulled off the road for a through-the-window shot of this lovely lady, one of about a fudillion pronghorns I saw between Laramie and Casper. Not my best work, but a nice memento for me. Sadly she didn’t want to race me. Maybe next time.
Matter of fact, I did a lot of side-of-the-road photography. Wyoming, man, whatcha gonna do?
Normally I crop, rotate, and color balance every photo within an inch of its life, but right now I have a talk to polish, hence the as-shot quality here. See you in the future — the real near future if you’re attending the 2024 Tate summer conference, “The Jurassic: Death, Diversity, and Dinosaurs”.
A bite-marked Apatosaurus pubis, in bone and in bronze
February 23, 2024
MWC 861 in bone (left) and in bronze (right).
Here’s a cool comparo. I was on the road recently, and since I was passing through Fruita, Colorado, I got some photos of my old friends MWC 861 and MWC 4011, a pubis and ischium, respectively, of Apatosaurus, with deep bite marks on their distal ends from a big theropod, probably Allosaurus (you may remember these awesome specimens from previous posts). That’s MWC 861 above on the left.
A week later I was passing through Tucumcari, New Mexico, and I decided it was finally time I stopped in at the Mesalands Dinosaur Museum, whose billboards I’d seen along I-40 numerous times on drives between SoCal and Oklahoma. Mesalands Dinosaur Museum is run by Mesalands Community College, which has a metalworking program and a bronze foundry. Evidently a lot of students cast fossils in bronze, and a good chunk of the museum exhibits are made of bronze — including the cast of MWC 861 above on the right.
This is the appropriate reaction to putting your grubby mitts on real sauropod bones that were really bitten by real theropods.
Why is my big dumb hand in the photos? When our theropod bite mark paper came out last fall (Lei et al. 2023), it stirred up some media interest, and one request I was not prepared for was for photos of the bite marks with a hand in for scale. I had a few, mostly of CM 555 (you can see those here), but to my immense irritation, I’d never taken any photos of the much-more-impressive MWC 861 and MWC 4011 with my hands in the shots for scale. I’ve now rectified that oversight.
Incidentally, Gaston Design sells casts of the ischium, MWC 4011, both the whole bone and just the bitten distal end. I picked up one of the latter while passing through Fruita. Do not judge Rob Gaston’s work by this particular cast, which is unfinished. Rob warned me in advance that he hadn’t time to finish the painting and antiquing, but I could have the cast anyway if I was interested. He also gave me a ton of advice on how to finish it myself, which I will be attempting in the future. In the meantime, yay! New toy!
So if you’re driving through Colorado on I-70, stop in Dinosaur Journey to see and touch some pretty amazing specimens. And if you’re driving through New Mexico on I-40, stop in the Mesalands Dinosaur Museum and do the same.
Reference
A close, fast encounter with a pronghorn
July 29, 2022
I was in the Oklahoma panhandle in late June for fieldwork in the Morrison with Anne Weil and her crew at the Homestead Quarry. It’s always a fun trip, in part because we see a lot of wildlife out there. One of my favorite panhandle critters, and in fact one of my favorite animals, period, is the pronghorn, Antilocapra americana. Pronghorns are North America’s fastest land animals, and probably the fastest land animals in the world after cheetahs. That’s because they evolved to outrun American cheetahs, Miracinonyx, which went extinct about 12,000 years ago. Once you are familiar with pronghorns, you could never mistake one for a deer. Body profile alone is enough to tell, even at great distances: deer are graceful-looking animals with long, tapering legs, whereas pronghorns look like lozenges on stilts.
