I’m kidding, of course. It will continue no matter what.
Loads of more and better photos of the upcoming Aquilops Lego sets — yes, sets, plural — thanks to the Brothers Brick.
What’s that other thing included in this jeep-and-raptor set?
It’s a teensy widdle Aquilops of teensiness! And it’s pretty darned accurate! I don’t see a lot of room for improvement at minifig scale.
CAN’T WAIT CAN’T WAIT CAN’T WAIT!!!
And here are some more photos of set 76970, the brick-built poseable Aquilops.
Head on over to the Brothers Brick for more photos, set descriptions, and so on.
Theoretically these sets will drop on June 1. My birthday’s June 3. Close enough!
For previous posts on Aquilops, see the linked list on this page. And don’t forget that the scientific paper describing Aquilops is free to the world here. Aaand Brian Engh has Aquilops posts here, here, and here, and Aquilops art in the Living Relic Productions store.
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.
New paper out today: Boisvert et al. (2025) on all the Haplos
January 29, 2025
New paper out today, in Geology of the Intermountain West (free at this link):
Boisvert, Colin, Bivens, Gunnar, Curtice, Brian, Wilhite, Ray, and Wedel, Mathew. 2025. Census of currently known specimens of the Late Jurassic sauropod Haplocanthosaurus from the Morrison Formation, USA. Geology of the Intermountain West 12:1-23. doi: 10.31711/giw.v12.pp1-23.
This one was born while the same crew was working on the Dry Mesa Haplo paper (Boisvert et al. 2024). We realized that there were more Haplos out there than any of us had individually realized, and it would sure be handy to have the pertinent information on all of them collected in one place. So the “all the Haplos” project became one of Colin’s talks at NAPC last year. Then last June, Colin, Brian, Ray, and I had a few days in the Salt Lake/Provo area, and Gunnar Bivens joined us. In addition to being a talented artist — he did all the skeletal recons in the new paper — Gunnar also has a fearsome command of the literature and an encyclopedic memory for specimen numbers. Pretty soon he’d contributed enough to the project that it was only fair to bring him on as an author. Jun-Hyeok Jang did the life restoration for the cover.
This one’s pretty straightforward — it does what it says on the tin — but I’m super proud of it and very, very happy to have it done and out. They say to write the stuff you want to read, and I’m going to have a printed and bound copy of this paper sitting on the shelf over my desk as soon as it can be decently arranged. I needed this paper to exist, and now it does. I hope y’all find it useful, too.
References
- Boisvert, Colin, Curtice, Brian, Wedel, Mathew, & Wilhite, Ray. 2024. Description of a new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry. The Anatomical Record, 1–19. http://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25520
- Boisvert, Colin, Bivens, Gunnar, Curtice, Brian, Wilhite, Ray, and Wedel, Mathew. 2025. Census of currently known specimens of the Late Jurassic sauropod Haplocanthosaurus from the Morrison Formation, USA. Geology of the Intermountain West 12:1-23. doi: 10.31711/giw.v12.pp1-23.
Jessie Atterholt and I are helping one of our students write up a pathological dinosaur bone (you’ll definitely hear more about this in time), and we needed a good example paper for our student to use as a model. We chose several, but for me the standout was Scott et al. (2015), and that’s the one I’m focusing on here.
The short, short version is that they found a partial timber wolf femur from the La Brea tar pits that was sheared off near the proximal end and healed. The healing demonstrates that the animal survived whatever violent event tore off the rest of the hindlimb. There’s no sign of a pseudarthrosis, so although it’s not impossible that the rest of the limb was there and just hanging uselessly, we can be sure that the animal wasn’t bearing any weight on it and was effectively tripodal. Maybe it was a loner that managed to hunt and scavenge enough to stay alive long enough to heal, but maybe its pack either helped supply it with food or at least tolerated its presence.
