In search of rearing mounted sauropod skeletons

April 11, 2026

I’m pretty sure that our old friend the AMNH Barosaurus was the first sauropod skeleton even mounted in a rearing pose.

Taylor and Wedel 2016:Figure 1. Mounted cast skeleton of Barosaurus referred specimen AMNH 6341, in the entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History. Homo sapiens (MPT) for scale. Photograph by MJW.

(Does anyone know of an earlier one? That would be fascinating!)

But what other mounted sauropods have been placed in a rearing posture, with both forefeet off the ground? I know of four others. First, the rearing Diplodocus at the Museum of Science and Innovation in Tampa, Florida, that we discussed in detail in Taylor et al. (2023:80–82):

Taylor et al. 2023:Figure 10. Double Diplodocus mount at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), Tampa, Florida. Both individuals are identical, having been cast from the molds made by Dinolab from the concrete Diplodocus of Vernal. Photograph by Anthony Pelaez, taken between 1997 and 2017.

Strangely enough, the other three are all individuals of Camarasaurus, an ugly four-square sauropod whose centre of gravity was well forward of the acetabulum in normal posture, and which would have found rearing much more difficult than in diplodocids. My guess is that’s just because Camarasaurus is so abundant that there are a lot of mounted skeletons out there, and some have been mounted in rearing postures because, well, why not?

Here is one from the Wyoming Dinosaur Centre in Thermopolis:

Camarasaurus skeleton from the BS (Beside Sauropod) quarry, on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Photograph by CryolophosaurusEllioti, CC By. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WDC_-_Camarasaurus_skeleton.jpg

(I can’t find a good photo of this mount from the front or the side: if anyone can, please let me know in the comments.)

The next is in the US National Museum (USNM), otherwise known as the NMNH, otherwise known as the Smithsonian. It’s on the right of this photo:

Rearing Camarasaurus (right of photo, the smaller of the two sauropods) at the USNM/NMNH/Smithsonian. Photo by Ben Miller. https://sauropods.win/@extinctmonsters/109293854660129716

And finally, as I was putting this post together, I stumbled across this mount at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands:

Yet another rearing Camarasaurus, at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Photo by thedogg, CC By-SA. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WLANL_-_thedogg_-_Camarasaurus_(2).jpg

I know nothing about this one, and would welcome any details.

In fact, I don’t know much about any of the three rearing camarasaurs. Can anyone tell me, for example, when they went up? And whether the AMNH Barosaurus was a conscious inspiration?

And the $64,000 question: does anyone know of other rearing sauropod mounts?

References

 

doi:10.59350/qg664-9be62

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Barosaurus, camarasaurs, mounts, Wyoming Dinosaur Center
8 Comments »

The Nazi sauropod — Giraffatitan (= “Brachiosaurus“) brancai in 1937

April 3, 2026

Back in 2010, I wrote about early artistic depictions of Brachiosaurus (including Giraffatitan). There, I wrote of the iconic mount MB.R.2181 (then HMN S II):

When the mount was completed, shortly before the start of World War II, it was unveiled against a backdrop of Nazi banners. I have not been able to find a photograph of this (and if anyone has one, please do let me know), but I do have this drawing of the event, taken from an Italian magazine and dated 23rd December 1937.

(See that post for the drawing.)

Recently the historian Ilja Nieuwland (one of the authors on our recent paper on the Carnegie Diplodocus, Taylor et al. 2025) sent me two photos of this unveiling, again with swastikas prominent in the background:

EEN MOOIE AANSWINST — voor het museum van natuurlijke historie te Berlijn: het skelet van een Brachiosaurus, het grooste voorwereld-lijke landdier ooit gevonden. Het skelet is 11.87 meter hoog.

Surprisingly, perhaps, this is in a Dutch newspaper, Haagsche Courant of 14 December 1937. The caption, which is in Dutch, reads: “A GREAT ADDITION — to the Museum of Natural History in Berlin: the skeleton of a Brachiosaurus, the largest prehistoric land animal ever found. The skeleton is 11.87 meters tall.” Ilja helpfully supplied a PDF containing the front page of the newspaper and the page that contained this image.

