More raptors with their heads on backwards
December 21, 2025
Chet Gottfried got in touch after he read Yet more lying necks: Backwards Birds edition, nearly two months ago now, with some more of his photos. Here they are, with his permission:
Sharp-shinned hawk from behind, its neck twisted 280 degrees to its head is looking straight at us.
Cooper’s hawk front view, with the head facing away from us.
Bald eagle from behind, its neck twisted about 135 degrees so that it’s looking back over its left shoulder.
Merlin in left posteolateral view with its neck twisted about 135 degrees so its head, looking back over its left shoulder, is directly facing us.
What’s going on here? As I wrote the Chet, “Interesting that this degree of twisting is common in raptors. I would not have thought their lifestyle demanded it, but what do I know?” He replied:
Movement means detection, and whoever can stay still the best (whether hunter or prey) will be most successful. And a head turn is much less detectable than a whole body turn. Also, if perching depends on balance, the least one does to upset the balance is best.
I replied “Solid point. I think of raptors cruising the skies, but of course they also spend a lot of time perching, waiting and watching.” Chet’s response:
I would suspect that eagles and buteos (such as red-tailed hawks) hunt from the sky, whereas falcons and accipiters hunt every which way. I remember once seeing a blue jay land in a tree and intent on harassing a Cooper’s hawk that was perched perhaps 2 feet below. The hawk literally jumped up, turned, grabbed the jay in its talons, and flew off. And whereas I’m accustomed to seeing Cooper’s hawks flying or perched, I saw one hawk stalk on the ground from underneath a hedge.
And of course it’s true: animals with apparently similar morphology can have very different lifestyles. It’s worth remembering when we’re thinking how extinct animals lived. Anything that we say about sauropods as a whole — or ceratopsians, say, or hadrosaurus — is very unlikely to be true of all members of the group.
New paper: Hart et al. 2025 on neural canal ridges in crocs
December 12, 2025
The dawn of a new era: AMNH FR 34089, a caudal vertebra of the giant extinct croc Thecachampsa, backlit to show the neural canal ridges. This is not just my favorite specimen with NCRs, it’s one of my favorite images of any fossil ever. Photo by William Jude Hart.
New paper out:
This one started last autumn. On October 2, 2024, I got an email from William Jude Hart, then an undergraduate at Hofstra University. At the time he was preparing to present a poster at the upcoming 2024 SVP meeting, on a caudal vertebra of a large extinct croc, Thecachampsa. Thecachampsa was a tomistomine gavialoid, closely related to the extant False Gharial, Tomistoma, which in turn is a member of Gavialidae and therefore a lot less “false” than we used to think. Thecachampsa lived on the east coast of North America in the Miocene, and it was bigger and scarier than any croc alive today. William had seen Atterholt et al. (2024), my paper with Jessie and a gang of other folks on neural canal ridges (NCRs) in non-avian dinosaurs — which we interpreted as bony spinal cord supports, following Skutschas and Baleeva (2012; see this post and this one). He had noted similar structures in his Thecachampsa caudal, and he offered to send photos.
OMNH RE 0215, a third dorsal vertebra of an alligator in anterior view showing the bilobed neural canal. Also used in Atterholt et al. (2024: fig. 9).
I was interested to see photos of the Thecachampsa vert, but I was trying to moderate my excitement. A lot of crocs have bilobed neural canals, shaped like a snowman or a numeral 8, with a larger lower passage for the spinal cord and its associated meninges, and a smaller upper passage for the large supraspinal vein (a character shared with many birds — see Atterholt et al. 2025 and this post). The two passages are often divided by longitudinal bony ridges, and these can mimic bony spinal cord supports. Criteria exist to distinguish the two, as we discussed in Atterholt et al. (2024), but it’s not always super clear-cut. I wondered if the structures in the Thecachampsa vert would just be elaborate ridges between the neural and vascular compartments.
Thecachampsa caudal AMNH FR 34089, close-up of the right NCR. Photo by William Jude Hart.
As the photo at the top of the post demonstrates, I should have had more faith in William’s perspicacity as a morphologist. When he sent the photos, my jaw hit the floor. These are the thinnest, spikiest, least ambiguous bony spinal cord supports I’ve seen in any amniote, extinct or extant. They’re up there with the rose-thorn-esque bony spikes in tuna vertebrae (see photos in this post).
Close-up of the right NCR in AMNH FR 34089. The morphology here is complex — there is a longitudinal ridgeline for the NCR itself (red highlight), but it doesn’t extend vert far at all. More interesting to me is the subtle ridge running dorsoventrally on the lateral wall of the canal (blue highlights).
I’m pretty confident that these have nothing to do with separating the supraspinal vein from the spinal cord. For one thing, this Thecachampsa vert does not have a bilobed neural canal. On the contrary, rather than having a longitudinal ridge on the side of the canal, the Thecachampsa caudal has a very subtle transverse ridge running up each side of the canal — highlighted in blue in the photo above — on which the neural canal ridge sits like a fairly abrupt summit. The photos above are closeups of the right NCR, but the same is true on the left, as you can see in the photo at the top of the post. That morphology looks a lot more consistent with bony spinal cord supports than with physically demarcating the canal into upper and lower halves.
My favorite sauropod NCRs, in MWC 10613, a Diplodocus caudal from Bone Cabin Quarry in Wyoming. Nice sharp little ridges about midway along the canal, visible to the naked eye, in CT slices (left), and in a hemisectioned digital model (right).
