Hello, ladies!
March 28, 2019
To my shock, I find that we seem never to have posted Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch Hello, ladies! on SV-POW!. His recent tweet reminded me about this piece, so here it is!
Like so many classic sauropod sketches, this was executed during a mammal-tooth talk at SVPCA: this one back in 2013, the year of our first Barosarus talk. (Our second was in 2016.)
Bob’s sketch shows speculative sexual display behaviour. We have no direct evidence for (or against) such behaviour; but while we don’t believe sexual selection was the main reason for sauropods evolving long necks, it seems inevitable that long necks evolved for other purposes would be exapted for sexual display.
I always love Bob’s sketches — in fact, for most palaeoartists, I tend to like their sketches more than their finished pieces. Among the many things about this one that make me jealous is all the females in the background admiring the male: the economy of line where Bob can not only summon up a perfectly cromulent diplodocid head in a few strokes, but imbue it with a sense of being inquisitive about the display. It’s magical.
Whatever happened to that 2013 Barosaurus project?, you may ask.
Well, the first thing that happened is that after we submitted the abstract, entitled Barosaurus revisited: the concept of Barosaurus (Dinosauria: Sauropoda) is based on erroneously referred specimens, we realised that there was a tiny, tiny mistake in our work. So by the time I gave the talk at the actual conference, the title slide was this:
Then you will recall we did an efficient job of converting the conference presentation into a manuscript, which we submitted as a preprint less than a month after the conference. The preprint quickly garnered amazingly helpful comments, which we used to extensively revise the manuscript.
For reasons we don’t understand, there was a three-year delay before we got it submitted for peer-review in 2016; but when we did finally submit, we did it in the confident hope that it would sail through peer-review, having already been extensively reviewed and revised.
But it was not to be. When we got the reviews back, they asked for a ton of changes, and that process was just too dispiriting to face having already made a ton of changes based on the first set of comments just prior to the submission. So the tedious process got back-burnered, and the suddenly three more years passed.
The upshot is that I still need to handle the reviews on the 2nd version of the paper, and shove the blasted thing through the peer-review process. I will, to be frank, be glad to get it out of my POOP chute, so I can think about other things — not least, the 2016 Barosaurus project.
Lydekker’s (1893) illustration of Xenoposeidon
November 19, 2018
Matt’s drawn my attention to a bizarre fact: despite 17 separate posts about Xenoposeidon on this blog (linked from here and here), we’ve never shown a decent scan of Lydekker’s (1893) original illustration of NHMUK PV R2095, the partial mid-to-posterior dorsal vertebra that since Taylor and Naish (2007) has been the holotype specimen of Xenoposeidon proneneukos — and since Taylor (2018) has been known to represent a rebbachisaurid.
Well, here it is at last!
That’s Xeno on the left, of course. On the right, we have one of the various Wealden titanosauriform dorsal vertebrae that were constantly getting referred back and forth between taxa in the late 1800s. I think it might be one of the NPMUK PR R90 vertebrae, perhaps the one that, for disambiguation purposes, I’ve informally named R90a.
Lydekker — or, more likely, an uncredited illustrator — did rather a good job on this, as we can see by juxtaposing the illustration with the now well-known left-lateral photo that’s launched a thousand blog-posts:
The main differences here seem to pertain to how Lydekker and I perceived “lateral”. I think he has the vertebra rotated slightly away from us, so that it’s leaning into the page, and that’s why the centrum appears slightly taller and the arch slightly less tall than in my photo. He seems to have a bit more matrix stuck on the front of the centrum — perhaps because slightly more prep has been done since 1893 — but, worryingly, slightly less bone around the cotyle. I think that can only be illustration error, since that bone is definitely there.
References
- Lydekker, R. 1893. On a sauropodous dinosaurian vertebra from the Wealden of Hastings. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, London 49:276-280.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2018. Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur. PeerJ 6:e5212. doi: 10.7717/peerj.5212
- Taylor, Michael P., and Darren Naish. 2007. An unusual new neosauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Hastings Beds Group of East Sussex, England. Palaeontology 50(6):1547-1564. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00728.x
Mike Taylor interview by Szymon Górnicki
October 18, 2018
A while back — near the start of the year, in fact — Szymon Górnicki interviewed me by email about palaeontology, alternative career paths, open access, palaeoart, PeerJ, scholarly infrastructure, the wonder of blogging, and how to get started learning about palaeo. He also illustrated it with this caricature of me, nicely illustrating our 2009 paper on neck posture.
For one reason and another, it’s taken a long while for me get around to linking to it — but here we are in October and I’ve finally arrived :-)
With apologies to Szymon for the delay: here is the interview!
By the way, Szymon’s also done interviews with other, more interesting people: Davide Bonadonna, Steve Brusatte, Tim Haines and Phil Currie. Check them out!