I’m tempted to go down a rabbit hole telling stories about the three-legged dogs I’ve known — and one two-legged dog that was amazingly fast (one front leg, one hind, and it could run much better than it could walk). Instead, my one short digression is going to be about severed arteries. “If something ripped this wolf’s leg off, why didn’t it bleed out?” you might ask. The answer is that arteries that are completely severed in amputation injuries will often clamp shut on their own. I don’t know how much has been written about this, but I’ve confirmed it with both veterinarians and trauma surgeons. So remember, folks, it’s better to get a major artery severed completely than to simply have it torn open.
ANYWAY, I love this paper. It is not lacking for information, it’s just concise and efficient. Four pages, two figures (figure 1 is the pathological specimen in anterior and posterior views), a few refs, boom, done. I realize that not every study can be done and dusted in four pages, but I’ll bet that a lot more of them could be done in four than are written that way, my own included.
Scott et al. (2015) is free at the link below — check it out.
Reference
Scott, E., Rega, E., Scott, K., Bennett, B. and Sumida, S., 2015. A pathological timber wolf (Canis lupus) femur from Rancho La Brea indicates extended survival after traumatic amputation injury. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Science Series, 42, pp.33-36. (link: Scott et al 2015 traumatic amputation in a La Brea timber wolf)
A unique sauropod mount: Haplocanthosaurus delfsi CMNH 10380
January 23, 2025
Hatcher (1903a) gave a very brief description — two pages and no illustrations — of the new sauropod Haplocanthus, basing it and its type species H. priscus on the adult specimen CM 572. Later that year, having been notified that the genus name was preoccupied by a fish, he renamed it Haplocanthosaurus in a single-paragraph note (Hatcher 1903b).
Then in his monographic description later that same year (Hatcher 1903c), he also named a second species, H. utterbacki, based on the subadult specimen CM 879. McIntosh and Williams (1988:22) considered this to be synonymous with H. priscus, the differences noted by Hatcher being due to preparation (absence of hyposphenes) and ontogeny (fusion of sacral spines). This synonymy has been universally followed since.
Eighty-five years after Hatcher’s three papers, McIntosh and Williams (1988) described a new species of Haplocanthosaurus — H. delfsi — and this one has been accepted as valid. Their paper contains a photograph of the mounted skeleton in the Cleveland Museum:
What I didn’t realise until recently is that this is not how the skeleton was first exhibited at the museum. In an article about the new remount of this skeleton (its tail is off the floor at last!), Emily Driehaus writes that “by 1957, the team had fully excavated the dinosaur—and it was on display in the Museum by 1961”. And the article includes this photo:
I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve seen plenty of regular mounts, and I’ve seen panel mounts where the bones are laid out on the ground as they may have been when they were found. And I’ve seen photos of the bizarre everted-elbowed Diplodocus in St. Petersburg. But never an exhibit like this, with the rib-cage complete and articulated, but sitting on the ground with the legs splayed out.
I wonder what the story was here? Did they get as far as building the torso, then run out of time or money? Were they trying for a possible sleeping posture? That doesn’t work at all: the femur would have been disarticulated in that posture, and the torso would need to be higher off the ground to allow space for the guts and gastralia.
Does anyone know any more about this?
Update (24 January 2024)
In a comment below, Matt Inabinett points to a Facebook post containing a photo of this exhibit under construction:
The accompanying text reads:
#TBT to the year 1959 and the mounting of our Late Jurassic sauropod, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi, nicknamed Happy! In life, this dinosaur was probably more than 72 feet long and 14 feet tall at the hips, with a weight of about 25 tons. Because of this tremendous mass, it’s anatomically impossible for a sauropod to be in this position without breaking all their joints…unless…😬🦖
Which could be construed as “unless killed by a theropod”, I guess, suggestion that the old mount might have been intended as a death pose.
(Note, by the way, that the 1959 date claimed for this photo doesn’t make a good match for the statement “it was on display in the Museum by 1961” in the article I first linked.)
References
- Hatcher, John B. 1903a. A new sauropod dinosaur from the Jurassic of Colorado. Proceedings of the Biology Society of Washington 16:1–2.
- Hatcher, John B. 1903b. A new name for the dinosaur Haplocanthus Hatcher. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 16:100.