Also, the Thecachampsa spikes are at about the midpoint of the neural canal, where we tended to find the NCRs in sauropods and other dinosaurs. That makes perfect sense if the bony spinal cord supports are remnants of embryonic myosepta, as hypothesized by Skutschas and Baleeva (2012; see this post for more discussion). The neural arch pedicles form within those myosepta, so if the bony spinal cord supports are also myoseptal remnants, they should be located near the craniocaudal midpoint of each neural arch pedicle, which is just another way of saying “about halfway down the neural canal”. Et voila, so they are, in both Thecachampsa and non-avian dinosaurs.
(Why not just check in extant crocs and see what soft tissues are tethered to these things? We’re working on that. Even if we’re wrong about NCRs being bony spinal cord supports, they’re bony somethings, presumably related to interesting soft tissues, and with anatomical and phylogenetic distributions that are very far from being fully mapped.)
Deinosuchus caudal WSC 285.8 in anterior view. The left NCR is the lower of the two prominences visible on the right side of the canal (the upper is taphonomic damage, the edge of a crack).
Armed with the knowledge that NCRs were present in crocs, I drove out to Hemet to visit the Western Science Center. Andrew McDonald has been digging in the Menefee Formation of New Mexico for years, unearthing cool critters like the tyrannosaur Dynamoterror, the armored Invictarx, the hadrosaur Ornatops (which you’ve seen here before), some turtles (McDonald and Wolfe 2018, McDonald et al. 2018, 2021, Adrian et al. 2025) — and, oh yeah, the gigantic and terrifying Cretaceous croc Deinosuchus (Mohler et al. 2021). Thanks to the kind offices of Andrew and Alton Dooley, a good friend and Haplocanthosaurus partner in crime, I got my mitts on the Menefee Deinosuchus caudals. Two of the three vertebrae that I examined had an NCR preserved on at least one side. The third vertebra, by far the most complete externally, ironically had the worst-preserved neural canal. But the others were enough.
We had all the ammo for this paper about a year ago. William had the original discovery, the nicer specimen, and everything he needed to publish on his own, but he kindly invited me to contribute. We put together — well, William put together, with about 95% of the work — a presentation for the 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress this spring. We looped in Jessie Atterholt for the paper, and she made a lot of improvements. And here we are.
Where will these things turn up next? Maybe you will be the one to find out. Modified from Hart et al. (2025: fig. 1).
(Incidentally, I created the silhouettes for Figure 1 myself, mostly tracing public domain images but drawing a few on my own. Why not use PhyloPic? Partly my own cussed persnickettiness, and partly because properly crediting 17 people was going to be cumbersome in such a short paper. I should make the originals available for everyone else — watch this space.)
Why do we find NCRs in some taxa but not others? Some animals are prevented from developing them: sharks don’t have a way to ossify their ligament attachments, and the denticulate ligaments of mammals don’t anchor to bone (see this post for more). Also, I suspect that NCRs are like the ossified traces of most muscle, tendon, and ligament attachments, in that they can be present but are not always present, even when the muscle, tendon, or ligament is. But that’s just kicking the can down the road — why do we see prominent NCRs in certain groups, and in certain regions of the vertebral column? We advance a hypothesis in the new paper (p. 752):
NCRs are prevalent in clades with laterally undulating locomotion (e.g., Teleosti; Skutchas and Baleev 2012), tail-driven femur retraction (e.g., Dinosauria; Atterholt et al. 2024), or both (e.g., Urodela; Wake and Lawson 1972), and absent in clades that have more rigid torsos, an absence of tail-driven femur retraction, or both, such as Anura, Aves, and Mammalia (Fig. 1A). This apparent distribution is consistent with the hypothesis that NCRs anchor the spinal cord against lateral undulatory motion.
That’s our best guess right now, but a LOT of work remains to be done. We hint at three fronts in the paper:
1. Discovery
NCRs are turning up all over the place. When we published the first NCR paper last year, they were known in salamanders but not in other lissamphibians. Now they’ve been documented in caecilians, by Santos et al. (2025), which we were able to cite in the new paper. The pace of discovery is rapid, but there is a lot of ground not yet covered. At this point, the number of non-sauropod archosaurs with published NCRs is very small — one individual each of Thecachampsa, Deinosuchus, Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Stegosaurus, and an indeterminate hadrosaur — but very suggestive, because Archosauria is a big, diverse clade. Not to mention all the other vertebrates. Someone is going to the be the first to document NCRs in, gosh, all the other things. Tyrannosaurs, anyone?
In particular, you may be thinking that it’s all very well for NCRs to be present in these giant extinct crocs, but what about mortal extant crocs? Stay tuned — we’re working on that, with William leading the charge. He’s a grad student now, pursuing his Master’s at East Tennessee State, and I’m confident you’ll be hearing a lot more about his work in the future.
Thecachampsa caudal AMNH FR 34089 in ventral view. This vert is just shy of four inches long, which if you know crocs, is up in *gulp* territory.
2. Investigating soft tissues
We think the NCRs in crocs and dinos are bony spinal cord supports, but it would be very nice to have that confirmed via dissection. Also, where do the denticulate ligaments attach in vertebrae with bilobed neural canals? Could some of the longitudinal ridges in croc verts be doing double duty, dividing the vascular and neural compartments and anchoring denticulate ligaments at the same time? These are open questions, which are about one dead alligator away from being answered.
Also, as mentioned above, if the NCRs of crocs aren’t bony spinal cord supports, what the heck are they?