The second is similar, but from a different angle that highlights the human skeleton that was placed down by the forefeet for scale:

EEN PRAEHISTORISCH MONSTER werd ongeveer zeven jaar geleden door een Duitsch geleerde in Oost-Africa ontdekt. Na moeizamen arbeid is men er in geslaagd het skelet van den brachiosaurus op te bouwen, dat in ‘n museum te Berlijn is opgesteld

Again, this is in Dutch, and the filename suggests that the source is a newspaper called Maasbode for 27 November 1937. The caption reads: “A PREHISTORIC MONSTER was discovered about seven years ago by a German scientist in East Africa. After arduous work, they succeeded in reconstructing the skeleton of the brachiosaurus, which is on display in a museum in Berlin.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel it as a gut-punch when I see this animal, which I deeply love, against a backdrop of Nazi symbols. Gerhard Maier’s usually very detailed book African Dinosaurs Unearthed (Maier 2003) is uncharacteristically terse about this, saying of the unveiling only this (on page 267):

With swastika banners hanging from the walls as a backdrop, the exciting new exhibit opened in August 1937. A curious public, especially schoolchildren, formed long lines, waiting to see Berlin’s latest attraction.

I don’t know to what extent the rising Nazi regime used the brachiosaur mount as a PR event, an advertisement for their national superiority or what have you. (Has anyone written about this?)

I was thinking about this because I get a daily notification of Wikipedia’s most-viewed article of the previous 24 hours. In recent times, it’s mostly been some article about bad news, or a person causing bad news. But a couple of days ago, it was Artemis II, and I remarked on Mastodon how nice it was, just for one day, to have good news as the most read article. And someone quickly replied “I love space exploration, but having the Trump administration take credit for something like this is the last thing we need.”

But here’s the thing. The Berlin brachiosaur mount has long outlived the Nazis (or at least the OG Nazis). And whatever the current moon mission achieves will long outlive the Trump administration.

We don’t really write about politics on this blog. I like that about it, and I’m guessing most readers do as well. I’m not going to change that — the Web is full of places to go and read about politics. But I do like the sense that scientific achievements are outside of the particular people who happen to be in power when they happen. The Berlin brachiosaur, and the Artemis II moon mission, are achievements for all humankind.

References

 

doi:10.59350/9d5gk-fm764

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in brachiosaurids, Giraffatitan, history
2 Comments »

The checklist for new zoological genus and species names is published

February 25, 2026

A little over a month ago, I announced that DRAFT v4 of the the checklist for new zoological genus and species names, incorporating information about electronic publication, was available for critique. Perhaps surprisingly, there were no comments (in contrast to the 127 comments on DRAFT v3). So I have gone ahead and published the checklist. You are free to use this in your own work. If you want to cite it, I recommend:

 

doi:10.59350/z0mzw-tv629

(Note that this is DOI of this post, not of the checklist.)

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Uncategorized
1 Comment »

Checklist for new zoological genus and species names

February 25, 2026

This checklist applies only to the establishment of new genera and species. It is not intended to guide the assignment of replacement names, nor for judging the availability of existing names, nor to guide the establishment of names of other ranks (e.g. families, subgenera). For simplicity, in some places its requirements are more stringent than those of the Code. This version of the Checklist is based on the 4th Edition (2000) of the Code (including its electronic-publication amendment). For further information, see the ICZN’s official FAQ.

