I’m stoked for Aquilops in Jurassic World Rebirth
February 26, 2025
A promo image Brian Engh did for the release of the Aquilops paper back when. Who wouldn’t want one of those?! See lots more great stuff at Brian’s Living Relic Productions.
Aquilops turned 10 years old in December. For all of that time, I’ve been waiting for Aquilops toys. I mean COME ON people, it’s an adorable little cat-ceratops, the only one of its kind so far in North America, how do we have multiple toys of Kaprosuchus and no Aquilops yet?
Well, my good day has come. Apparently Aquilops is going to be in Jurassic World Rebirth, and there are going to be toys!
Screenshot of the leak(?)/announcement from Collect Jurassic this very morning. Better photos here.
There may be plushies too, which is such an obvious move that I am legit flabbergasted no-one has done it sooner. But also, yay!
I am not so cool and reserved that I will not squee hard over all of this. As I texted Jenny this morning:
I’m going to buy 100 of them and give them all unique names and turn the spare bedroom into the Aquilops Paddock and take 2 0r 3 with me wherever I go and aggressively start conversations with strangers about them and generally be unbearable.
You’ve been warned.
UPDATE March 4, 2025:
An addendum in three images.
Burn it all down
February 18, 2025
Clarivate is the content-hoarding corporation that owns ProQuest, the Web of Science and EndNote, among many other services widely used in academia. Plus a ton of content. Today’s announcement, “Introducing ProQuest Digital Collections, a new library subscription offering unparalleled breadth, value and access”, sounds nice, doesn’t it? And the first few paragraphs are certainly full of praise for the changes they’re making.
Those changes amount to: libraries will no longer be able to buy books. Specifically:
Customers can continue to purchase content via perpetual archive license through December 31, 2025, after which this content will be available via subscription only.
You will only be able to rent content, not buy it.
I am quite sure this is not what the authors of books now controlled by Clarivate had in mind.
I think it’s too late for the commercial scholarly publishing sector to turn itself around — in truth it was probably already too late a decade ago, but I and others have fooled ourselves that maybe the good people at these corps can do something. They can’t. Commercial scholarly publishing is owned and controlled by terminal-stage capitalists, and is consequently all about increasing the next quarterly figures — not just ignoring the needs of researchers, but even the medium- and long-term finances of the companies.
In short, the commercial scholarly publishing industry is owned by people who are quite prepared to burn it all down so long as they get rich doing it.
And I think the only response is for us to burn it down first.
The difference is, we’ll replace it with something better.
If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well
February 14, 2025
Here’s a Mastodon thread from a year ago.
Just a quick check on how ChatGPT’s getting on …
Me: Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when?
ChatGPT: The species Brachiosaurus brancai was reassigned to its own genus, Giraffatitan, by the paleontologist Michael Janensch in 1914.
Me: Dude, that is so wrong I can’t even.
ChatGPT: I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. The reassignment of Brachiosaurus brancai to Giraffatitan brancai was not done by Michael Janensch. The correct attribution goes to the paleontologist Ernst Stromer, who reclassified it in 1914.
Me: That answer is even worse. Stromer had nothing to do with the genus name or species name.
ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion in my previous responses. The reassignment of Brachiosaurus brancai to Giraffatitan brancai was actually done by the paleontologist Werner Janensch, not Michael Janensch, in 1914.
sigh
Regular readers will know that the actual sequence of events was:
- Riggs (1903) named the genus Brachiosaurus and its type species Brachiosaurus altithorax.
- Janensch (1914) named a second species of this genus, “Brachiosaurus” brancai.
- Paul (1988) considered the two species separate at the subgeneric level (a taxonomic level that is rarely if ever used in vertebrate palaeontology) and named the subgenus Brachiosaurus (Giraffatitan) brancai.
- Olshevsky (1991) used the genus-and-species combination Giraffatitan brancai without comment in a self-published booklet, a combinaton which was not followed by any formal publication known to me, until …
- Taylor (2009) demonstrated that numerous characters separate the two species and that Giraffatitan is a separate genus with type species G. brancai.
Now, ChatGPT got every single part of that wrong. It left Riggs, Paul, Olshevsky and me out completely. It credited Werner Janensch for reassigning a species to a genus whose name was coined 19 years after he died. It pulled poor Ernst Stromer in for some reason. It invented “the paleontologist Michael Janensch”, who is presumably the unholy offspring of Werner Janensch and me. And in all three answers, it insisted that the reassignment was done in 1914, 74 years before the name Giraffatitan was coined.