3. Biomechanical testing
Assuming NCRs are bony spinal cord supports, is lateral movement of the vertebral column the primary driver in their formation, just one factor among many, or a complete red herring? This is the kind of thing that could easily lend itself to logistically intensive approaches like 3D scanning and modeling, but might also get solved by just, like, pulling on things to see what happens (e.g., Baumel 1985).
Conclusion
If you want to get in on this, it’s a pretty straightforward gig: find some vertebrae, peer in the neural canals, document what you find, tell the world. If you don’t find NCRs you might find pneumatic cavities or blood vessel tracks or some totally new thing to add to the neural canal zoo. There are whole big clades of vertebrates about which we know basically nothing, neural-canal-wise, and opportunities for new discoveries abound — as our new paper shows. Come play.
References
- Adrian, B., Smith, H.F. and McDonald, A.T. 2025. A revised turtle assemblage from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation (New Mexico, North America) with evolutionary and paleobiostratigraphic implications. PeerJ 13: e19340.
- Atterholt, J., Wedel, M.J., Tykoski, R., Fiorillo, A.R., Holwerda, F., Nalley, T.K., Lepore, T., and Yasmer, J. 2024. Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of postcranial neuroanatomy in dinosaurs. The Anatomical Record, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25558
- 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.
- Baumel, J.J. 1985. Suspensory ligaments of nerves: an adaptation for protection of the avian spinal cord. Anatomia, Histologia, Embryologia 14(1): 1-5.
- Hart, W.J., Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First occurrences of neural canal ridges in Crocodylia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 70(4): 749–753.
- McDonald, A.T. and Wolfe, D.G. 2018. A new nodosaurid ankylosaur (Dinosauria: Thyreophora) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. PeerJ 6: e5435.
- McDonald, A.T., Wolfe, D.G. and Dooley Jr, A.C. 2018. A new tyrannosaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. PeerJ 6: e5749.
- McDonald, A.T., Wolfe, D.G., Fowler, E.A.F. and Gates, T.A., 2021. A new brachylophosaurin (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. PeerJ, 9, p.e11084.
- Mohler, B.F., McDonald, A.T. and Wolfe, D.G. 2021. First remains of the enormous alligatoroid Deinosuchus from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee formation, New Mexico. PeerJ 9: e11302.
- Santos, R.O., Wilkinson, M., and Zaher, H. 2025. An overview of the postcranial osteology of caecilians (Gymnophiona, Lissamphibia). The Anatomical Record, 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.70000.
- Skutschas, P. P., & Baleeva, N. V. 2012. The spinal cord supports of vertebrae in the crown-group salamanders (Caudata, Urodela). Journal of Morphology 273(9): 1031–1041.
- Wake, D. B., & Lawson, R. 1973. Developmental and adult morphology of the vertebral column in the plethodontid salamander Eurycea bislineata, with comments on vertebral evolution in the Amphibia. Journal of Morphology 139(3): 251–299.
SV-POW! is an AI-free zone
December 11, 2025
We’ve written plenty about the problems with what is now ubiquitously called “artificial intelligence”: see for example These new “artificial intelligence” programs don’t know what they’re talking about, Another day, another catastrophic “AI” failure, If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well, What LLMs are really saving you from.
And those are just the problems you get when you try to use LLMs (which is what people almost always mean when they say “AI”). Much more pervasive is the problem of ubiquitous machine-generated slop. Even when you don’t go looking for it, it’s everywhere, polluting discourse, diluting scholarship, perverting politics.
The fundamental problem is that, for the first time in history, it’s easier to “write” something than it is to read it. Given even a tiny proportion of bad actors, how could that possibly not result in a tsunami of slop?
So this is our pledge to you: we will never publish LLM-generated text on this blog, except for the purpose of critique (as in most of the posts linked above). As a constant reminder of this, we now have the No To AI logo at the top right of every page.
If you run a blog of your own, we invite you to join us in this AI-free pledge. You can use the same logo as us — it’s in the public domain and can be downloaded in various formats from WikiMedia.
Book Week 2025, Day 8: Jurassic West, 2nd edition, by John Foster
December 4, 2025
Ha ha, I lied. Book Week will continue until morale improves.
Mike has made the point to me more than once that there are papers I could and probably should write, but haven’t, because they’re things that I just assume everyone else knows. I’m not alone here, it’s a very common human thing to subconsciously assume that basic, background knowledge for each of us is also basic, background knowledge for most everyone else (a.k.a. the “curse of knowledge”, which Mike has blogged about before) — even when stopping and interrogating that assumption would explode it almost immediately. Similarly, there are books I haven’t blogged about because they are so fundamental to my process that it’s hard to remember that not everyone in the world operates from the same fundamentals.
I’ve given quite a few public talks about dinosaurs, and in the past decade I’ve typically ended with shout-outs to four things: (1) this blog, (2) my book with Mark Hallett, (3) Brian Engh’s website and paleoart channel, and (4) John Foster’s Jurassic West. I realized, admittedly a bit belatedly, that it’s plain loony for people who see my talks to learn about JW, but not people who read this blog. So I’m patching that hole.
John Foster in the field near Brachiosaur Gulch. That big rock he’s standing in front of is a preserved stream bed in cross-section.
