A PDF of Kingham (1962) on Astrodon
August 28, 2025
In 1962, Richard Frank Kingham — a student at Woodward School Washington, D.C. — wrote a four-page paper, with three further pages of line drawings, about the Early Cretaceous sauropod Astrodon (Kingham 1962). It was published in the Proceedings of the Washington Junior Academy of Sciences (which to no-one’s great surprise does not seem to be available online).
For a smallish high-school project, it’s been pretty influential. For example, Carpenter and Tidwell (2005) followed Kingham in considering Pleurocoelus to be a junior synonym of Astrodon (though neither they nor anyone else has followed Kingham’s suggestion that Brachiosaurus, including Giraffatitan, should also be considered a junior synonym). Matt and I cited it in the Brontomerus description (Taylor et al. 2011) and probably in other papers, and it keeps turning up in all sorts of places.
Yet there is — or rather, was — no PDF of this influential short paper. The community has been subsisting on nth-generation photocopies. So when Matt asked me a day or two ago if I could send him a PDF, I had to reply in the negative.
But I do have one of those nth-generation photocopies — most likely originally from Matt himself. So I ghetto-scanned it (i.e. photographed the pages with my phone), cleaned up the scans, concatenated them into a PDF and OCR’d the result. I sent it to Matt, and now I give it to you, the community. Enjoy!
References
- Carpenter, Kenneth, and Virginia Tidwell. 2005. Reassessment of the Early Cretaceous sauropod Astrodon johnsoni Leidy 1865 (Titanosauriformes). pp. 78-114 in: Virginia Tidwell and Ken Carpenter (eds.), Thunder Lizards: the Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. 495 pp.
- Kingham, R. F. 1962. Studies of the sauropod dinosaur Astrodon Leidy. Proceedings of the Washington Junior Academy of Science 1:38-44.
- Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Richard L. Cifelli. 2011. A new sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, USA. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 56(1):75-98. doi: 10.4202/app.2010.0073
Matt’s DinoCon 2025 adventure
August 27, 2025
Where all discerning paleontologists buy road trip junk food. This one is in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
I just got back home after a solid four weeks on the road, an epic peregrination from SoCal to Oklahoma to England to Oklahoma to SoCal. DinoCon 2025 was embedded mid-trip, which is why I haven’t gotten anything about it posted before now.
I love driving across the American West. Give me a thousand miles of interstate and a couple of days to myself and you’ll rarely see me happier or more well-adjusted.
My brain is still buzzing, from DinoCon and from the rest of the trip, but here are some of my personal highlights in no particular order:
1. Venue generally — all the conference areas on the University of Exeter campus were very walkable, and the Great Hall had tons of space and lots of doorways, which made it easy to get in and out of from multiple directions, quietly, even during talks. The vendor space was nice, and having dorms and a pub on site was excellent.
Kieran Satchell fixin’ to hold court. Past Matt did not know that he was about to get his face rocked off.
2. Speakers — great, diverse set, appreciated seeing so many women and early-career folks, and people that have had different pathways into paleontology (researchers, educators, artists, people in entertainment, students, etc.). Hillary Maclean’s talk was the absolutely perfect way to kick off the conference, and set a really wonderful tone for everything that followed (irritatingly, I got no photos). I’ll have more to say on a couple of standout talks in a future post.
I’ve been admiring Dougal Dixon and his work for four decades, so getting to meet this kind, gracious, curious, enthusiastic, wonderful person was a lifetime dream come true.
3. Vendors — freakin’ amazing. Highlights for me were getting to meet Dougal Dixon, Andy Frazer (Dragons of Wales, Novosaurs, etc.), Sean Hennessey (Speed Thief), Alex Pritchard (DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk), and Katrina van Grouw (Unfeathered Bird, Unnatural Selection), in addition to catching up with old friends like Mark Witton, Georgia Witton-Maclean, Bob Nicholls, and Toni Naish. I’d corresponded with Natee Himmapaan and David Krentz but not met them in person, so it was nice to finally close those loops. And Nathan Barling — I’ve been meaning to blog about Dr. Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs for ages, and I got to gush at Nathan for a few minutes over how rad that book is. I got books signed by Dixon, Frazer, Hennessey, Naish, and Witton, but I was a lightweight compared to some in that department. The evening art exhibition was fantastic; Mike and I wandered around taking it all in, and it gave us a lot to think and talk about. If you were there and I didn’t meet you — and I know I missed a few folks from busyness, brain fog, general overwhelmedness, etc. — I’m sorry, and I hope we can catch up next year.
