New video: did air-filled bones allow dinosaurs to become gigantic?

My friend and frequent collaborator (one, two, three) Tito Aureliano invited me to give a talk on his YouTube channel, I suggested pneumaticity and gigantism, and here we are. There’s a decently lengthy Q&A, moderated by Tito, after the talk itself. Hilariously — and kindly — one of the commenters pointed out that I hadn’t explicitly answered the titular question in the talk, so I took a stab at it in the Q&A. I come on about 1:40, the talk starts about 5:20, and the Q&A starts at 1:24:30.

If you’ve seen any of my pneumaticity talks since, er, I gave my dissertation finishing talk in 2007, you’ve seen at least a few slides of this. But you won’t have seen all of them before, because a good number of them didn’t exist; this is sort of a Frankenstein stitched together from previous talks, new observations, and trying to think about the future. In particular, almost my entire 2012 SVPCA talk is crammed in near the end.

If in the talk I sound less certain about some things than I have in the past, that’s accurate. In the past few years I feel like I’ve accumulated a lot of interesting pieces (most of my post-2020 papers), and I’m in quest of a new synthetic foundation for my work (e.g., Taylor and Wedel 2021, this post), but I’ve also Seen Things that have rocked my certainty about my own level of understanding (e.g., Aureliano et al. 2023, this post). I’m cool with that. I think that whatever comprehension of pneumaticity I’m questing toward is going to have to emerge inductively from all the pieces, new and old, that I and others are producing. That’s an exciting prospect, and I’m having enough fun with the individual Legos that I’m in no tearing rush to guess what the final product will look like.

Many thanks to Tito for the invitation. After having just given a big talk that was a little speculative and a little outside my wheelhouse, it was nice to come back to home base, but hopefully still give people some useful things to take away. Time will tell.