But the worst part of this is not the errors. It’s not the blithe confidence with which the false facts are recited. It’s not even the bland “I apologize for the mistake in my previous response” to be followed by more utter nonsense. It’s that these incorrect answers look so plausible. For a lay-person — someone who, foolishly, has not been reading this blog for the last eighteen years — the answers given here look superficially reasonable. A kid doing a homework report on Brachiosaurus could take these answers and weave them into the submission without even having an inkling that they’re completely wrong. And the teacher who has to mark the essay will also likely swallow them.
Because LLMs get catastrophically wrong answers on topics I know well, I do not trust them at all on topics I don’t already know. And if you do trust them, I urge you to spend five minutes asking your favourite one about something you know in detail.
Why do I keep banging on about this? Because we’ve reached an especially toxic phase in the history of AI. A lot of companies have ploughed billions of dollars into the dream of being able to replace human workers with machines, and they are desperate to make us believe it’s going to work — if only so they can cash out their investments while the stocks are still high. We’re in the “pump” phase of an industry-wide pump-and-dump. It would be wise for all to beware getting suckered in.
(Disclaimer: LLMs are useful for some classes of queries. I use them a lot to remind me of programming-language idioms, asking questions like “In Go, if I have an object satisfying the error interface, how can I determine which specific kind of error structure it is?”. They’re good for this because you can quickly determine whether the answer is correct or not, thanks to the merciless compiler. LLMs are not useless; they’re just way overhyped and misapplied.)
References
- Janensch, Werner. 1914. Ubersicht uber der Wirbeltierfauna der Tendaguru-Schichten nebst einer kurzen Charakterisierung der neu aufgefuhrten Arten von Sauropoden. Archiv fur Biontologie, Berlin, III, 1(1):81-110.
- Olshevsky, George. 1991. A Revision of the Parainfraclass Archosauria Cope, 1869, Excluding the Advanced Crocodylia. Mesozoic Meanderings #2 (1st printing): iv + 196 pp.
- Paul, Gregory S. 1988. The brachiosaur giants of the Morrison and Tendaguru with a description of a new subgenus, Giraffatitan, and a comparison of the world’s largest dinosaurs. Hunteria 2(3):1-14.
- Riggs, Elmer S. 1903. Brachiosaurus altithorax, the largest known dinosaur. American Journal of Science 15(4):299-306.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk
February 11, 2025
I’ll be sending this letter to the Royal Society, but I also want it out there in public, because I hope that more people will follow the lead set by Dorothy Bishop and Stephen Curry in putting pressure on the Royal Society to grow a backbone.
Dear Royal Society of London,
You exist to support the advancement of science. Your ability to do this effectively is largely due to the respect your society is held in, due to its long history and numerous eminent Fellows.
In 2018, Elon Musk was elected a Fellow of the Society, not due to any scientific achievements of his own but due to his financial involvement with the achievements of others. At the time, his fellowship was questionable but understandable.
Since then, Musk’s behaviour in every field has been the antithesis of that described by the Society’s Code of Conduct: “selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership”. I surely do not need to outline the ways in which his exploitative and malicious behaviour has egregiously and repeatedly contravened these standards.
Now Musk is an influential member of a US presidential administration that is actively impeding the progress of science on a scale not seen since the darkest days of the USSR, through censorship, catastrophic defunding, dismantling of infrastructure, and withdrawal from international coalitions. Added to this, his vindictive personal behaviour in targeting individuals contravenes every standard of decency.
At present, the Royal Society is seen to be standing behind Musk, its Fellow, effectively cheering him on. This cannot stand. The reputation of the society, carefully built across 365 years, is at stake. No-one can respect a society that retains Musk as a Fellow. The resignation of Dorothy Bishop, in protest at Musk’s continuing fellowship, should have sent waves of shame through the Society. That it has not meaningfully responded to her resignation should be a cause of further shame.
The choice now facing the Society is stark: retain the goodwill of a billionaire; or retain the respect of the scientific community. It is not possible to do both.