Lots of official DinoCon stuff, some of it personalized by me. No-AI pin by Andy Frazer is available in his shop.
4. Brochure — all the swag was great, including the badges and lanyards, but the brochure was a real high point for me, for these specific reasons: I love the A5 size and form factor, so much more convenient than anything larger or smaller; print quality and paper quality were excellent, so it felt good in the hand and like a high-quality artifact; layout with schedule on the middle fold and maps at the back (and on the back) was super convenient, especially for one-handing when carrying an armload of books and art; and finally having room for notes. This is peak conference guidebook design; no need to rethink, just keep making them like this, and other conferences take notice.
Still a few spaces left, but laptop real estate is getting tight. Blue Lias sticker was another DinoCon acquisition, courtesy of Kieran Satchell.
5. Official themed art for the conference — I like that this existed, and I thought that Natalia Jagielska‘s art hit the right note for the type of event this was, so well done all around. I was particularly taken with what I can’t help seeing as her Union Jack azhdarchid; that piece adorns the laptop I’m typing this on, courtesy of the official DinoCon 2025 sticker pack. Speaking of: loved the stickers and pins and so on, I’m a helpless victim for all of that, as Mike can attest.
As the self-nominated Aquilops Ambassador, I left a few Aquilops Funko Pops with various parties in the UK, and put one in the auction.
6. Auction and Quiz — turns out Darren Naish is really good at working a room, and keeping the tone light, even when he was (mock) exasperated by this or that. Both events were enjoyable and hilarious. My plea for the future: don’t find a more professional or even competent auctioneer, just keep making Darren do it. It’s unarguably the right move.
What the kids refer to as a grip of Mark Witton’s art.
Needless to say, I enjoyed myself tremendously. I did have one minor problem that I’d never had the opportunity to experience before: sheer exhaustion from all the dinosaurian awesomeness. At most conferences the dinosaur bits get one day, maybe a day and a half max, and although many of the vendors will be catering to the dinosaurati, it’s not all dinosaurs all the time. DinoCon was just that, and although it was exhilarating, I collapsed into bed each night on the thinnest of fumes (and thinnest of wallets).
Mike and Fiona kindly let me disgorge my DinoCon loot onto their dining room table. I did manage to get it all safely home to SoCal, with only a little necromancy and some slight warping of the spacetime continuum.
But heck, I’ve got in the neighborhood of 50 weeks to recover. By the time DinoCon 2026 rolls around, I’ll be more than ready to do it all again.
The SV-POW!sketeers cracking each other up, as is our wont. This photo was taken just before the one at the top of Mike’s recent post.
One of the major highlights of the trip was just getting to hang out with Mike and Darren. I hadn’t been to the UK since SVPCA 2019, so it was well overdue. I’ve known them both as pen pals for a quarter-century now, and as good friends and colleagues for over 20 years, and looking back I can see the Godzilla-sized footprints their scholarship and companionship have left in my life and my career. That’s a humbling amount of good fortune.
Probably my favorite photo from the trip. Fiona, Mike, me, and Jenny watching the sunset from the trampoline in the Taylors’ back garden.
Also perfectly lovely: getting to stay with Mike and Fiona before and after the conference. Their place is my home away from home. Rivers of English tea flow invisibly beneath the surface of many of my papers, courtesy of the Taylors, and it’s past time I publicly acknowledged that.
I have more to say about the trip — about Mike’s talk, book signings and art acquisitions, not one but two close encounters with Aquilops, and more — but science is calling so those posts will have to wait a bit. Stay tuned.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence; it just isn’t proof
August 24, 2025
One often hears it said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. For example, if you excavate some fossil sauropods and they don’t have preserved feathers, that not evidence that sauropods didn’t have feathers.
