Calling all young paleo-artists! Museum of the Rockies is thrilled to announce our Dinos and MOR! Festival Art Contest, a digital showcase for creators ages 0-18. Details at the bottom of the page at museumoftherockies.org/signature-ev...
Happy #FossilFriday!
Check out this Allosaurus dorsal rib next to the ribs of a Ceratosaurus.
There is definitely a size overlap in these Jurassic predators, but when it comes to body size (and abundance), Allosaurus takes the cake.
A belated #FossilFriday...
I spent Friday with Logan King (CNCC) and Lukas Trout (BLM) examining Uinta Formation sites for collection & student work.
Our shared paleo heritage serves many purposes. Museums, educators, & resource mgrs work together to make the most of every fossil!
A new titanosauriform with European affinities in the Early Cretaceous of Brazil: insights on Somphospondyli phylogeny, histology and biogeography: Journal of Systematic Palaeontology: Vol 24 , No 1 - Get Access www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Concerned about the Point of No Return? Today we published a paper on the risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory. You can read it here: authors.elsevier.com/c/1mbW49C~Iu...
Hmm...
My CMU student found it back in 2017. Published in the Foster et al., 2018 Mygatt-Moore tome.
Not everyone in the Jurassic Period was a giant.
This tiny jaw of teeth was collected from the Mygatt-Moore dinosaur bonebed. It belonged to no dino, but instead to a small, lizard-like animal called a rhynchocephalian. Today, this group is represented by the Tuataras of New Zealand.
#FossilFriday
Until now, estimating how old a dinosaur was when it died has been a fairly simple process: Count up the growth rings in the fossilized bones. But new research into some of dinosaurs' living relatives, like crocodiles, suggests that this method may not always work. n.pr/4qTSIhz
A children’s book about the life of Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska? Yes please! Learn more about the discoveries of the Polish-Mongolian Expeditions with “Dinosaur Desert”!
🦕📖🦖
dinodadreviews.com/2026/02/01/d...
Happy #FossilFriday! We got the good news that our abstract for WAVP was accepted for a talk.
Super excited to be part of the Wedel Pneumaticity Crew!
I'm hearing from multiple people that students who submitted ecology GRFP proposals are having those proposals rejected without review, despite ecology being listed as an eligible field. If this is a programmatic change, this is devastating. Ecology is the study of Earth's life support systems.
First pub of the new year, with @drjmchugh.bsky.social
We're back on our bone surface modification nonsense, this time comparing bite marks and insect traces between two Jurassic sites and between our work on those sites and other teams' to see how comparable they all are.
A large rocket in an even larger building
Artemis II moving out of the Vehicle Assembly Building on its way to the launch pad. Launch for the first trip to the Moon in more than 50 years is scheduled for February 6.
📸 NASA
🚨New paper out with @alexauderset.bsky.social! We show that the Arabian Sea oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) was better oxygenated during the warm Miocene Climate Optimum than today, but its path to full deoxygenation was slow and complex.
Link to paper: www.nature.com/articles/s43...
This is a coalified log from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, collected by Museum crews in 2023.
Coalification is a longer, slower than carbonization.
This log was found buried in the bottom of a mudstone bonebed and was likely submerged in a boggy muck for a long time.
#FossilFriday #fossil #Jurassic
Nothing like a good piece of tail...
For this #FossilFriday, enjoy a distal causal vertebra from the King of the Jurassic- Allosaurus fragilis!
The enlongate prezygapotheses are a hallmark of tetanuran theropods, lime Allosaurus. They help stiffen the posterior tail.
Out in @nature.com today, we shake up the ornithischian family tree. Remember those weird Late Cretaceous iguanodontians, the rhabdodontids? Well they're weird because they aren't iguanodontians. They're ceratopsians. Well, at least some of them are... www.nature.com/articles/s41...
In these photos, the spool-shaped body of the vertebra would have attached where my palm is placed, but in young animals the fusion is not complete, so sometimes the fossil of 1 vertebra is preserved as 2 pieces. This is the top piece.
It is the arch of bone on a vertebra (back bone) that covers the top of the spinal cord inside the neural canal.
First #FossilFriday of 2026!
To celebrate, check out this beauty on my desk today: a neural arch from a juvenile Apatosaurus cervical vertebra.
This lovely specimen was collected by Museum crews from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry in 2025.
Ammonite survival across the K-Pg mass extinction.
Are your kids “boooooored”? We’ve got hundreds of book recommendations for them right here:
Hope everyone has as good a Christmas as a goofy dog and her new toy!
New life goal:
Be brave enough to go skydiving by the my 50th birthday.
That gives me just a few years to get over my fear of heights! 🫣
PTO is here! I spent last night drinking wine, listing to holiday music, & wrapping presents!
Let the holidays begin!
For every one else who is just trying to make it through the holiday season in one piece... Cheers to you! See you in 2026.
Would love to see this position go to a paleo person!
Dean of Collections
American Museum of Natural History | New York, New York
www.imsearch.com/open-searche...
