Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

This will be a short and mostly navel-gaze-y collection of links.

Back in November, 2016, I posted here about my “Twelve Steps to Infinity” article in Sky & Telescope magazine. That one covered 12 objects in the winter sky and corresponding events in Earth history when the light we see now left those objects. I’ve now done a similar but larger article for the summer sky, titled “Fifteen Steps to Forever”, which is out in the June issue of Sky & Tel. Also, the June issue has not one but three articles on space rocks and their terrestrial traces: one on where we are as a species in assessing the impact threat (timely since I was just talking about that), one on how to see impact craters from commercial airliners (awesome!), and one on upcoming asteroid sample-return missions being prepped by the Japanese space agency and NASA. Confusingly, the June issue will be on newsstands during the month of May, so if you want to check it out, now’s the time.

More recently, in the unexpectedly popular tungsten cube post I wrote:

There are a couple of objects in my collection that give me more pleasure than any of the rest. One is a piece of shrapnel from the Sikhote-Alin meteorite – more about that another time, perhaps.

“Another time” has come – in the wake of my impact talk, I’m slowly going through my (small) meteorite collection over at 10 Minute Astronomy. I just covered my Sikhote-Alin chunk, in what I immodestly think is one of my better posts. Go see if you agree.

Finally, you presumably came here in hopes of seeing the anatomy from something, so here you go. My friend and colleague Jessie Atterholt is on Instagram as @theladyanatomica and she has been posting some pretty sweet photos and videos, mostly of specimens she prepared herself. I’m highlighting her work now because she just posted a video of her horse foot mount, which is free-standing with the help of a single rod, but which breaks almost all the way down thanks to metal pins and magnets. It’s one of my favorite anatomical preparations of all time and something I both envy and covet. Peter Dodson has one in his office – Jessie made it for him when she was his student at UPenn. Seeing it when I was in Philadelphia in March re-fired my interest in such things – if you’ve noticed an uptick in posts about anatomical specimens in the last few weeks, Peter and (mostly) Jessie are to blame. With any luck, I’ll have something similar of my own to post on in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, go check out Jessie’s work at the link above.