When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,/They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Sunny today. A little cooler. Our high was 79F.
Today, the mosasaur paper I have worked on since the summer of 2021 was published in the University of California (Berkeley's) journal PaleoBios. I've been calling it MP 1.3. The title is actually "Two new plioplatecarpine mosasaurs (Mosasauridae; Plioplatecarpinae) of the genus Ectenosaurus from the Upper Cretaceous of North America." PaleoBios is an open access journal*, which means you can read and download the file for free. So much work, finally finsihed, and as usual I feel no particular sense of satisfaction. I'm just glad to see it done, to see that it got done. That I stuck with this one through the rough spots. By the way, I first saw the holotype of Ectenosaurus shannoni (one of the two new species described in the paper) and realized what it was in the collection of the Alabama Geological Survey way back in March 1986. Sometimes, science takes that long. The last few days have been a mad flury of last minute work, hampered by my vaccination there at the very end. But it's done. I think, maybe, the greatest relief is that I can dispense with the secrecy about exactly which specimens we were describing. It is very silly we have to worry about such things, but paleontology has become very competitive.
This afternoon's film was Steven Soderbergh's superb Solaris (2002). I adore this film. Jeremey Davies' performance is especially nice. Last night, Kathryn and I watched Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), and I am always amazed that this film refuses to surrender any of its punch to the passage of time. Anyway, it made me think, for Halloween, I should post a list of my favorite haunted house novels. They are not posted in any order, eacept that the first two are tied for my very favorites:
1. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
2. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
3. The Shining by Stephen King (1977)
4. The House Next Door by Anne River Siddons (1978)
5. Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)
6. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)
I might add to that later. But you can't go wrong with any of those.
Selwyn's "cone" came off today. He is a happy little man.
Please vist the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Buy something, anything.
Later Tater Bugs,
Aunt Beast
3:58 p.m.
*Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA) license.
Today, the mosasaur paper I have worked on since the summer of 2021 was published in the University of California (Berkeley's) journal PaleoBios. I've been calling it MP 1.3. The title is actually "Two new plioplatecarpine mosasaurs (Mosasauridae; Plioplatecarpinae) of the genus Ectenosaurus from the Upper Cretaceous of North America." PaleoBios is an open access journal*, which means you can read and download the file for free. So much work, finally finsihed, and as usual I feel no particular sense of satisfaction. I'm just glad to see it done, to see that it got done. That I stuck with this one through the rough spots. By the way, I first saw the holotype of Ectenosaurus shannoni (one of the two new species described in the paper) and realized what it was in the collection of the Alabama Geological Survey way back in March 1986. Sometimes, science takes that long. The last few days have been a mad flury of last minute work, hampered by my vaccination there at the very end. But it's done. I think, maybe, the greatest relief is that I can dispense with the secrecy about exactly which specimens we were describing. It is very silly we have to worry about such things, but paleontology has become very competitive.
This afternoon's film was Steven Soderbergh's superb Solaris (2002). I adore this film. Jeremey Davies' performance is especially nice. Last night, Kathryn and I watched Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), and I am always amazed that this film refuses to surrender any of its punch to the passage of time. Anyway, it made me think, for Halloween, I should post a list of my favorite haunted house novels. They are not posted in any order, eacept that the first two are tied for my very favorites:
1. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
2. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
3. The Shining by Stephen King (1977)
4. The House Next Door by Anne River Siddons (1978)
5. Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)
6. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938)
I might add to that later. But you can't go wrong with any of those.
Selwyn's "cone" came off today. He is a happy little man.
Please vist the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Buy something, anything.
Later Tater Bugs,
Aunt Beast
3:58 p.m.
*Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA) license.