Matt Wedel will be yapping about Brachiosaurus at the Burpee Museum PaleoFest this year
February 25, 2020
Challenge: can you spot the Iguanodon pelvis in this photo?
Big news: I will be at the Burpee Museum PaleoFest this year. I’m speaking at 10:30 AM on Sunday, March 8. The title of my talk is, “In the Footsteps of Giants: Finding and Excavating New Fossils of Brachiosaurus from the Lower Morrison Formation in Utah”. Brian Engh, John Foster, and ReBecca Hunt-Foster are all coauthors.
The main page for PaleoFest 2020 is here (link), and on the right side of that page there’s a block of quick links to the speaker list, daily schedules, and so on. If you’re in the Midwest and not already booked for the weekend of March 7-8, come on out and I’ll talk your legs off about dinosaurs.
The photo above is of me at a table at the Raymond M. Alf Museum Fossil Fest on February 8, 2020. It’s nothing to do with the Burpee PaleoFest, I just needed a photo of me talkin’ Brachiosaurus. And yes, you can have that t-shirt — objectively the greatest in the history of the universe — when you cut it off my cold, dead carcass. (Or you can order your own; this model is the “Retro Brontosaurus Dinosaur T-shirt” by Dinosaur Tees and the Amazon link is here.)
Two navel-gazey announcements: book signing in Pittsburgh this Sunday, and Medlife Crisis video
March 5, 2019
This one.
No time for a long post today, but there are a couple of cool developments I wanted to let you know about. The folks at the Barnes & Noble Settlers Ridge store in Pittsburgh got in touch and asked if I’d give a short talk and do a book signing while I’m in town. That will be this coming Sunday, March 10, at 1:00 PM, in the children’s section at that store, which is located at 800 Settlers Ridge Center Drive. They’ll have copies of my big sauropod book with Mark Hallett, and my kid’s book that came out last fall. Come on out if you’re in the area and interested.
And this one.
In other news, the excellent Medlife Crisis channel on YouTube recently did a video on the recurrent laryngeal nerve and gave a nice shout-out to my 2012 paper. The video is five minutes long and — in my heavily biased opinion — well worth a watch:
Timely: come see Matt talk, or come talk to Matt
October 18, 2018
I did a fieldwork!
This is going to set new records for “almost too late to be worth posting”, but here goes.
First up, this Wednesday evening, Oct. 18, at 6:00 PM (in about 18 hours), while most of the paleontologists in the West are at SVP in Albuquerque, I will giving a public lecture at the Canyonlands Natural History Assocation’s Moab Information Center, at the corner of Main St. and Center in Moab (link). The talk is titled, “Lost worlds of the Jurassic: Diverse dinosaurs and plants in the lower Morrison Formation of south-central Utah”, and it is free to the public. It’s a report on the fieldwork I’ve been doing in the Morrison Formation of southern Utah for the past few summers with John Foster, Brian Engh, and Jessie Atterholt. I promise lots of pretty pictures and probably more yapping about sauropods than anyone really needs. Did I mention it’s free? I hope to see you there.
Second, I will be at SVP myself, for a bit. Basically Friday night and Saturday. Gotta catch up with collaborators and go see Brian Engh pick up his Lanzendorf Paleoart Prize Saturday night. Why do you care? Western University of Health Sciences has an open position for an anatomist, and a lot of paleo folks have anatomy training, so…if you are interested in this position specifically, or if you have general questions about what it’s like to be a paleontologist teaching gross anatomy at a med school (spoiler: mostly awesome), come find me sometime Friday evening or Saturday and chat me up. I’ll probably be roaming the hallways and talking with folks instead of attending talks (sorry, talk-givers–you all rock, I’m just too slammed this year). And if you are on the job market, have some anatomy experience, and aren’t allergic to sun, palm trees, and amazing colleagues, please consider applying for the position. We’re taking applications through October 26, so don’t tarry. Here’s that link again.
Fun and games at the BYU museum
May 12, 2016
Things remain frantic on the Sauropocalypse tour. Today, we were back at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, working on four or five separate projects. Here’s Matt, photographing broken bone of the iconic Supersaurus cervical BYU 9024, while a pallet of Big Pink Apatosaur cervicals wait for attention in the background:
You’ve seen this bone before – I first posted on it 8 years ago this month, and it turned up again here and here. It is still the longest known vertebra of any animal that has ever lived.
And here’s Mike, getting Jensen’s sculpture of the same vertebra down from storage to compare it to the original:
In Jensen’s (1985) original description of this vertebra – which he at first referred to Ultrasauros – the only relevant illustration he included was one of the model, so it was good to see this bit of history in the flesh (Jensen did include photos of the actual bone in later papers). We’ll show the two vertebrae, real and sculpted, side by side in a future post.
References
- Jensen, J. A. 1985. Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado. Great Basin Naturalist 45, 697-709.