Here’s my plug for Jurassic West: it’s the closest you can get to carrying the Morrison Formation around in your backpack. I don’t mean a couple of little pieces, I mean the whole damn thing. John covers everything about the Morrison: geology, sedimentology and stratigraphy, paleoenvironments (yes, plural, the Morrison was diverse in every way), plants, inverts, dinosaurs, other vertebrates, history of study, notable quarries (well, really, all the quarries, if you count the incredible appendices), current research, prospects for the future, and, I assume but am too busy to check right now, about 57 other things I’ve forgotten to mention. And it’s well written! And lavishly illustrated! And nicely produced, on good heavy high-gloss paper between sturdy covers. Which is a good thing, because I use this freakin’ book so often that it doesn’t have a space on my bookshelf, it stands cover-out in front of all the lesser books, where I can grab it in less time than it took to type this clause. It’s ridden with me to and from Utah and Colorado more times than I can count. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve picked it up just to review which dinosaurs are known from which quarries, I could afford to buy you a copy.
The emotional truth of my relationship to this book.
If Jurassic West was all that John had produced, it would still be a towering achievement, and a humbling one for those of us who toil in its shadow. But he also has a totally separate research thread on Cambrian strata and their biotas, and a whole ‘nother book on that stuff, Cambrian Ocean World. And he continues to do fieldwork and museum research and publish papers on both the Morrison and the Cambrian (jeez, pick a lane, fella!). Oh, and he’s a husband and father with a wonderful family, including his rather accomplished spouse, ReBecca Hunt-Foster, Park Paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument. I assume John either has a Time-Turner or he’s into some deep necromancy, and he’s too good of a friend and colleague for me to want to find out which.
If you like dinosaurs, the Morrison Formation, or just want a truly killer guide to take with you on your museum-and-dinosaur-quarry tour of the American West, this book is a must have. Very Morosaurus-brained of me not to have recommended it sooner. In my defense, it’s only because I assumed you already had a copy.
Now Book Week is over. Probably. Come back tomorrow and we’ll find out together.
Book Week 2025, Day 7: Three favorites by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen
December 3, 2025
I have been a fanboy of prominent animal physiologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen for a long time. I first encountered his papers back in the late 90s, working on my MS thesis at OU. I realized that vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods implied, among other things, that I had better get to reading about birds. Probably the first Schmidt-Nielsen paper I read was, “Temperature regulation and respiration in the ostrich” (1969). It’s still a good read, focused, concise, containing much that is useful and interesting for people who care about dinosaurs, and at least right now it’s freely available here.
I believe that Vic Hutchison at OU, himself a pretty legendary animal physiologist, was the first to put me onto Schmidt-Nielsen’s magisterial textbook, Animal Physiology: Adaptation and Environment. I was used to textbooks written by committee, often not by the people leading their respective fields, which did workmanlike duty introducing undergrads to fundamentals, and which serious researchers would soon outgrow. Schmidt-Nielsen’s Animal Physiology was different; it was written by one person, who at the time of its writing was one of the world leaders in animal physiology; it covered so much so well that it seemed to have transcended the category of things that could be outgrown; and most importantly, it was well-written. Really well-written, to the point of being readable for pleasure (if you like learning how animals work). And, I thought then and still think today, a model for good science communication. A copy of the 5th and final edition sits within arm’s reach of my desk, and if the house ever starts sliding into a sinkhole or I see zombies coming down the street, I’ll put it on the stack of things to run out with, between the sauropod monographs and Brown’s Composition of Scientific Words. If you want a taste of the ideas and the writing but don’t want to lug around a 600-page textbook, try How Animals Work, a slim volume based on a lecture series that covers a lot of the same ground in 124 pages.
So what is it about this animal physiologist that made him one of my scientific heroes? I envy people who communicate well, and I find Schmidt-Nielsen’s papers to be models of clarity at every level. Each paper tends to be about a single thing, something you could relay in one sentence. They have short, punchy titles. They’re readable.
I should say right here that the Schmidt-Nielsen style is not the Wedel style. I have friends whose offices are so uncluttered that they look like model rooms in an IKEA store. I have an office at work and another at home, and both of them look like habitable cabinets of curiosities at best, and like hoarder nightmares at worst. I have come to accept that I am a maximalist — in my physical-space-arranging, in my writing, and in my choice of study organisms — and that’s that. But I can admire the minimalist aesthetic, and learn from it. I may never craft anything as elegantly lean as a Schmidt-Nielsen paper, but maybe by studying his writing I can ensure that underneath all the asides and digressions and racing stripes and feathers, my papers will have airworthy frames.
It was that attitude of careful study that led me to pick up Schmidt-Nielsen’s autobiography, The Camel’s Nose. I learned that a lot of the qualities I’d been admiring were not accidental at all, but deliberately chosen and cultivated. Schmidt-Nielsen was born and raised in Norway. English was his adopted language, not his first, and he wrote in simple, direct sentences to reduce the opportunities for being misunderstood. He’d stayed active for so long because he was driven by simple curiosity, about how animals got on in the world. When the time came around for a new edition of Animal Physiology, he basically made that his project for a year or so. He’d gather all the top papers and latest research on each topic, distill what was interesting and important, and write. That’s why the book is so good: one of the world’s top physiologists, who strove for clear communication, basically shelved everything else for a year at a time to make sure he was caught up on the literature, and then wrote.