Requirements

  1. The new name must be published in a work issued for the purpose of providing a permanent, public scientific record.
  2. The work must either printed or electronic. A printed work must be produced in an edition containing numerous simultaneously obtainable identical and durable copies. Numerous copies that are not simultaneously obtainable (e.g., print on demand, paper reprints, etc.) do not constitute published works. For the purposes of priority, the Code defines the date of publication as the date on which the numerous identical durable copies were made simultaneously obtainable.  [The Code does not specify how many copies must be printed, but 50 or more is typical.] An electronic work must be registered in ZooBank before publication, and must state the date of publication and contain evidence that registration has occurred. The ZooBank registration must specify an electronic archive intended to preserve the work and the ISSN or ISBN associated with the work.
  3. The newly named animal must not already have a name that can be used for it.
  4. A new genus name must not have previously been used for a different genus or subgenus; a new species name must not have previously been used in the same genus for a different species or subspecies.
  5. The new name must be spelled using only the 26 letters of the English-language alphabet, without diacritics or punctuation.
  6. New scientific names must consist of “words” (not merely initialisms or arbitrary combination of letters), i.e. the name, or each part of a binomial, must in some language be pronounceable as a single word.
  7. The new name must be explicitly stated to be new and the rank of the new taxon must be given. This may be done by appending “sp. nov.” to the first use of a new species name, and “gen. nov.” to a new genus name.
  8. The new name must be accompanied by the explicit designation of a type. For a species, this must be a holotype specimen or syntype series. If the holotype or syntypes are not lost or destroyed, state that they are (or will be) deposited in a collection, and indicate the name and location of that collection and the specimen number within the collection. For new genera, a type species must be designated.
  9. The new name must be accompanied by a description or definition that states in words characters that differentiate the taxon, or be accompanied by a bibliographic reference to such a published statement.
  10. If a species name (i.e., the second part of a genus+species combination) is, or ends in, a Latin or latinized adjective or participle in the nominative singular, it must agree in gender with the name of the genus that contains it.

Best practice

  1. The Code does not state exactly what constitutes “a permanent, public scientific record”. To avoid controversy, recognised academic journals should be used, and newsletters and popular magazines avoided. While peer-review is not required, names published in reviewed literature may be more widely recognised.
  2. Publish new taxon descriptions in a widely understood language where possible; otherwise, provide a summary in a widely understood language.
  3. The date of publication should be stated within the published work itself. Sometimes only the year is given, but more precision (month and day) is preferable in case a priority dispute arises.
  4. When establishing a new species, avoid species names already established within closely related genera, to avoid the creation of secondary homonyms if the genera are later synonymized.
  5. Avoid creating new names that have been represented as misspellings of existing names.
  6. Avoid creating zoological names that are already established under other Codes of scientific nomenclature (e.g., the botanical code or the bacteriological code). These are not forbidden by the Code, but may cause confusion.
  7. Avoid spellings that are likely to be misspelled by subsequent users, and take care to spell the new name consistently throughout the work.
  8. Species can be named after people by casting those people’s names into a Latin genitive: when doing this, observe gender and number distinctions. The default method is: add -i to the name of a single male, -ae for a single female, -arum for several females, and -orum for any group with at least one male.
  9. If at all uncertain about the formation of the new name, consult a linguist.
  10. State the etymology of the new name.
  11. State the gender of a new genus name.
  12. Illustrate the type material, showing the diagnostic features of the taxon where possible.
  13. Register the new name at ZooBank.

Contributors (in chronological order)

  • Mike Taylor
  • Wolfgang Wuster
  • Francisco Welter-Schultes
  • David Patterson
  • Paul van Rijckevorsel
  • Brad McFeeters
  • William Miller
  • Christopher Taylor
  • David Marjanović
  • Bill Eschmeyer
  • Frank Krell
  • Richard Pyle
  • Mark Robinson
  • Matt Wedel
  • Stephen Thorpe
  • Tony Rees
  • Gunnar Kvifte
  • Miguel Alonso-Zarazaga

Note that this page has no official standing with the ICZN, and for that matter neither do I. (If the Commission were to want to adopt this document, they would be welcome.)

 

doi:10.59350/knt7m-whb54

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Nomenclature, Taxonomy
1 Comment »

What was the first life restoration of a sauropod?