On June 21, we were heading back to Black Mesa after checking out some new-to-me Morrison outcrops north of Boise City, Oklahoma (see Richmond et al. 2020). I was driving my Kia Sorento, with a couple of students also in the truck. I came over a hill going about 65 mph (105 kph), and a female pronghorn that had been grazing in the ditch decided that would be the perfect time to bolt across the road. I thought I was about to have a fairly disastrous high-speed collision with a large-ish ungulate, but between my braking and her veering off a bit, we narrowly missed colliding. Instead, she ended up running down the road, parallel with my truck, seriously about 1 meter ahead and left of the driver’s side front tire. For a few seconds, I was driving 55 mph (89 kph) and she was keeping pace, and it didn’t look like she was really taxing herself. Then I realized that she was technically out ahead of the bumper and could still decide to run in front of the truck, so I accelerated and got past her, but the key point is that I had to speed up to about 60 mph (97 kph) to do it. Once I was past her, she trotted to a stop and stood in the middle of the road, watching me drive off (the road ahead was empty, and I was watching her in the rearview mirror).
I’ve read other anecdotal accounts of people driving alongside pronghorns that were really booking it — some memorable ones are recounted in the Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (Wood 1982) — but I never imagined that I’d get to experience something like that. It was cool as heck, and one of the best wildlife encounters of my life. It all happened too quickly to get any photos, so I’m illustrating this post with pronghorn photos I got on a stargazing expedition to Black Mesa in September, 2020. I also have some half-decent pronghorn photos in this post from 2016.
References
- Richmond, D.R., Hunt, T.C. and Cifelli, R.L. 2020. Stratigraphy and sedimentology of the Morrison Formation in the western panhandle of Oklahoma with reference to the historical Stovall dinosaur quarries. The Journal of Geology 128(6): 477-515.
- Wood, G. L. 1982. The Guinness Book of Animals Facts & Feats (3rd edition). Guinness Superlatives Ltd., Enfield, Middlesex, 252 pp.
Burpee PaleoFest 2020: my last conference
March 8, 2021
Last spring I was an invited speaker at PaleoFest at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois. I meant to get these photos posted right after I got back. But I flew back from Illinois on Monday, March 9, 2020, and by the following weekend I was throwing together virtual anatomy labs for the med students. You know the rest.
The wall of ceratopsians at the Burpee Museum. Every museum should have one of these.
I had a fantastic time at PaleoFest. The hosts were awesome, the talks were great, the Burpee is a cool museum to explore, and the swag was phenomenal.
An ontogenetic series of Triceratops skulls. Check out how the bony horn cores switch from back-curving to forward-curving. The keratin sheaths over the horn cores elongated, but they didn’t remodel, so adult trikes probably had S-curving horns.
I know I poke a lot of fun at non-sauropods around here, but the truth is that I’m a pan-dino-geek at heart. When I’m looking at theropods and ceratopsians I am mostly uncontaminated by specialist knowledge or a desire to work on them, so I can relax, and squee the good squee.
I’m a sucker for dinosaur skin. It’s just mind-blowing that we can tell more or less what it would feel like to pet a dinosaur.
Among the memorable talks last year: Win McLaughlin educated me about rhinos, which are a heck of a lot weirder than I thought; Larisa DeSantis gave a mind-expanding talk about mammalian diets, evolution, and environmental change; and Holly Woodward explained in convincing detail why “Nanotyrannus” is a juvenile T. rex.
The pride of the Burpee Museum: Jane, the juvenile T. rex.
But my favorite presentation of the conference was Susie Maidment’s talk on stegosaurs. It was one of the those great talks in which the questions I had after seeing one slide were answered on the next slide, and where by end of the presentation I had absorbed a ton of new information almost effortlessly, by just listening to an enthusiastic person talk almost conversationally about their topic. And when I say “effortlessly”, I mean for the audience–I know from long experience that presentations like that are born from deep, thorough knowledge of one’s topic, deliberate planning, and rehearsal.
The big T. rex mount is pretty great, too.
That’s not to slight the other speakers, of course. All the talks were good, and that’s not an easy thing to pull off. Full credit to Josh Matthews and the organizing committee for putting on such an engaging and inspiring conference.