That level of pure commitment doesn’t sound like a recipe for work-life balance. I’m sure there are exceptions, but in my experience the most driven people are not usually the ones with happy home lives. In The Camel’s Nose, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen relates how his marriage to his spouse, fellow physiologist Bodil Mimi Schmidt-Nielsen (née Krogh — she was descended from physiological royalty on both sides), unraveled because they were both too driven, too close to the work, too competitive. Schmidt-Nielsen relays all this with a tinge of sadness, but otherwise in his typical style — directly, concisely, matter-of-factly. It would be interesting to know Bodil’s side of the story. The dissolution of their marriage was certainly not a career-ender for her — she went on to be a department chair at Case Western Reserve, a full-time researcher at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, and the first woman president of the American Physiological Society. On one hand, having two people at the top of their field — at the top of the same field — in the same household sounds pretty relentlessly intense to me, like trying to force the north poles of two magnets together. On the other hand, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen seems to me to have been pretty relentlessly intense all by himself, and I wonder if anyone’s inherent north-pole-ness (in this metaphor, we all prolly have a little) could have survived near him without being pushed away. As with his writing style, I can look and learn without being tempted to emulate.
Confession time: I’ve never made it to the end of The Camel’s Nose. For me, the ratio of new insights into Schmidt-Nielsen’s process and his discoveries in the field, on one hand, compared to increasingly dense chunks of self-congratulation on the other, becomes unfavorable in the final chapters. I already admired him before I picked up the book; indeed, that’s why I picked it up in the first place. Reading about his honors, however well-deserved and however fairly relayed, doesn’t help me (except maybe as a What Not To Do for Future Matt, and sometimes Present Matt). Possibly in skipping the last couple of chapters I’ve missed some gold nugget of advice or perspective, but I doubt it. I came for insights into Schmidt-Nielsen’s process of research and writing, I got what I was after, and I still recommend the book on that basis. Like the rest of his works, it’s remarkably clear in both vision and execution, and it’s probably the most readable of all his books. If you make it to the end, I’d be curious to hear what I missed.
All of these books are old. How Animals Work was first published in 1972, Animal Physiology 5th ed. in 1997, and The Camel’s Nose in 1998. They’re all still relevant, readable, and worth learning from. Do what I did and find used copies.
That’s it for Book Week 2025. There are of course legions of deserving books that I didn’t cover — feel free to shout ’em out in the comments.
Reference
Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, by John Muir Laws
December 3, 2025
Drawing is how I understand things best, and it’s one of the ways I teach myself new subjects. My top advice for anyone wanting to be a paleontologist is “learn how to write” and “learn how to draw”, which really boil down to, “practice writing and drawing”. You only get better by doing. There’s a great saying, that everyone is born with 1000 bad drawings inside them. You get to the good drawings — you get to be good at drawing — by exorcising the 1000 bad drawings. “I can’t draw” is just a shorter way of saying, “I’m unwilling to practice drawing.” (That probably sounds pretty strident. If you don’t want to be good at drawing, that’s fine. The world is big, full, and busy, and not everyone has to be interested in every possible thing. Just don’t mistake “I can’t draw” for a good reason not to try.)
Drawing forces me to be a better observer. If I have to trace every line and contour of a fossil, I have to push my pen along those paths, and that compels me to notice them in the first place, and wonder about them. Why this shape, and not some other? Is this an omnipresent feature, or a variable one? Where have I seen this before? Have I seen this before? Has anyone ever noticed this at all? (Answer: surprisingly often, no.) I think anyone who wants to be a better morphologist could improve their observational skills and anatomical understand through drawing; indeed, I can hardly imagine how it could be otherwise.
A slide from my introduction to anatomy lecture, from the section on how to study.
John Muir Laws is all about the practice of observing nature through drawing and writing notes, but the principles he teaches have much broader applications. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes of his:
“The first pancakes off the griddle are always funky, but you need to make them to get to the good pancakes. So too with drawing or journaling. Do not judge yourself by your first lines on paper on any given day.”
– from “Sacrificial Pancakes”
When I first read that, I wrote to Mike, “Holy cow, did I need to read these lines, not just about drawing or writing but about LIFE.”
Mike responded, “Whether X is blog-posts, specimen drawings, novels, narrative songs or landscape paintings, the best _and quickest_ way to produce a good X is to produce a lot of bad Xs. Also: “sacrificial pancake” is a good term for the sequence of Bad Xs.”
The thing is, it’s not about the bad Xs, or even the good Xs. It’s about the willingness to keep making Xs at all. To wit:
“Drawing with the goal of the drawing itself makes a fetish of the product. […] Each drawing is not an end in itself. It is a vehicle to help you focus your attention.”
– from “Quantity, not Quality”
The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is about doing that — learning to focus your attention by drawing and taking notes. I particularly like Laws’s 3-part structure to taking notes on something, be it a landscape, an organism, or a phenomenon. His guiding prompts are:
- “I notice…” What do you notice about the thing? Draw those things, write them down, annotate them — capture them somehow. The more you capture, the more you will likely notice.
- “I wonder…” Ask questions. They can be dumb questions, or unanswerable ones. The goal in the moment is not to filter, not to judge, just to let the ideas flow. As with pancakes, you may have to off-gas some dumb ideas into your notebook to get to the good ones.
- “It reminds me of…” Make connections. Again, without judgement. They can be far-fetched or goofy. You’ll have the rest of your life to sort the good from the bad — but only if you cast a broad enough net to catch the good ideas in the first place. Which is just another way of saying, lower your inner defenses to looking or feeling stupid. A lot of great ideas looked dumb at first blush.
