Accidental anaglyphs
October 16, 2020
Everyone knows that the very first thing you should do to improve your specimen photography is to use a tripod: it eliminates hand-shake and gives you much crisper photos. In most respects, my photographs have got much, much better since I’ve been habitually using a tripod.
But it has meant I’ve not been able to benefit from happy accidents like the one that gave me this 3D anaglyph of the Archbishop‘s Cervical S in dorsal view:
(Do you have red-cyan glasses? Yes? Good! You will be able to appreciate all the delicious morphological information in this photo. No? Go and order some right now — they cost literally a dollar.)
The reason I was able to make this very useful image is because back in the old pre-tripod days I would sometimes accidentally move a little bit between taking two more-or-less identical photographs. Here are the two images that I was able to composite into the anaglyph above:
Each of them is pretty uninformative alone: who can tell one nondescript area of brown bone from another? But when combined, they are extraordinarily more informative. If you don’t have 3D glasses then (A) get some! and (B) you can get some idea of how helpful the 3D information is from the crude wigglegram below, which simply switches back and forth between the two images.
And I can’t overstate how enormously helpful I have found these accidentally sourced anaglyphs as I write the descriptive part of the Archbishop manuscript. Even at this level of crudity, they have shown me several important points of morphology that I would certainly have missed if I’d been working only from my orthogonal-view photos, and saved me from more than one misinterpretation.
The moral is twofold:
- When taking specimen photographs, use a tripod — but deliberately get some pairs of shots where the camera is moved to the side by about 7 cm (the distance between the pupils in an average human).
- If you don’t have any red-cyan glasses, get some!
Hey, Mike! Why haven’t you been blogging much lately?
October 14, 2020
Well, one reason is the utterly rancid “block editor” that WordPress has started imposing with increasing insistence on its poor users. If there is one thing that world really doesn’t need, it’s a completely new way of writing text. Seriously, WordPress, that was a solved problem in 1984. As Henry Spencer very nearly said back in the eighties, “thy creativity is better used in solving problems than in creating beautiful new impediments to productivity“.
But enough pointless whining: instead, check out this bad boy:

Taylor (in prep. for 2020: Figure V). NHMUK PV R5937, “The Archbishop”, cervical vertebra V (most anterior preserved cervical vertebra, probably C6), left side still encased in plaster. A. Reconstruction of right lateral view with neural spine, prezygapophysis, diapophysis, condyle, cotyle and cervical rib restored. The prezygapophysis from the succeeding vertebra that has adhered to this element is shown in red. B. Dorsal view with anterior to the right. C. Posterior view. D. Right lateral view. E. Anterior view. F. Ventral view with anterior to the right. Scale bar 20 cm.
Yes, it’s your friend and mine, The Archbishop! It’s a big titanosauriform sauropod excavated by F. W. H. Migeod for the British Museum (Natural History) back in 1930, from the same Tendaguru Formation that yielded the awesome Giraffatitan specimens in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
Yes, I admit I have been working on the Archbishop for more than sixteen years, and that I gave a talk about it at SVPCA 2005, and that I failed utterly to get it done as part of the Paleo Project Challenge 2010, and that as early as 2011 I was in despair about ever finishing it, and that I promised to do it by SVPCA 2016 but didn’t.
But in 2018 I did something significant, which was to actually start writing the paper in public. Now anyone can follow the progress of the project — and it’s progressing. The manuscript currently runs to about fifty printed pages, although that length is inflated by twenty-odd beautiful illustrations — of which the “Cervical V” image above is just one. (Do click through to see it in all its glory.)
So, yeah. That’s the main reason I am not blogging much. Because I am writing the paper. Finally.
Just write the Archbishop description already!
September 3, 2015
Here I am at SVPCA in 2015. I am haunted by the fact that ten years ago at SVPCA 2005, I gave a talk about the NHM’s Tendaguru brachiosaurid, NHMUK R5937. And the description is still not done and submitted a full decade later. Even though it’s objectively one of the most beautiful specimens in the world:
So here is my pledge to the world:
By this time next year (i.e. the start of SVPCA 2016 in Liverpool), I will have written and submitted this description. If I fail, I give you all permission — no, I beg you — to mock me mercilessly. Leave mocking comments on this blog, yes; but more than that, those of you at SVPCA are invited to spend the week pointing contemptuously at me and saying “Ha!”
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
—
Update (6 September): see also.
Photography and illustration talk, Part 7: Manipulating photographs
February 21, 2014
Photography and illustration talk, Part 2: Taking good photographs
February 8, 2014
Specimen photos with desaturated backgrounds
April 25, 2013
Generally when we present specimen photos in papers, we cut out the backgrounds so that only the bone is visible — as in this photo of dorsal vertebrae A and B of NHM R5937 “The Archbishop”, an as-yet indeterminate Tendaguru brachiosaur, in right lateral view:
But for some bones that can be rather misleading: they may be mounted in such a way that part of the bone is obscured by structure. For example — and this is a very minor case — the ventral margins of the centra in the photo above are probably slightly deeper than they appear, because the centra are slightly sunk within the plinth that holds the vertebrae upright.
So I’ve been toying with a different idea: instead of cutting the background out completely, leaving it in place but toning it down. Then the supporting structure is visible, but clearly distinct from the actual bone. (For a more extreme case, see the “Apatosaurus” minimus sacrum.)
Here’s how the image above looks if I desaturate the background:
I’m not sure what to make of this. It looks a bit strange to me, but that might only be the strangeness of unfamiliarity.
And it might not work so well (or indeed it might work better) for photos taken against a busier background.
What do you think?
And a happy Christmas from me, too!
December 23, 2011
Necks, I win; tails, Wedel loses –or– The SV-POW! Palaeo Paper Challenge
December 14, 2011
This year, I missed The Paleo Paper Challenge over on Archosaur Musings — it was one of hundreds of blog posts I missed while I was in Cancun with my day-job and then in Bonn for the 2nd International Workshop on Sauropod Biology and Gigantism. That means I missed out on my annual tradition of promising to get the looong-overdue Archbishop description done by the end of the year.

Brachiosauridae incertae sedis NMH R5937, "The Archbishop", dorsal neural spine C, probably from an anterior dorsal vertebra. Top row: dorsal view, anterior to top; middle row, left to right: anterior, left lateral, posterior, right lateral; bottom row: ventral view, anterior to bottom.
But this year, Matt and I are going to have our own private Palaeo Paper Challenge. And to make sure we heap on maximum pressure to get the work done, we’re announcing it here.
Here’s the deal. We have two manuscripts — one of them Taylor and Wedel, the other Wedel and Taylor — which have been sitting in limbo for a stupidly long time. Both are complete, and have in fact been submitted once and gone through review. We just need to get them sorted out, turned around, and resubmitted.
(The Taylor and Wedel one is on the anatomy of sauropod cervicals and the evolution of their long necks. It’s based on the last remaining unpublished chapter of my dissertation, and turned up in a modified form as my SVPCA 2010 talk, Why Giraffes Have Such Short Necks. The Wedel and Taylor one is on the occurrence and implications of intermittent pneumaticity in the tails of sauropods, and turned up as his SVPCA 2010 talk, Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus.)
We’re going to be realistic: we both have far too much going in (incuding, you know, families) to get these done by the end of 2011. But we have relatively clear Januaries, so our commitment is that we will submit by the end of January 2012. If either of us fails, you all have permission to be ruthlessly derisive of that person.
… and in other news …
Some time while we were all in Bonn, the SV-POW! hit-counter rolled over the One Million mark. Thanks to all of your for reading!