February 2, 2026

Way back in 2010, when I was young and stupid, I wrote as follows in my History Of Sauropod Studies book-chapter (Taylor 2010:368–370):

Ballou (1897) included, as one of his six figures, the first published life restoration of a sauropod, executed by Knight under the direction of Cope (Fig. 5a). This illustration, subsequently republished by Osborn & Mook (1921, fig. 127), depicted four Amphicoelias individuals in a lake, two of them entirely submerged and two with only their heads above the water. The skins were shown with a bold mottled pattern like that of some lizards, which would not be seen again in a sauropod restoration for the best part of a century

And here is that illustration:

Taylor 2010:Fig. 5. Snorkelling sauropods. Left: the first-ever life restoration of a sauropod, Knight’s drawing of Amphicoelias, published by Ballou (1897), modified from Osborn & Mook (1921, fig. 127). Right: a similar scene with ‘Helopus’ (now Euhelopus), modified from Wiman (1929, fig. 5).

I blithely repeated this assertion on the in-progress Barosaurus-mount manuscript. When I mentioned this manuscript in a Dinosaur Mailing Group thread, Tyler Greenfield helpfully pointed out that I’d missed something!

Two publications in 1892 included life restorations of sauropods.

One is Henry Neville Hutchinson’s book Extinct monsters: A popular account of some of the larger forms of ancient animal life, first published in September 1892. His Plate IV (between pages 68 and 69) shows a Brontosaurus:

My initial thought that this may be by Joseph Smit, since the book’s title page says “With illustrations by J. Smit and others”, but that the poorly preserved signature at bottom left doesn’t look like it spells his name. However, Mary Kirkaldy sent me a helpful comparison of this poorly reproduced signature with several others which are definitely Smit’s, and it checks out:

The other 1892 publication with a sauropod life-restoration is James Erwin Culver’s seven-page article “Some Extinct Giants” from issue 1(5) of The Californian Illustrated Magazine. This must have been published before Hutchinson’s book, because the date-range for Volume 1 of this magazine is October 1891 to May 1892.

I’ll quote from page 505 because it’s just so cute:

If men lived in those days, they were cave dwellers living in the rocks,, garbed in skins, defending themselves,, if necessary, with stone clubs and hammers. But what could their weapons, avail against the giant Amphicoelias that crawled slowly and heavily out of the water in the direction of their homes, a mountain of flesh, weighing possibly twenty tons, four or five feet taller than the tallest elephant, and dragging along sixty or seventy feet of flesh?

And on page 506 we see this — note the cavemen on the ledge to the right!

(Tyler says this artwork is by Carl Dahlgren, but I’ve not been able to find the attribution. Can anyone point me to it? He also notes that this piece was clearly an inspiration for Knight’s rendition, especially the patterning.)

But both of these 1892 works were predated by Camille Flammarion’s 1886 book Le Monde Avant la Création de l’Homme (The World before the Creation of Man). On page 561, as figure 297, Flammarion included this restoration by Jules Blanadet:

Translation: Shape and probable size of the atlantosaur, the biggest animal that ever existed (length: 35 meters).

As things stand, this is the oldest life restoration of a sauropod that I know of. But I’ve been wrong about this before, and very possibly there are yet older ones that I don’t yet know about. Can anyone point us to something older than 1886?

References

 

doi:10.59350/nw6c1-ks757

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Art, help SV-POW!, history, life restorations
9 Comments »

Belatedly … here’s DRAFT v4 of the checklist for new zoological genus and species names

January 20, 2026

Long-term readers will remember that waaay back in 2011, we started the process of putting together a checklist for people naming new zoological genera and species, distilling the relevant portions of the long and complex International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). Across twelve days of intense discussion, we got as far as DRAFT v3 of the checklist, and then I … sort of forgot about it for fifteen years.

Six months into those fifteen fallow years, of course, the ICZN introduced the electronic publication amendment, which means that the checklist has spent twenty-nine 30ths of its life outdated in a critical respect. So now I am doing what I should have done fourteen and a half years ago, and finalizing the checklist.