- Hatcher, John B. 1903c. Osteology of Haplocanthosaurus with description of a new species, and remarks on the probable habits of the Sauropoda and the age and origin of the Atlantosaurus beds; additional remarks on Diplodocus. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 2:1–75 and plates I–VI.
- McIntosh, John S, and Michael E. Williams. 1988. A new species of sauropod dinosaur, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi sp. nov., from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Fm. of Colorado. Kirtlandia 43:3–26.
My Constant Reader, and staying close to the work
January 16, 2025
A middle caudal vertebra of a diplodocid, presumably Tornieria africana, on display at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, in left lateral view.
Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History led me to this post at Nothing Human, and poking around there led me to another good’un: “Shallow feedback hollows you out”. That post really hit for me, and it made me think about SV-POW! Especially this bit:
Suppose you don’t want to lose your ability to think new thoughts and see new things. What are your options?
The best remedy is to write to the single smartest person you know who cares a lot about your topic of interest.
I have two thoughts about this. The first, which dovetails nicely with the thesis of that post, is that SV-POW! staying relatively small is probably a good thing. We’ve never written with the goal of growing our readership, and I think that’s kept us from being tempted by a lot of bad habits whose deleterious effects you can see play out over and over again across the whole internet. Our habit of posting on a completely irregular schedule on whatever topics we like has been doubly beneficial: it’s kept us sane (for reasons explored in this post), and it’s probably kept our readership low,* which has kept the temptation to write for marginal readers from ever getting off the ground. In case that sounds insulting or dismissive to our readers, let me clarify: we love our readers, and we’d rather have our little community of dedicated weirdos than any other set.
(Don’t get me wrong, I like it when one of our posts goes viral, but I like it in the same sense that I like watching a comet: it’s a cool phenomenon that I feel is beyond my influence. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t affect how I conduct myself.)
*Having written that, I wonder now if our irregular posting schedule has possibly deepened the dedication of those readers who can tolerate it — it could be a form of intermittent reinforcement, which has been implicated in gambling addiction.
That leads to my second thought: at any given time in the 17-year history of this blog, we’ve had a small but dedicated cadre of commenters, but the makeup of that group has changed over time. This has also had a salutary effect: for every post I’ve ever written here, I could be pretty sure that at least some of the regulars would see it and comment, but the one thing of which I could be absolutely certain is that the post would be seen and read by Mike. For most posts, Mike probably cares as much or more about what I’m writing than anyone else in the world, he will absolutely call me to account if he catches any weaknesses of evidence or reasoning, and he’ll do it publicly, in our own comment section. These are all good things! As my Constant Reader, Mike’s helped enforce the good habits of mind and of writing that are the subject of that Nothing Human “Shallow feedback” post.
The same Tornieria vertebra in dorsolateral oblique view, showing some pneumatic features on the lateral aspect of the neural spine. The pocks on the centrum are also raising my pneumaticity antennae, but I can’t be sure from my limited set of 16-year-old photos. When Diplodocus caudals have pneumatic features this far back in the tail, they’re more commonly on the centrum than the arch, but diverticula gonna diverticulate.
Speaking of, I also really liked this bit from the first comment on that post, by Mo Nastri:
…the details change but the general pattern is the same. In each case the [once great] intellectual in question is years removed from not just the insights that delivered fame, but *the activities that delivered insight*.
To the extent that this blog has escaped enshittification, it’s probably because Mike and I are not removed from the activities that deliver insight. We care more about sauropod vertebrae (and pig skulls, etc.) than we do about clicks. And at this point, I’m confident that we always will. If we were ever in danger of click-maximizing behavior, it was probably back in the early days, and even then the risk was minimal. We love our weird little niche blog just as it is, weird and niche-y and little.
The possibly-surprising conclusion I’m building toward is that we’ve probably made SV-POW! a better experience for our readers (minimally, in that it still exists to be read) by not caring about our readership, and by not writing to please or impress anyone other than ourselves and each other. And that in turn has kept SV-POW! viable for us as well.
So if you’re here, great! We’re happy to have you — as an interested person, rather than a click. If you like what we’re doing, stay tuned. We’re gonna do a lot more of the same.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 