That second quote resonates with me for another reason. I have the odd privilege of being friends with some of the world’s most accomplished paleoartists. If I started comparing my drawings to theirs, I’d never pick up a pen or pencil again. I’m like a goldfish watching a team of brain surgeons. But I’m not drawing for the same reasons they are. I basically only need to be able to do two things: take notes for my own personal use, and — occasionally — hand-draw something for publication. My first draft of the previous sentence included the formulation, “draw well enough to learn something”, but I realized that’s a nonsensical arrangement of words. I think that anyone at any level of skill or experience can draw well enough to learn something; indeed, a beginner may learn more from their first 10 drawings than a master will learn from their next 50.
And to circle back to the opening of the post, I don’t think aspiring paleontologists need to learn how to draw so that they can draw better. I think aspiring paleontologists need to learn how to draw so that they can see better. As Laws wrote, drawing is a vehicle for focusing attention. But the process of drawing has the handy corollary that it gives off archivable notes as waste.
A still from one of Laws’s videos on sketching.
Laws’s chosen field is natural history, but you could apply his ideas on noticing things, asking questions, making connections, and creating iteratively to all kinds of things: baking techniques, physical exercises, lawn mower engines, you name it. So a book with a seemingly specific remit, observing nature, actually is about becoming a better observer, and a better learner, in general. UPDATE: I should have thought to include this the first time around — Laws has just tons of great resources on his website, including a lot of freely-downloadable inserts and templates in the store to help with observation and drawing. One of them, the ruler sticker, is where I got the idea for affixing IKEA paper tapes to the cover of my research notebook.
Of all the books I’ve covered in this book week, if there’s one I could inflict on aspiring scientists — or active ones — and beg them to read and engage with, it would be this one. Not from any position of superiority! I am climbing the mountain myself, always, one day and one step at a time. This book is one of my hiking poles. I think you will find it useful as well.
I put these Book Week posts into sequence with a level of forethought about one notch above pure randomness, but a felicity emerged. It’s useful for me to cover The Last Days of the Dinosaurs after the previous three books, each for a particular reason. As I did with Steve Brusatte, I’ve tracked Riley Black’s career since its inception, from their old blog, Laelaps (since superseded by the currently active Tooth and Bone), and the book Written in Stone (2010). It’s been a satisfying evolution to follow, as Riley’s voice and range as a writer have developed and deepened. In the same way that my post on Dr. Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs serves as a belated shout-out to Mark Witton, this one is a long-overdue acknowledgement of Riley’s steady, determined, seemingly-inevitable-in-hindsight rise to prominence as a now multiply-award-winning writer. I’ve been following all along, and her current — and well-earned — success stands on the usual pillars: time, patience, grit, and, in Robert McKee’s memorable formulation, “the work, the work, all the work”.
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs shares with Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands a stride-through-time structure, but running forward in time where Otherlands dove into the increasingly remote past. The book starts with the Chicxulub impact, and narrates what happened in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation and in the wider world at ever-expanding intervals: an hour post-impact, then a day, a week, a month, a year, and so on, out to one million years into the Paleogene. Like Otherlands, it’s both an exhaustively-researched tour de force, and a compellingly told story. The story here is an imperial drama on the largest possible stage, involving the rapid unmaking of one dynasty — that of the non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles — and the rather more protracted rise of its successor, our familiar world in which mammals, birds, and flowering plants get top billing in most times and places, but reptiles, amphibians, conifers, ferns, and many other forms of life keep on keeping on.
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is by turns pitiless and hopeful, showcasing both the terrifying fragility of life, from individuals to species to ecosystems, in a sometimes violent universe, and the resilience of life in the wake of the grimmest and most implacable catastrophes. (It also left me really, really hoping for more civilization-level investment in asteroid defense.) The constant note ringing through the book is that “our familiar world” simply would not exist without the impact and its aftermath. Non-avian dinosaurs were changing and evolving in the latest Cretaceous, as they had been for nearly 180 million years, but the idea, still prevalent in some circles when I was a kid and even in college, that the end-Cretaceous turnover was some kind of intrinsic and inevitable replacement driven by superior biology is now deader than, well, you know. If the asteroid had missed, we might have gotten some elements of Dougal Dixon’s New Dinosaurs, but we most assuredly would not have gotten the world we enjoy today, and “we” would almost certainly be living in trees and holes, eating insects and fruit, and picking nits instead of pecking keys. It’s one thing to know that intellectually — that our very existence hinged on an improbable astronomical event — and another to be led through the horrible, grinding aftermath of the cataclysm by a knowledgeable guide. In Riley Black, this particular inferno has found its Virgil.
Book Week 2025, Day 4: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday
November 30, 2025
Otherlands is unlike any other book I’ve encountered. Starting in the Pleistocene and roving back in time, for each epoch of the Cenozoic and each period of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic, Thomas Halliday takes us to a specific place and time, a particular biota, that illustrates both the global changes taking place at the level of the biosphere (and, frequently, the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere), and the peculiarities of the ecosystem that serves as our temporal window. Each chapter has a narrative section, a sort of you-are-there story in the lives of the organisms concerned, a section of broader outlinks to the global patterns that shaped, and were shaped by, the specific environments and organisms under consideration, and a healthy dose of references to the scientific discoveries that wove the narratives at both scales, presented as detective story rather than homework or dry history lesson.
That’s what the book does, not what it is. What it is: a triumph.
In the foreword to Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art, Robert McKee wrote,
As I looked beneath his seamless prose and sensed the depth of his research, of knowledge of human nature and society, of vividly imagined telling details, I was in awe of the work, the work, all the work that built the foundation of his riveting creations.