So I present DRAFT v4 of the checklist, which quietly went up on the site last night. I’ve tweaked the wording here and there, and adjusted whitespace, but the only substantive change is in clause 2 of the Requirements section, on what constitutes published work. Here’s what it now says:

2. The work must either printed or electronic. A printed work must be produced in an edition containing numerous simultaneously obtainable identical and durable copies. Numerous copies that are not simultaneously obtainable (e.g., print on demand, paper reprints, etc.) do not constitute published works. For the purposes of priority, the Code defines the date of publication as the date on which the numerous identical durable copies were made simultaneously obtainable.  [The Code does not specify how many copies must be printed, but 50 or more is typical.] An electronic work must be registered in ZooBank before publication, and must state the date of publication and contain evidence that registration has occurred. The ZooBank registration must specify an electronic archive intended to preserve the work, and the ISSN or ISBN associated with the work.

I welcome comments on this clause — especially regarding any factual errors that might have crept in, but also on infelicities in the wording. Please hop over to DRAFT v4 to comment. (Comments on this post are closed, to avoid splitting discussion across two places.)

 

doi:10.59350/nvwhv-cjb98

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in help SV-POW!, Nomenclature, Taxonomy
1 Comment »

Never name a new species of an existing dinosaur genus

January 16, 2026

I’m still making my way through Brian Curtice’s excellent and detailed post on Greg Paul’s (2025) recent erection of a new titanosaur genus (Curtice 2025), but I just want to comment on this one passing thought of Brian’s:

The species tells me where it was found if named by “Old Timers,” the genus almost can do that if named by “New Kids on the Block” as they almost never add species names to existing genera (recent tyrannosaur excepted :-)).

The new kids are right.

You should never[1] name a new species of an existing dinosaur genus. Here’s why. Suppose you have two genera, A and B, which are sister taxa in your phylogeny:

         Genus A
        /
        \
         Genus B

Now you discover a new specimen, X, which your phylogenetic analysis says is more closely related to Genus A than than to any other named genus:

           Genus A
          /
         /\
        /  Specimen X
        \
         \
          \
           Genus B

The smart play is to name it genus X. But suppose you say “Oh, but it’s really quite similar to genus A, it can’t be separated at the genus level”, and you instead name it as a new species, A. x. You go merrily on your way congratulating yourself on not being one of those filthy splitters, and all is well until someone else runs a different phylogenetic analysis with more characters, better taxon sampling, a better weighting algorithm, whatever. And it comes out like this:

           Genus A
          /
         /
        /
        \  Specimen X
         \/
          \
           Genus B

Now the new author has to say something like “The species x is hereby removed into the genus B yielding the new combination B. x.”

And now your taxon’s name has changed. That’s really bad. The whole purpose of a name is to be a fixed, permanent label that consistently refers to the same thing. But Linnaeus’s terrible mistake, the Linnean binomial, is a “name” that encodes a specific phylogenetic hypothesis, and which implodes when that hypothesis is considered false.

Naming a new species x of a genus A is a nomenclatural enshrining of your phylogenetic hypothethesis that specimen X is more closely related to the genoholotype of genus A than to that of any other genus. It’s a bet that has no upside if you turn out to be right, but makes you look like a dummy if you’re wrong. There is absolutely no need to make such a bet.

Names are for naming things. Phylogenetic analyses are for analysing things. Don’t confuse them. And don’t reify that confusion in nomenclature.,

Note 1. As so often when one writes “never”, we really mean “hardly ever”. I don’t discount the possibility that there may be some very special circumstances when a new species within an existing genus is warranted, but I bet that your example of such a very special circumstance doesn’t qualify.

References

 

doi:10.59350/byq4p-bxe54

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in Nomenclature, rants, Taxonomy
17 Comments »

Stop it, birds, your necks are stupid

January 13, 2026

We’ve seen a lot of raptors with their heads turned 180 degrees recently. Jerry Harris dropped me a line to remind me that flamingos are also perverts when it comes to neck posture. Here are three of his photos:

All these photos show multiple individuals curving their necks through 180 degrees so they can rest them on their torsos. In fact, they go much further than 180 degrees, then curve back again: the individual on the right of the second photo, and the one on the left of the last photo. are both curling their necks 270 degrees to the right, then 90 degrees back to the left. That is of course a total of 360 degrees, which strongly suggests these bad boys can crank a full 360 if they want to. (In fact, it has to mean that, unless the necks are asymmetric, and I’ve never heard any suggestion of that.)