Did I say the swag was phenomenal? The swag was phenomenal. Above are just a few of my favorite things: a Burpee-plated Rite-in-the-Rain field notebook, a fridge magnet, a cool sticker, and at the center, My Precious: a personalized Estwing rock hammer. Estwing makes nice stuff, and a lot of paleontologists and field geologists carry Estwing rock hammers. Estwing is also based in Rockford, and they’ve partnered with the Burpee Museum to make these personalized rock hammers for PaleoFest, which is pretty darned awesome.
I already had an Estwing hammer–one of blue-grip models–which is good, because the engraved one is going in my office, not to the field. (If you’re wondering why my field hammer looks so suspiciously unworn, it’s because my original was stolen a few years ago, and I’m still breaking this one in. By doing stuff like this.)
There’s a little Burpee logo with a silhouette of Jane down at the end of the handle, so I had to take Jane to meet Jane.
Parting shot: I grew up in a house out in the country, about 2 miles outside of the tiny town of Hillsdale, Oklahoma, which is about 20 miles north of Enid, which is about 100 miles north-northwest of Oklahoma City. Hillsdale is less than an hour from Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge, where you can go dig for selenite crystals like the ones shown above. The digging is only allowed in designated areas, to avoid unexploded ordnance from when the salt plains were used as a bombing range in World War II, and at certain times of year, to avoid bothering the endangered whooping cranes that nest there.
I don’t know how many times I went to Salt Plains to dig crystals as a kid, either on family outings or school field trips, but it was a lot. I still have a tub of them out in the garage (little ones, nothing like museum-quality). And there are nice samples, like the one shown above, in the mineral hall of just about every big natural history museum on the planet. One of my favorite things to do when I visit a new museum is go cruise the mineral display and find the selenite crystals from Salt Plains. I’ve seen Salt Plains selenite in London, Berlin, and Vienna, and in most of the US natural history museums that I’ve visited for research or for fun. The farm boy in me still gets a little thrill at seeing a little piece of northwest Oklahoma, from a place that I’ve been and dug, on display in far-flung cities.
I already credited Josh Matthews for organizing a fabulous conference, but I need to thank him for being such a gracious host. He helped me arrange transportation, saw that all my needs were met, kept me plied with food and drink, and drove me to Chicago, along with a bunch of other folks, for a Field Museum visit before my flight home, which is how I got this awesome photo, and also these awesome photos. Thanks also to my fellow speakers, for many fascinating conversations, and to the PaleoFest audience, for bringing their A game and asking good questions. I didn’t know that PaleoFest 2020 would be my last conference for a while, but it was certainly a good one to go out on.
Matt Wedel will be yapping about Brachiosaurus at the Burpee Museum PaleoFest this year
February 25, 2020
Challenge: can you spot the Iguanodon pelvis in this photo?
Big news: I will be at the Burpee Museum PaleoFest this year. I’m speaking at 10:30 AM on Sunday, March 8. The title of my talk is, “In the Footsteps of Giants: Finding and Excavating New Fossils of Brachiosaurus from the Lower Morrison Formation in Utah”. Brian Engh, John Foster, and ReBecca Hunt-Foster are all coauthors.
The main page for PaleoFest 2020 is here (link), and on the right side of that page there’s a block of quick links to the speaker list, daily schedules, and so on. If you’re in the Midwest and not already booked for the weekend of March 7-8, come on out and I’ll talk your legs off about dinosaurs.
The photo above is of me at a table at the Raymond M. Alf Museum Fossil Fest on February 8, 2020. It’s nothing to do with the Burpee PaleoFest, I just needed a photo of me talkin’ Brachiosaurus. And yes, you can have that t-shirt — objectively the greatest in the history of the universe — when you cut it off my cold, dead carcass. (Or you can order your own; this model is the “Retro Brontosaurus Dinosaur T-shirt” by Dinosaur Tees and the Amazon link is here.)
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 