That quote starting ringing in my head like a bell by the time I’d left the hot, deep, dry Mediterranean basin. I am equally in awe of the volume and quality of Halliday’s scholarship, and of the deftness of his artistic execution. This seems like the kind of towering achievement that could only be possible after a half-century or more of dedicated study, but Halliday is a generation younger than I am. It would be easy to give myself over to profound professional jealousy, both as a paleobiologist and a writer, if I weren’t swept along by the vital strangeness that he conjures on this fascinating tour.
All my life, I’ve wanted to be a chrononaut. Otherlands is the closest I’ve come in book form. The Mammoth Steppe and the Rhynie Chert were terms I knew before, signposts pointing to vanished worlds — and ones that I don’t study — but now they are places to me, places that I feel like I’ve been to, and have memories of, like Minas Tirith or Sietch Tabr. What a rare gift, to have the past brought to life in both its fundamental reality and its unbridgeable alienness.
As I said: a triumph.
Book Week 2025, Day 3: Dungeon delvers delight in Dr Dhrohlin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs
November 29, 2025
This book is squarely at the intersection of being an objectively great thing to have in the world, and a subjectively great thing to have on my gaming shelf. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 16, and running Dungeons & Dragons for over a decade, including an elaborate “Dinosaur Island” campaign for my son when he was younger. Just this year my current party has had to deal with an Octyrannopus — one of my homebrew monsters:
— as well as a gigantic, very aquatic, possibly-somewhat-undead Spinosaurus. In game, that horror was summoned on the shore of the Sunless Sea by a gnoll necromancer. But I summoned it from the pages of Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs, which is packed with so much good stuff that it’s hard to know where to begin.
First off, as it says on the tin, the book has a bunch of dinosaurs, which go waaay beyond the standard half-dozen or so from the official D&D Monster Manual. It’s nice to see some love for some of the more recently-described, not-yet-famous taxa like the titanosaur Mnyamawamtuka.
But it’s not just dinosaurs sensu stricto — the book also has a healthy leavening of pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and non-dinosaurian critters to round out your random encounter tables and fictional ecosystems.
And speaking of ecosystems, the book covers four in some depth: the Yixian, Bahariya, and Crato Formations, and Hateg Island, including flora, landscape, climate, and so on, so dungeon masters can give their players some you-are-there verisimilitude, or use the covered ecosystems as guides for fleshing out their own homebrew worlds. I believe that every single organism in the book — dinosaur, pterosaur, fish, or plant — comes with optional magical rules, so dungeon masters can dial in the high-to-low magic level of their game worlds. There’s just so much in here, to use as written or mine for inspiration.
Note that each critter gets at least one two-page spread (a few prominent taxa get two or more spreads), and, crucially, all the game-relevant info is usually available on a single spread. Why is this important? I’ve heard it may be largely fixed for the new 2024 Monster Manual, which I’ve not yet acquired, but all three of the 2014 D&D core rulebooks, and most of the official campaign books that followed, are UI disasters when it comes to consistently putting the info that people will need at the table (i.e., at speed) where it will be immediately accessible — which is the One Job that an RPG book really needs to do well. RPG books are sort of like a combo of emergency manual and cookbook in requiring good, reader-focused structure and graphic design for usability on the fly. If you can’t find what you need quickly, and ideally get all the info for a given thing without turning the page, the book has failed as a game reference, no matter how great the ideas and writing are. Why Wizards of the Coast can’t figure this out for most of the official D&D books is quite beyond me (possibly because they keep firing the whole D&D creative crew and then replacing them with newcomers, so neither institutional memory nor game-creation expertise accumulate as they should). But like a lot of 3rd-party products, Dr Dhrolin’s gets it right, and runs circles around WOTC books in terms of usability at the table.
When a critter gets more than one spread, it’s either for a splash page of art, or more options, or both. There are a handful of custom dinos chosen as high-level pledge rewards by backers when the book was crowdfunded. For example, You-Know-Who here, which struck me as a neat linkage between Mark Witton’s scientific thoughts on what a max-size tyrannosaur would have been like, as explored in his new book, King Tyrant, and a truly awesome challenge to throw at a D&D party. The big, weird spinosaur my party recently faced is another of these special purpose, beyond-the-ordinary, truly monstrous foes. As a dungeon master, it’s nice to have a selection of boss dinos locked and loaded.
For people new to dinosaurs and paleontology, there’s a really lovely, concise introduction that would not be out of place in almost any popular science book about dinosaurs. The book is built in two versions, for D&D 5E and Pathfinder 2E, but there’s such a wealth of good ideas and great art inside that I think it would be worth picking up for anyone interested, no matter what system they run (it’s an article of faith with me that dungeon masters should freely adapt or homebrew stats as needed).
I’m especially impressed by Dr Dhrolin’s as a sort of global and all-encompassing guide to bringing paleontology into tabletop games. It includes ideas on how this might happen at all — lost worlds, time travel, necromancy, and more — NPCs to hook parties into paleo-themed adventures, and new subclasses and other options, for newly-generated characters or pre-existing ones encountering dinosaurian realms for the first time.
Want to ride a dinosaur? The book has you covered, with taming and domestication rules.
Want to play a dinosaur, or a pterosaur? You can do that, too, with six new playable species, complete with notes on their societies.
Just like great paleoart? The visuals alone are worth the price of admission, with Mark Witton providing art for the critters and Jules Kiely on plants, items, and some of the new playable species and character options. The book is a shade over 300 pages long, illustrated in full color throughout, and with pretty pictures on almost every spread. It’s a staggering amount of art.