And more: this is not some kind of extreme behaviour that flamingos can attain in extremis. This is what they do to relax.

Note by the way that different flamingos are shown here curving their necks in different directions. For example, check out the two birds sitting in the foreground of the third photo. I wonder whether different individuals have different handedness, or whether each bird randomly curves one way, then next time the other. Or even if they alternate handedness for successive rests.

In some senses, what we’re seeing here from the flamingos is the most extreme neck posture we’ve seen in the present sequence of posts. But in another sense, this is much less impressive than the raptors. Flamingos have long cervicals, and they are bending their intervertebral joints laterally to achieve these postures. The raptors by contrast have craniocaudally short vertebrae, and they are twisting the joints to achieve their 180-degree turns. And that is what I find preposterous.

Some time soon, I must get around to posting the osteological implications.

 

doi:10.59350/vjyh4-v0t83

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in flamingo, necks
9 Comments »

Yet more raptors with their heads on backwards

January 8, 2026

Here are a couple more backwards-headed raptor photos, courtesy of ceratopsian palaeontologist and home-brewing consultant Andy Farke:

Here’s what he had to say about them:

Your recent post spurred me to snap these photos of a burrowing owl doing backwards head things. There are a few individuals at the Living Desert Zoo in Palm Desert, California….it’s a super cool enclosure, in which you can walk into an aviary habitat that has free-roaming burrowing owls, prairie dogs, a turkey vulture, and a few other cool North American critters.

(Even though the San Diego Zoo is most famous, I am of the firm opinion that both Living Desert and the Santa Barbara zoos are objectively better – they have an amazing variety of semi-obscure animals, large and naturalistic enclosures, cool up-close opportunities, and both mostly avoid having kiosks placed every three feet selling cheap plastic crap, which has always perplexed me about organizations that purportedly promote conservation).

At some point, I’m going to have to stop just posting photos of these weirdos, and start writing about what’s going on and how and why.

 

doi:10.59350/ymkee-8d771

Posted by Mike Taylor
Filed in necks, some kind of bird
2 Comments »

Three Four quotes about doing good work

January 4, 2026

None of these were intended by their creators to be about research; even Marie Curie’s line was about her education. But each of them touched a nerve for me. Also, since they’re not explicitly about research, you may find them applicable to other areas of life as well, whether you’re a researcher or not.

 

“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”

– Marie Curie, quoted in “Madam Curie: A Biography by Eve Curie”, p. 116

Oh man, do I feel this. I’m proud of my output to date, but I don’t spend a lot of time enjoying the sensation of having written a bunch of papers. My feelings about my past work fall, to varying degrees for various papers, into three bins:

  • thank goodness that’s done so I don’t have to do it again, because it was a lot of work;
  • thank goodness that’s done so I can just cite it now, and get on with other things;
  • eesh, I wish done that a bit better.

It’s not that I never look back fondly on what I’ve done. I just have some distance from it, like it was done by someone else. I joke about Past Matt and Future Matt, but they’re pretty constant and often useful mental constructs. And my own work, out of all the work in the world, has this unique character: I know for dead certain that the guy who did it knew less than I do now and was a less-experienced writer. Eventually that starts to rankle, no matter how good the paper was at the time.

There is a less healthy side to this, for me and for a lot of people that I know, where it becomes hard for us to own the good work that we’ve done — or take a healthy, deserved break — because we’re always in pursuit of the next thing. I don’t know what to do about that; I’m fortunate to have a partner who pushes me to own my accomplishments and take my breaks, but it’s a skill or a viewpoint I’m still working on cultivating in myself.

 

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

– Robert Hughes, “Art: Modernism’s patriarch”, Time magazine, June 10, 1996

For ‘artist’, I think you can sub in pretty much any other field of human endeavor, public or private, solo or group effort, transient or permanent: scientist, educator, athlete, writer, counselor, mystic, programmer, diarist, craftsperson, parent, engineer, explorer, hobbyist. To me it pairs perfectly with a quote from Paul Graham which was part of my email signature for many years: “The people I know who do great work think that they suck, but that everyone else sucks even more.”

