Long-time readers may recall that back in 2009, I was quote-mined in the television documentary series Clash of the Dinosaurs (1, 2, 3). Turns out, such misrepresentations are not that uncommon, and now there’s a whole feature-length documentary about the problem, titled Science Friction . The trailer is above, and the film’s homepage is here. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime Video and on Tubi (maaaybe for free?

This is super cool: my friend and lead author on the new saltasaur pneumaticity paper, Tito Aureliano, made a short (~6 min) video about the fieldwork that Aline Ghilardi and Marcelo Fernandes and their team — many of whom are authors on the new paper — have been doing in Brazil, and how it led to the discovery of a new, tiny titanosaur, and how that led to the new paper. It’s in Portuguese, but with English subtitles, just hit the CC button.

On 22nd December 2020, I gave this talk (via Zoom) to Martin Sander’s palaeontology research group at the University of Bonn, Germany. And now I am giving it to you , dear reader, the greatest Christmas present anyone could ever wish for: It’s based on a 2013 paper written with Matt Wedel, which itself goes back through many years slow gestation, originating in a discussion on a car journey in 2008.

Want to make online readings a little more engaging? Social annotation (SA) may offer one solution. SA tools allow students to highlight and comment on online course materials, sharing questions and ideas with each other as they read. When used effectively, they can help boost student motivation, reading comprehension, and more.

Webinars and community calls are a great way to gather many people to discuss a specific topic, without the logistic hurdles of in-person events. But whether online or in-person, to reach the broadest audience, all events should work towards greater accessibility.

When I gave the talk about vertebral orientation for the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress at the end of 2018, I had to prepare it as a video — so I saved it on YouTube so it would outlive the conference: Having figured out the practicalities of doing this, it made sense to similarly make a permanent record of my SVPCA 2019 talk, The Past, Present and Future of Jensen’s “Big Three” sauropods : I promised back then that I would put

At rOpenSci we are developing on a suite of packages that expose powerful graphics and imaging libraries in R. Our latest addition is av – a new package for working with audio/video based on the FFmpeg AV libraries.

For those of you who, like me, weren't at the "Frontiers Of Biodiversity Informatics and Modelling Species Distributions" held at the AMNH in New York, here are the videos of the talks and panel discussion, which the organisers have kindly put up on Vimeo with the following description:

As recently noted, it was my pleasure and privilege on 25 June to give a talk at the ESOF2014 conference in Copenhagen (the EuroScience Open Forum). My talk was one of four, followed by a panel discussion, in a session on the subject “Should science always be open?“. I had just ten minutes to lay out the background and the problem, so it was perhaps a bit rushed. But you can judge for yourself, because the whole session was recorded on video.

As part of my scheduled re-posts during the summer break, I’ll also post some of the science videos from the archives. I originally posted this one on Agust 31, 2011: