Brian Engh made this and posted it to FaceBook, writing, “Apropos of nothing here’s Mathew Wedel annihilating borderline parasitic theropods with the Bronto-Ischium of Eternal Retribution — a mythic energy weapon/sacred dinosaur ass-bone discovered by Uncle Jim Kirkland, now stored in Julia McHugh’s lair at Dinosaur Journey Fruita CO.”

I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while. Maybe because blogging already feels distinctly old-fashioned in the broader culture. A lot of the active discussion migrated away a long time ago, to Facebook and Twitter, and then to other social media outlets as each one in turn goes over the enshittification event horizon.

But I continue to think that if you’re an academic, it’s incredibly useful have a blog. I’ve thought this basically forever, but my reasons have changed over time. At first I only thought of a blog as a way to reach others — SV-POW! is a nice soapbox to stand on, occasionally, and it funnels attention toward our papers, which is always nice. Over time I came to realize that a huge part of the value of SV-POW! is as a venue for Mike and me to bat ideas around in. It’s basically our paleo playpen and idea incubator (I wrote a bit about this in my 2018 wrap-up post — already semi-ancient by digital standards!).

More recently I’ve come to realize another part of the value of SV-POW! to me, apart from anyone else on the planet: it’s an archive for my thoughts. If I want to find out what I was thinking about 10 or 15 years ago, I can just go look. And at this point, there is far too much stuff on SV-POW! for either Mike or me to remember it, so we regularly rediscover interesting and occasionally promising observations and ideas while trawling through our own archives.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from Nick Czaplewski, who was a curator at OMNH when I was starting out and for many years thereafter. He told me that you end up writing papers not only to your colleagues but also to your future self, because there’s no way you’re going to remember all the work you’ve done, all the ideas you’ve had, all the hypotheses you’ve tested, and so your published output is going to become a sort of external memory store for your future self. I’ve always found that to be true, and it’s even more true of SV-POW! than it is for any one of my papers, because SV-POW! is vast and ever-evolving.

Created by Stanley Wankel, also from Facebook.

I’ll preface what comes next by acknowledging that I’m speaking from a place of privilege (and not just because I have friends with image-editing software and senses of humor). Broadly, because I’m a cis-het white dude who had a fairly ridiculous string of opportunities come his way (like these and these), but also narrowly in that I’m not trying to make a name for myself right now. I have the freedom to not engage with social media. I never got on Twitter (bullet dodged), and I don’t plan on joining any of the Twitter-alikes (my life is already full, and I already struggle enough with online attention capture). I’m only on Facebook to keep in touch with a few folks I can’t easily reach otherwise, and to promote papers when they come out (because I want to, not because I feel any pressure to). And, frankly, at this point I expect every social media outlet to decay, so my motivation to invest in whatever’s next is minimal.

So, while I’m a definite social media skeptic at this point, I’m alert to the fact that people just coming into the field may want or even need to engage on the new platforms, because they don’t have the option of starting a reasonably popular paleo blog in 2007. But I still think it’s useful to have a blog, precisely because social media platforms decay, and because the conversations that happen on them are so ephemeral. Theoretically you could go back and see what you were saying on Twitter or Facebook 10 years ago, but they don’t make it easy, and why would you? (And good luck doing the same with Google Plus.) So I think if I was starting out at this point, I’d still have a blog, and every time I wrote something substantial or at least interesting on the platform du jour, I’d copy and paste it into a blog post. It might reach a few more folks, or different ones; it might start different conversations; but minimally it would be a way to record my thoughts for my own future self.

I’m curious if anyone else finds that reasoning compelling. It will be interesting to come back in 10 years and see if I still think the same. At least when that time comes, I’ll know where to come to find out what I was thinking in late 2023, and I’ll be able to (provided WordPress doesn’t mysteriously fail between now and then).

My other thought for the day is that SV-POW! has survived in part by dodging a few specific bullets. The first was exhaustion — after blogging weekly for over two years, we decided that we wouldn’t even attempt a weekly schedule anymore, and just blog when we felt like it (2018 was, by intention, an odd year out, and we haven’t repeated that experiment). The second was over-specialization. For the first couple of years we worked a sauropod vertebra into just about every post, and if we blogged about something off-topic, we flagged it as such. Over time the blog evolved into “Mike and Matt yap about stuff”, like how to make your own anatomical preparations, and — most notably — open-access publishing and science communication. I think that’s been crucial for the blog’s survival — Mike and I both chafe at restrictions, even ones we set for ourselves, and it’s nice to able to fire up a WordPress draft and just let the thoughts spill out, whether they have to do with sauropods or not.

Another Stanley Wankel creation. Gareth Monger commented that the band name was ZooZoo Tet, which is instantly, totally, unimpeachably correct.

A third bullet, which I’d nearly forgotten about, was blog-network capture. As I was going back through my Gmail archive (my other digital thought receptacle) in search of the origins of the “Morrison bites” paper (see last post), I ran into discussions with Darren with about Tetrapod Zoology moving from ScienceBlogs to the Scientific American Blog Network. I had completely forgotten that back when the big professional science-blogging networks were a thing, I had a secret longing that SV-POW! would be invited. But they all either imploded (ScienceBlogs) or became fatally reader-unfriendly (SciAm, at least for TetZoo*), and now I look back and think “Holy crap I’m glad we were never asked.” Because even if those networks didn’t implode or enshittify, they’d have wanted us to blog on time and on topic, and both of those things would have killed SV-POW!

*If you are on SciAm, or read any of their blogs, and like them: great. I’m glad it’s working out for you. It didn’t for the only SciAm blog I cared about.

So really both my points are sides of a single coin: have a digital space of your own to keep your thoughts, even if only for your future self, and don’t tie that space to anything more demanding or ephemeral than a website-hosting service.

doi:10.59350/29yxb-qh763

If you live within striking distance of Norman, Oklahoma, and you have some time free next Monday and Tuesday, August 26 and 27, and you care enough about dinosaurs to be on SV-POW! reading this, then I have good news for you.

From Brian’s announcement post on Facebook:

NEXT WEEK (Mon) I’m visiting the University of Oklahoma’s Art department to do a live paleoart drawing seminar. We’ll be analyzing big cool fossils and discussing comparative anatomy in order to reconstruct dinosaurs!

THEN! (Tues) I’m doing a talk at the Sam Noble Museum exploring the philosophy of palaeoart and paleontology.

Both events are free and open to the public! Bring your hardest questions about what we really know about paleontology, paleo reconstruction, changing ecosystems, why we explore the depths of deep time, and our place in the vast ancient universe we struggle to survive in!!!

And as long as you’re there, hit the Sam Noble public galleries and say hi to Aquilops, Sauroposeidon, and the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine for me.

Go have fun!

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Sobia “helping” Brian Engh draw Ornatops.

I’ve written here before about Donald Glut’s The New Dinosaur Dictionary and the looooong shadow it cast over my adolescence. That book introduced me to a lot of artists I’d never heard of. The Dinosaur Renaissance was named two months before I was born, so I grew up with a mix of old school paleoart from the 1960s and before, and newer restorations by the likes of Bob Bakker, Greg Paul, William Stout, and — fatefully — Mark Hallett. Among the older artists that I first encountered in The New Dinosaur Dictionary was Neave Parker. Parker was active in the middle of the 20th century, painting dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals for the British Natural History Museum, the Illustrated London News, and books by Edwin Colbert and W.E. Swinton (see this page at the old Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, and this almost comically ungenerous piece at the NHMUK).

Parker’s work was oddly evocative for me. It’s true that little of it holds up today in terms of anatomical accuracy, but the execution really worked for me — especially at the small scale and relatively low resolution (by modern standards) of the reproductions in The New Dinosaur Dictionary, which compressed the brush strokes into invisibility, lending the work a near-photographic crispness. Combined with Parker’s penchant for bright light and stark shadows, the work had a documentary-like air of reality, like I could step into the scenes and squint up at the sun.

I realize this is a highly personal take, and you may feel completely differently about Parker’s work. I’m not describing my objective assessment of his work in 2024, but its subjective effect on me in the early 1980s. I imprinted on Parker’s vision of the past, as I did on the work of William Stout and Mark Hallett and the rest. Specifically, I internalized from Parker’s work that when I stepped out of the time machine, the Mesozoic would be sun-drenched, and there would be palm trees.

This is Brian Engh’s painting of the hadrosaur Ornatops (McDonald et al. 2021) on display at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. It’s phenomenal, but like almost all pieces by my favorite artists, I prefer the original pencil sketch, for reasons I explained back when. Here’s my print of it, awaiting a frame:

This resonates for me on so many levels. The sun, the shadows, the (paleobotanically correct) palm trees, the sense that I could step through and run my hands over the animal’s skin and feel each bump and wrinkle. The sheer technical virtuosity on display. Perhaps most of all, the way that it collapses all the time between 1984 and 2024, letting me play chrononaut both in the Cretaceous and in my own life, a gangly kid in my dad’s recliner, The New Dinosaur Dictionary open in my lap, plummeting down the rabbit hole. And that is why this goofy horse-faced no-vertebral-pneumaticity-havin’ hadrosaur is, in fact, my favorite piece of paleoart ever.

Do you encounter flat surfaces in your daily life? Do the right thing.

Brian Engh recently launched his new website for Living Relic Productions, and there’s a store where you can buy his art. Both Ornatops pieces are there, the color painting because it was one of the first things he put up as a test article, and the pencil sketch because I requested it and he accommodated me (thanks, fam!). He also has some sweet stickers, so you can class up the joint with sauropods. Go have fun!

References

• Glut, D.F. 1982. The New Dinosaur Dictionary. Citadel Press, 288pp.
• McDonald AT, Wolfe DG, Freedman Fowler EA, Gates TA. 2021. A new brachylophosaurin (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. PeerJ 9:e11084 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.11084

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A promo image Brian Engh did for the release of the Aquilops paper back when. Who wouldn’t want one of those?! See lots more great stuff at Brian’s Living Relic Productions.

Aquilops turned 10 years old in December. For all of that time, I’ve been waiting for Aquilops toys. I mean COME ON people, it’s an adorable little cat-ceratops, the only one of its kind so far in North America, how do we have multiple toys of Kaprosuchus and no Aquilops yet?

Well, my good day has come. Apparently Aquilops is going to be in Jurassic World Rebirth, and there are going to be toys!

Screenshot of the leak(?)/announcement from Collect Jurassic this very morning. Better photos here.

There may be plushies too, which is such an obvious move that I am legit flabbergasted no-one has done it sooner. But also, yay!

I am not so cool and reserved that I will not squee hard over all of this. As I texted Jenny this morning:

I’m going to buy 100 of them and give them all unique names and turn the spare bedroom into the Aquilops Paddock and take 2 0r 3 with me wherever I go and aggressively start conversations with strangers about them and generally be unbearable.

You’ve been warned.

UPDATE March 4, 2025:

An addendum in three images.

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