Again, there is the potential for unhealthy self-doubt here, and an unwillingness to fairly acknowledge our growth and own our inner gold. As Oliver Burkeman wrote in “Meditations for Mortals”, if any of us met our inner critic at a party, we’d think that person was impossible rude, socially inept, and in some way fundamentally broken. But I like to focus on the positive aspect: each of us is a tree, making leaves in our chosen fields of endeavor, and since we tend to get better at that over time, it’s hard to deny the possibility — or inevitability — that we’ll make even better leaves in the future. Just as I know that Past Matt was less knowledgeable and a less-experienced writer than I am, I know that Future Matt will think of me the same way. Part of me thinks, can’t I skip over all of this laborious becoming and just be that guy? But the truth is, there’s no path to a more capable Future Matt that doesn’t lead through hard work; trying to duck the effort is only going to turn me into a Wall-E chair person.

 

“It’s hard to build momentum if you keep dividing your attention.”

– James Clear, 3-2-1 Newsletter, September 25, 2025

Hammer, nail, WHAM!! This quote crystallizes why 2025 was my year of saying no. Since 2021 I’d said yes to almost every single invitation to collaborate that came down the pike. I don’t have many regrets about that; it got me on a lot of cool projects and I made a lot of new friends along the way. But it also meant that I didn’t get much of my own work done and out. Since last January I’ve been keeping a list of the projects and invitations that I’ve turned down — not just papers but conferences, leadership positions, and so on — and it’s really clarified for me just how much I’ve been Balkanizing my attention. I can be fourth or fifth author on a dozen papers or lead author on one or two; having done a lot of the former, I’m now going to lean into attempting the latter (again — for the first half of my career, solo or lead-authored papers dominated my output). I’m sure there’s a healthy balance to be struck, but for now I’m trying to swing the pendulum back toward my own projects. (And for any collaborators I’ve turned down in the past year: thank you for letting me come play, I had a blast, I’m sorry for whatever delays I introduced, let’s collaborate again sometime when I’m better-adjusted. It’s not you, it’s most definitely me.)

 

– – – – – – – – – –

I wrote the first draft of this post a few months ago, and it sat in the drafts folder, waiting for me to find images to go with it. I definitely had images in mind when I wrote the draft, but whatever visual inspiration I had at the time seems to have permanently evaporated. Eventually I realized that it was silly to leave a perfectly good draft just sitting there because I couldn’t think of pictures to back up its rather philosophical points.

But was it “a perfectly good draft”? Coming back to it after some months, I couldn’t help but read it through the lens of another quote that I’d come across in the meantime, one which has been ringing in my head like an alarm:

“Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”

– Andrew Wilkinson, Twitter, April 26, 2021

I reread the draft with mounting skepticism, and a tinge of discomfort. I was tempted to either junk the whole thing, or edit it to match my new, enlightened perspective. But I think the more honest thing is to admit that enlightenment is a moving target, or perhaps an ocean I could never drink all of, and this post — in both its draft version, and the one you’re reading now — is just a cobblestone on my path.

It’s oddly and perhaps perversely navel-gazey to think about doing my work so that I can become a better version of myself. In my best moments, when I’m in flow and it feels like I am a conduit funneling the mysteries of the past into words and images in my research notebook, I’m not thinking of myself at all, but only about the things I’m studying. And when I stop for the occasional meal or bio-break, or at the end of the day, I’m positively tingly with the exhilaration of discovering new things. Thinking of myself — like I’m doing right now — is a symptom of being very far from the work. And maybe that’s the conclusion that I’ve been unwittingly building toward, through the whole protracted development of this post. The best and surest way to quiet that anxiety that runs like a barbed vine through most of this post is to stop worry about myself, and even stop worrying about the work, and simply do it. Not because it will make me better (although it might, if I can get out of my own way, and out of my own head), but because it’s my calling and my privilege to get to do it.

 

doi:10.59350/hg0ef-ajx78

Posted by Matt Wedel
Filed in doing the work, navel blogging
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