Matt’s adventures in the Camarasaurus pit
May 7, 2016
At the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, our host Ken Carpenter invited us to jump right into the Camarasaurus pit and start pulling apart their beautiful specimen. We did. Here is Matt, looking as happy as I’ve ever seen him:
The pit is the central exhibit of the museum’s palaeontology hall. You can look down on its Jurassic scene from the balcony above:
Theres a very nice Stegosaurus and an Allosaurus in pursuit of some kind of ornithopod, but needless to say the star of the show is the dead Camarasaurus that lies on the ground, well associated but partially articulated.
It’s a beautifully undistorted specimen, and we were amazed and delighted when Ken not only gave us permission to hop over the barrier and get closer to it, but even to move the elements around to better measure and photograph them. We spent the morning with the skeleton, concentrating on four anterior cervicals, and could happily have spent much, much longer.
A shot across the room at ground level:
Further bulletins as and when we find time to post. Can’t write more now, we’re off to the big wall of awesome at Dinosaur National Monument!
SV-POW! endorses Triceratops
May 6, 2016
Today, we were at the BYU Museum of Paleontology, which is in a ridiculously scenic setting with snow-capped mountains on the horizon in almost every direction.
We got through a lot of good work in collections, and we’ll show you some photos from there in due course. But for today, here are a couple of pictures from the public galleries.
First, here in a single photo is definitive proof that the “Toroceratops hypothesis” is wrong:
Say what you want about ontegenetic trajectories, that huge and well ossified Triceratops is not a juvenile of anything.
Good, glad we got that sorted out.
Meanwhile, at the even better end of the gallery, here is a very nice — and very well lit — cast of the famous articulated juvenile Camarasaurus specimen CM 11338 described by Gilmore (1925):
Further bulletins as events warrant.
References
Gilmore, Charles W. 1925. A nearly complete articulated skeleton of
Camarasaurus, a saurischian dinosaur from the Dinosaur National
Monument, Utah. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 10:347-384.
SV-POW! on the road – Sauropocalypse 2016
April 30, 2016
Mounted Diplodocus at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal.
I love Utah. I love how much of the state is given over to exposed Mesozoic rocks. I love driving through Utah, which has a strong baseline of beautiful scenery that is frequently punctuated by the absolutely mind-blowing (Arches, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Monument Valley…). I love doing fieldwork there, and I love the museums, of which there are many. It is not going too far to say that much of what I learned firsthand about sauropod morphology, I learned in Utah (the Carnegie Museum runs a close second on the dragging-Matt-out-of-ignorance scale).
Cast of the juvenile Camarasaurus CM 11338 at Dinosaur National Monument.
There is no easy way to say this so I’m just going to get it over with: Mike has never been to Utah.
I know, right?
But we’re going to fix that. Mike’s flying into Salt Lake City this Wednesday, May 4, and I’m driving up from SoCal to meet him. After that we’re going to spend the next 10 days driving around Utah and western Colorado hitting museums and dinosaur sites. We’re calling it the Sauropocalypse.
Mounted Barosaurus at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Why am I telling you this, other than to inspire crippling jealousy?
First, Mike and I are giving a pair of public talks next Friday evening, May 6, at the USU-Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Price. The talks start at 7:00 and will probably run until 8:00 or shortly after, and there will be a reception with snacks afterward. Mike’s talk will be, “Why giraffes have such short necks”, and my own will be, “Why elephants are so small”.
Second, occasionally people leave comments to the effect of, “Hey, if you’re ever passing through X, give me a shout.” I haven’t kept track of all of those, so this is me doing the same thing in reverse. Here’s our itinerary as of right now:
May 4, Weds: MPT flies in. MJW drives up from Cali. Stay in SLC/Provo area.
May 5, Thurs: recon BYU collections in Provo. Stay in SLC/Provo area.
May 6, Fri: drive to Price, visit USU-Eastern Prehistoric Museum, give evening talks. Stay in Price.
May 7, Sat: drive to Vernal, visit DNM. Stay in Vernal.
May 8, Sun: visit Utah Field House, revisit DNM if needed, drive to Fruita.
May 9, Mon: visit Rabbit Valley camarasaur in AM, visit Dinosaur Journey museum in PM. Go on to Moab.
May 10, Tues: drive back to Provo, visit BYU collections.
May 11, Weds: BYU collections.
May 12, Thurs: drive to SLC to visit UMNH collections, stay for Utah Friends of Paleontology meeting that evening.
May 13, Fri: BYU collections.
May 14, Sat: visit North American Museum of Ancient Life. MPT flies home. MJW starts drive home.
We’re planning lots of time at BYU because we’ll need it, the quantity and quality of sauropod material they have there is ridiculous. As for the rest, some of those details may change on the fly but that’s the basic plan. Maybe we’ll see you out there.
SV-POW! on the road – Matt’s public lecture at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
March 14, 2016
Just a quick heads up for any SV-POW! readers within convenient striking distance of Norman, Oklahoma, this Wednesday, March 16. Like all of the lectures in the “Dinosaurs Past & Present” series at OMNH, this one is free to the public. I hope to see some of you there!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 