Oh yes it is.
This is an example of a mantra that’s short, catchy, and wrong. Every time you see absence of evidence, you are accumulating evidence of absence. What you’re not doing is proving absence — not with any single observation, at least.
Here’s an example. You toss a coin, and it comes down heads. You now have evidence of the presence of a head side (hurrah!) but only absence of evidence for a tails side. It’s perfectly likely that the coin has a tails side but merely happened to come up heads. So the absence of evidence for a tails side is certainly not proof that there is not a tails side.
But now suppose you toss the coin ten times, and it comes up heads every time. For a fair coin, there is less than one chance in a thousand of that happening (2^10 = 1024). Now let’s toss it 20 times. If you still see heads every time, you’re seeing a one-in-a-million event (2^20 = 1048576), and if you’re still seeing only heads after 100 tosses, that is a 1-in-1267650600228229401496703205376 event.
By this point, I’m hoping you’d be concluding with reasonable certainly that you had a two-headed coin. What’s happening is that each observation of absence (no tails side) is increasingly your confidence that there is no such side.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
WARNING: Science In Progress!
August 19, 2025
Matt’s staying with me for a few days, and we’re working into the night trying to put a stake through the heart of a long-running project. He just left the room to take a quick break, and I snapped this photo of the work area.
We have everything we need! From left to right: beer, Carnegie Diplodocus skeletal reconstructions, 3d prints of brachiosaurid dorsals, chocolate, alligator vertebrae, a shared Google Doc with an in-progress manuscript, and wine.
Let the science flow!
The very first #DinoConUK!
August 18, 2025
Matt and I are just back from the first DinoCon, a British dinosaur convention hosted at Exeter University by Darren Naish (the silent partner at SV-POW!) and colleagues. Among other things, it was a great chance for the three of us to get together, for the first time since the 2019 SVPCA on the Isle of Wight.
SV-POW!sketeers reunited! From left to right: Mike Taylor, Matt Wedel, Darren Naish.
It was a pretty amazing event: about 800 people, I believe, including a few professional palaeontologists, lots of amateur enthusiasts, straight up fans, and quite a few kids. Because of the wide mix of levels of expertise, I was a bit concerned about how the talks should be pitched, but in the end I think nearly everything was accessible to nearly everyone. (It helped that the talks were in generous one-hour slots — 45 minutes plus a Q&A. So there was time to explain bits of background in a way that’s neither necessary nor possible when speaking in a 20-minute slot at SVPCA.)
Highlights included Hillary McLean’s talk on what a preparator does and Kieran Satchell’s survey of the Jurassic coast. But I’m not just blowing smoke when I say that the best talk of the weekend for me was Matt’s “The Sauropod Heresies”. He convincingly explained why, once sauropods had landed on their body plan, they never made any fundamental changes. (There are no aquatic, arborial, cursorial, meaningfully dwarfed, carnivorous, fossorial or short-necked big-headed sauropods.)
Matt beginning his talk on the wide, wide stage of the Great Hall. His opening statement: “This is my own original palaeoart.”
Bringing a novel palaeobiological hypothesis to a mixed audience, and justifying it with evidence, is a tough needle to thread. Matt’s blend of hard science, relevant anecdotes and dumb jokes was perfectly calibrated not just to bring the audience along with him, but to leave them with solid understanding of things most of them had probably never thought about before.
There’s loads more that could be said about DinoCon, but I’m going to leave it here as I’m preparing curries for Matt and his son London. I’m sure Matt will have thoughts of his own in due time.
I leave you with this:
Matt holding court among his many admirers, after the end of the Q&A session that followed his talk.
Sauropod dinosaur body plan for DinoCon 2025
August 17, 2025
“Rights of papers are owned by the publishers hence, there is no consent needed from authors”
August 13, 2025
Straight from Elesevier’s own mouth, in a letter sent by a “Customer Experience Champion” in response to Professor Iris Van Rooij’s enquiry:
Rights of papers are owned by the publishers hence, there is no consent needed from authors.