Old drawings (of heads)
June 25, 2017
I was organizing my files in DropBox and I found a folder of old drawings I’d almost forgotten about. I drew this back in the late 90s. It was used on a t-shirt by the OU Zoology Department. I got the general idea of making a head out of animals, and the specific idea of using a butterfly wing for the ear, from Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s cover for the novel Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. The snake I stole from ancient Egypt. I think everything else is in there just because I thought it was cool. Note that inverts, fish, herps, birds, and mammals are all represented, with a good balance of aquatic, terrestrial, and volant forms. It looks awfully hippie-dippie from 20 years out, but heck, what doesn’t?
“Solitude” by Mathew Wedel. CC BY-NC 4.0.
Well, this, I suppose.
I drew this about the same time. I was reading The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels and lots of stuff about ancient monastic traditions and thinking that if the world is an illusion that must be penetrated, then the evidence of one’s senses can only mislead. Also, Vicki was working for the state medical examiner in Oklahoma City and they used wooden dowels to represent the paths of bullets when reconstructing the skulls of those killed by gunfire. So here’s the skull of a monk, with all of the lethal pathways of distraction and temptation clearly marked as such. At last he can contemplate the eternal mysteries in perfect solitude.
Obviously I didn’t get on board the world-is-an-illusion, sensation-is-bad train – skewed pretty hard in the opposite direction, in fact. Possibly because years earlier the Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs had shown me that pursuing ‘pure’ intellectual and spiritual inquiry would ultimately lead one to a pathetic existence as a disembodied head living in a cave (high culture, meet low culture). Anyway, whatever interest I might have had in that philosophy I exorcised through this drawing. Stripped of any art-making-a-point baggage, I still think it’s pretty bitchin’. I should make t-shirts.
Actually, I probably will make t-shirts of this one if there’s any interest. Hence the CC BY-NC license I put on it, as opposed to the normal CC BY for almost everything else on this site. Look at me, boldly experimenting with new licenses.
This, obviously, is a lot more recent. I was collating all of my scanned drawings and I realized that I’d gone to the trouble of drawing the cranium and lower jaw of Aquilops separately, but I’d never posted the version from before I composited them back into articulation. It is very unlike me to do work and then hide it, so here it is.
It wasn’t until I the post mostly written that I realized that all three drawings are of heads, none of them are saurischians (although the first includes a saurischian, but not the cool kind), and two are stinkin’ mammals (and not the cool kind). I stand ready for your slings and arrows.
For previous posts on my drawings, see:
Matt’s best tetrapod photos of 2016
April 13, 2017
I was fortunate to get to visit some pretty cool places last year, and to photograph some awesome critters, many of which I had never seen so well before. Here are the best of the lot.
In March I went out to Black Mesa with my mentor, Rich Cifelli, and a Native Explorers crew led by Kent Smith. Rich and I saw this pronghorn on the way in, and I got the shot by holding my phone up to Rich’s binoculars.
Later that same day, I caught these pronghorns crossing the highway in front of us. You can tell from the glare and splotches that I was shooting through the windshield. It was that or no shot.
A few days later, we got absurdly lucky. Everyone was driving back to base at the end of the day, with Rich’s truck at the end of the train. This herd of bighorn sheep picked that time to jump a fence and run across the road, right in front of Rich’s truck. Everyone else missed it, they were too far ahead. The bighorns crossed the road in front of our caravan again a couple of days later, and Kent Smith and Jeff Hargrave got some good photos of their own.
I like this landing-and-recovery sequence, illustrated by four different individuals.
Check out the two at the edge of the road, running in step.
A final wide shot. Thank goodness for burst mode shooting. These are all cropped iPhone photos, by the way.
Then in June I got to go with my son’s 5th grade field trip group to Santa Cruz Island in Channel Islands National Park, where we camped for three days and two nights. The dwarf island foxes were always around.
I think people have actually been good about not feeding them because they don’t beg. Neither are they afraid of humans. They treated us as non-threatening and inedible chunks of ambulatory matter. This one was startled by something in the bush and decided that running past me was the lesser of two evils. It might have been another fox, we saw and heard several get into tussles.
Another burst mode catch was this raven on the beach.
Here’s a crop. Not bad, sez me. For a shot of a stinkin’ theropod.
And here’s my favorite shot of that trip, and my second-favorite of the entire year. On the boat ride out to the island, a pod of dolphins came and surfed our bow wake. They did this for quite a while, and everyone who wanted to was able to cycle through the front of the boat and get close-up shots. I’d seen dolphins from shore before, when we lived in NorCal, but I’d never gotten to see them up close from the water. This is yet another burst-mode catch, taken just as this dolphin was breaking the water and before most of the bubbles coming out of its blowhole had popped.
I’m going to use my son’s standing as a tetrapod to sneak this in: sunset at Dead Horse Point, near Moab, Utah. That’s the Colorado River down there, 2000 feet below the clifftops. If you’re ever in that neck of the woods, this is the place to come see the sun set. Trust me on this.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 