Yours with all due respect,
Dr. Michael P. Taylor
University of Bristol, UK.
dino@miketaylor.org.uk
A truly obscure variant muscle: the tibiocalcaneus internus. Ramnani et al. (2025: fig. 5).
I have a new paper out:
Ramnani, A.S., Landeros, J.T., Wedel, M., Moellmer, R., Wan, S., Shofler, D.W. 2025. Supernumerary muscles in the leg and foot: A review of their types, frequency, and clinical implications. Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association 114(6): 9pp.
Hoo boy, this one has been a saga from almost the moment it was conceived. And in fact, the project we originally conceived was very different from the one that finally made it to print. Indulge me in a little trip down memory lane…
Anushka Ramnani and Jessica Landeros were first-year podiatry students at Western University of Health Sciences in the fall of 2019. They were interested in anatomical variation, and together we hatched a plan to survey the cadavers in the anatomy lab for all of the variant and supernumerary muscles in the lower leg and foot. (Emphasis on leg and foot together — we were looking for variant muscles that crossed the ankle joint, as opposed to intrinsic foot muscles.) We were going to start in the summer of 2020 with the donor cadavers in the summer anatomy program, and continue with the larger sample of cadavers in the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021. Anushka and Jessica applied for a summer research fellowship, and got one. It was awarded in the spring of 2020.
You can guess what happened next: no research in the anatomy lab in the summer of 2020, or in the fall, or in the spring of 2021, because of the COVID lockdown.
Jessica Landeros (left) and Anushka Ramnani (right) presenting their work at the 2021 APMA meeting (“The National”) in Denver.
Anushka and Jessica were not deterred. They made a very sharp pivot, which I thought was impressive at the time, and still think is impressive. Since they couldn’t survey the variant muscles of the leg in the lab, they’d survey them in the literature, and write a review paper. Crucially, although there are a host of papers on individual variant muscles, and they are all covered in textbooks like Sarrafian’s Anatomy of the Foot and Ankle, there wasn’t an up-to-date, accessible paper that pulled all the common variants together in one place. Anushka and Jessica decided to compile a paper that would serve as a field guide to supernumerary muscles in the leg and foot, one that would be useful not just for doctors of podiatric medicine but also for orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, family practice docs — anyone who might need to include variant muscles in their differential diagnosis or care plan.
Getting the paper written, submitted, and revised took a while, because med students and anatomy professors are busy. Along the way, Anushka and Jessica presented their preliminary results at the 2021 summer conference of the American Podiatric Medical Association in Denver. The paper was finally accepted at JAPMA in May…of 2023. Then for 18 months we waited for proofs. They finally came at the end of November last year, and the paper is finally out now as an advance online publication. It’s been quite a ride, but I’m proud of the paper, proud of Anushka and Jessica, and happy to have it out.
The late David Shofler, my friend and coauthor. That smile was almost always present, and infectious. Photo from his obituary in the Claremont Courier (link).
The paper benefited greatly from the input of three of my DPM colleagues who joined us as authors: Rebecca Moellmer, Stephen Wan, and the late David Shofler. David Shofler was a friend as well as a colleague, and we’d been coauthors on my first human anatomy paper (Penera et al. 2014). He passed unexpectedly, and far too young, on May 10, 2021, of a heart attack. All of us at WesternU were still reeling from his loss when my wife Vicki passed away five days later, also a parent, also in her 40s, also of a heart attack. David had an agile mind and he was a straight-up MacGyver when it came to thinking up clever, tractable research projects for students. He was also one of the most easygoing and approachable people I’ve ever met. I miss him, and it is especially satisfying — and more than a little bittersweet — to have helped shepherd one more collaboration with him into print.
References
- Kelikian, A.S. (Ed.). 2011. Sarrafian’s Anatomy of the Foot and Ankle: Descriptive, Topographic, Functional. 3rd Ed. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
- Penera, K., Manji, K., Wedel, M., Shofler, D., and Labovitz, J. 2014. Ankle syndesmotic fixation using two screws: risk of injury to the perforating branch of the peroneal artery. The Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery 53(5):534-8.
- Ramnani, A.S., Landeros, J.T., Wedel, M., Moellmer, R., Wan, S., Shofler, D.W. 2025. Supernumerary muscles in the leg and foot: A review of their types, frequency, and clinical implications. Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association 114(6): 9pp.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