(This is in the context of scholarly papers being fed to their LLM.)
Folks, when you send your work to Elsevier journals, you are literally giving them away. Given them rights that explicitly invite them to ride roughshod over your rights.
Is that what you want? Huh? Is it?
Talk slides are not fungible
August 9, 2025
Here’s a new slide that wasn’t in my talk last summer.
Mike and I are working on our respective talks for DinoCon 2025 — a timely concern, since Mike presents next Saturday and I’m on next Sunday. My talk will be an adapted and upgraded version of the keynote talk I gave at the Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference last summer. Adapted because I have to shave off about half an hour from my very long Tate talk, and upgraded because I’ve had 13 months of additional thoughts. The required changes led to this exchange:
Matt: The trick — and what I’m dithering over — is what combination of slides will make a talk that will not just be passable, but sing, as its own separate and coherent thing.
Mike: Exactly. It’s always about sequencing, and the narrative that that sequence induces.
Matt: It’s such an interesting problem. Some slides don’t disrupt the narrative much, others are like big rocks in a stream — you can’t put them just anywhere, because they threaten to direct the flow in some new direction, or create awkwardness if you force the flow back onto its original path around them. So in much the same way that paint or graphite interact with the canvas or paper to produce unexpected results that were more than just your artistic intent flowing from your brain through your fingers — they push back, in a way — I find that slides have their own narrative geometry, that makes some transitions natural and others almost impossible. And personally I find it very hard to redo a slide to change that geometry; I’m much more likely to change things upstream and downstream to make that slide seem natural rather than like a dam or impediment. If it’s a sufficiently good slide, which for me is driven by its internal logic. In ecological terms, each slide has an autecology that dictates how it works on its own, and a synecology that describes how it works with other slides.
Mike: Once again, you have accidentally written an SV-POW! post. Seriously. Just post it.
A review of sorts, of questionable objectivity. Forty-eight minutes, so grab some popcorn and settle in. Or run screaming. Up to you!
DinoCon 2025 is next week
August 7, 2025
The DinoCon brochure — really a conference guidebook, with schedule, speaker list, vendor list, maps, etc. — is a free download here. Art by Natalia Jagielska.
DinoCon is right around the corner, the weekend of August 16-17. The speaker lineup looks fantastic, and the vendor lineup looks like it will execute a Chicxulub on my wallet. On the speaker side, I’m happy to see sauropods getting so much representation. In addition to Mike’s talk on the Carnegie Diplodocus and its various offspring, and mine on the sauropod body plan, Tess Gallagher is giving a talk on sauropod skin. I’ve vaguely noodled on that topic (once, twice), but it is far from my realm of expertise, so I’m looking forward to getting the real story from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. A talk on sauropod skin seems extremely fitting for a conference that straddles the science and art of dinosaurs, with lots of presenters and attendees who are interested in the life appearance of extinct animals.
DinoCon 2025 schedule (with the Saturday evening quiz and art exhibition cut off). Click to embiggen, or see the full version online at this link.
I’m stoked for every single book signing — Witton! Hennessy! Naish! — but most especially for Dougal Dixon’s event on Sunday afternoon. He’ll be signing copies of the new edition of The New Dinosaurs, which I recently reviewed and am looking forward to acquiring. I’ve been idolizing Dixon from afar since I was 10, so it will be deeply satisfying to finally meet him and tell him in person how much his books have meant to me. There’s a non-zero chance that I will also throw myself on the floor, crying and begging like a spoiled child for him to work with Breakdown Press on new English-language editions of Man After Man and Greenworld. (I gather Dixon doesn’t have fond memories of Man After Man or think highly of it, but it’s still one of the foundational documents of speculative evolution and it would be great to have it in print again, not least so I could get a copy without selling any organs.) If you see me there, have your camera ready, just in case.
I don’t have the time or financial fortitude to cover all the vendors right now, but there’s a list in the DinoCon 2025 Brochure (link) and various vendors have been getting love on the DinoCon Instagram account for weeks. I’m horrifixhilarated at the prospect of my impending bankruptcy.
Hope to see you there!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 