Finally, a word on professionalism. Considered broadly, RPG products tend to be very hit-and-miss. It’s a genre where new authors can sometimes bring new ideas to the table pretty quickly, and without having all the interesting bits sanded off by corporate focus groups, but also one where a certain level of amateurish production is almost endemic. Even the official WOTC books, pretty as they are, rarely seem to have been designed and assembled by anyone who actually plays D&D regularly, or understands how books get used mid-game. Dr Dhrolin’s is one of the most professionally — and considerately — produced products ever put out for 5E. The creative team — Drs. Nathan Barling and Michael O’Sullivan on writing, Mark Witton and Jules Kiely on art, and a host of others (nicely detailed and credited on page 8) — had the ambition to make it wide-ranging, the closest thing that’s ever existed to one-stop-shopping for dinosaurs in RPGs, while also understanding the brief to make it useable at speed at the gaming table, and while also delivering an attractive, high quality, solidly-constructed book that feels good in the hand and is a joy to just flip through. If you like dinosaurs and paleontology, it’s great — every critter even gets a small section of references! If you like D&D, it’s jam-packed with ideas, well-organized, and actually useful in prep and in play. If, like me, you’re into both things, it’s basically aersolized, weaponized crack, and you probably already own a copy.
If you need more convincing, professional dungeon master and RPG creator Ginny Di has a great video review.
Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs has been out for a year now, so this is yet again something I could have and should have covered a lot sooner. But this entry is still timely. Right now, and for about 59 hours after I hit the “publish” button (= until sometime on Dec. 1), PalaeoGames has big discounts on Dr Dhrolin’s and lots of other associated goodies, including tokens, battle maps, a fillable character sheet, and 3D-printable digital models (delivered as STLs), through their current crowdfunding campaign, Dr Dhrolin’s Festive Party 2025. You can also pre-order the follow-up volume, Professor Primula’s Portfolio of Palaeontology, which is being developed as I type. This is a hoard of good stuff, just in time for holiday shopping. Go do the right thing.
This one starts with a personal note. I’ve never blogged much about the media whirlwind that accompanied the announcement of Sauroposeidon. Rich Cifelli and I did tons of interviews, separately and together, for local and national television news, newspapers, and magazines. Sauroposeidon got an 1/8th-page box in TIME magazine and a half-page news piece in the journal Science — the latter was especially satisfying, given that Science had rejected our manuscript without review, for having been deemed, ha ha, insufficiently newsworthy.
Of all the interviews I did about Sauroposeidon, by far the best was the one for Dinosaur World, a fanzine published by Allen and Diane Debus from 1997 to 2001. I did the interview over the phone, in the vert paleo library in the then-new OMNH building, now the Sam Noble Museum. I remember talking for close to two hours. In both process — quality, detail, and insight of questions asked — and product, that interview stood head and shoulders above all the others put together. It would have been a standout effort from any interviewer, at any level of professional training or achievement. In point of fact, the interviewer was a 15-year-old kid, who managed to smoke professional science writers with decades of experience.
As you’ve likely figured out, that 15-year-old kid was Steve Brusatte.
Although our circles haven’t intersected very frequently, I’ve watched Steve’s career with great interest, and enjoyed talking with him whenever the opportunities came around. He’s gone from strength to strength, and at each step I’ve thought, “Yep, that tracks.” The same qualities that he showed as a teenage dinosaur afficionado — passionate interest, broad reading, an eye for detail and another for the wider canvas, an adamantine work ethic, and, I think not coincidentally, generally being an agreeable human being — turn out to be a pretty good recipe for success in science.
Nowhere is that better displayed than in Steve’s book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. It was first published in 2018, and I read it during the COVID-19 lockdown, so this blog post is more than little belated. But the book holds up, in no small part because the higher-level picture of dinosaur evolution and biogeography that was emerging when it was published is still more or less intact, nudged here and there by the churn of new discoveries, but not overturned or changed beyond recognition. In the decade after I graduated with my PhD, I mostly had my head down, in the Morrison and in the human anatomy lab, and I’d fallen behind on the big picture of dinosaur paleobiology and evolution. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs helped me get caught up. I can’t think of a single other book that does such a good job of tying what was going on with the dinosaurs at any given time with what was going on with the planet. Steve grounds the global narrative by deftly interweaving his personal experiences in the field and the lab. He really captures the excitement of the hunt, and the occasional disappointments as well. I was especially impressed by his willingness to say “we don’t know yet” at several crucial junctures — hopefully this book inspires some kids to go hit the hills and badlands and find out.
When I was 12, I devoured John Noble Wilford’s The Riddle of the Dinosaur, which at the time was probably the definitive popular science book on dinosaurs and dinosaur paleontology. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is the heir apparent, three decades on, but it surpasses Wilford’s noble effort by dint of Steve’s first-hand experience in field and lab — the story of dinosaurs isn’t one he’s covering from the outside, but one that he’s helping to tell from the inside.
If someone asked me, perhaps a bit skeptically, “What’s interesting about dinosaurs? Why would anyone want or need to know about them?”, this is the book I would hand them. That’s about the highest praise I have to offer.
Closing confession: I also own Steve’s following book, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, but haven’t read it yet, mostly because, dinosaur supremacist that I am, I haven’t been able to summon the will to read a whole book about stinkin’ mammals. Watch this space.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
