SV-POW!  ...  All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695

University of Bristol

Mike Taylor

The opening remarks by the hosts of conferences are usually highly forgettable, a courtesy platform offered to a high-ranking academic who has nothing to say about the conference’s subject. NOT THIS TIME! This is the opening address of APE 2018, the Academic Publishing in Europe conference.

Martin Grötschel’s opening address to the APE 2018 conference (Academic Publishing in Europe)

Matt and I are writing a paper about

 Barosaurus

cervicals (yes, again). Regular readers will recall that the best

 Barosaurus

cervical material we have ever seen was in a prep lab for Western Paleo Labs.

Seriously, though, what are we going to do about privately held specimens?

Western University of Health Sciences

Matt Wedel

Dolly the dinosaur - pathological vertebrae by WitmerLab at Ohio University 3D Navigation basics All controls

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Sauro-throat, Part 2: Dolly in 3D

Many aspects of scholarly publishing are presently in flux. But for most journals the process of getting a paper published remains essentially the same as decades ago, the main change being that documents are sent electronically rather than by post. It begins with the corresponding author of the paper submitting a manuscript — sometimes, though not often, in response to an invitation from a journal editor.

How papers are published, in 343 words

A while back — near the start of the year, in fact — Szymon Górnicki interviewed me by email about palaeontology, alternative career paths, open access, palaeoart, PeerJ, scholarly infrastructure, the wonder of blogging, and how to get started learning about palaeo. He also illustrated it with this caricature of me, nicely illustrating our 2009 paper on neck posture.

Mike Taylor interview by Szymon Górnicki

Various Internet rumours have suggested that the Archbishop is a super-giant sauropod one third larger than the mounted

 Giraffatitan

specimen MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN SII). This is incorrect.

How big was the Archbishop?

Today marks the one-month anniversary of my and Matt’s paper in

 Qeios

about why vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods is so variable. (Taylor and Wedel 2021). We were intrigued to publish on this new platform that supports post-publication peer-review, partly just to see what happened.

How can we get post-publication peer-review to happen?

“And in conclusion, this new fossil/analysis shows that Lineageomorpha was more [here fill in the blank]: diverse morphologically varied widely distributed geographically widely distributed stratigraphically  …than previously appreciated.“  Yes, congratulations, you’ve correctly identified that time moves forward linearly and that information accumulates.

Tutorial 39: how not to conclude a talk or paper

This is a very belated follow-up to “Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on”, and it’s about how to turn Step 2, “Learn lots of stuff”, into concrete progress. I’m putting it here, now, because I frequently get asked by students about how to get started in research, and I’ve been sending them the same advice for a while.

Tutorial 38: little projects as footsteps toward understanding

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Paul Graham on blogging as a way to generate papers

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Hey, look, sauropod vertebrae!

Long before Matt and others were CT-scanning sauropod vertebrae to understand their internal structure, Werner Janensch was doing it the old-fashioned way.

Investigating sauropod vertebral pneumaticity the old-fashioned way

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Forelimb homology display at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

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Afield in Oklahoma, part 3

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OMNH 2162, probable dorsal 2 of the big apatosaur

Here at SV-POW! we’re big fans of the way that animals’ neck skeletons are much more extended, and often much longer, than you would guess by looking at the complete animal, with its misleading envelope of flesh.

Necks lie: solitaire edition

Last Wednesday, May 9, Brian Engh and I bombed out to Utah for a few days of paleo adventures. Here are some highlights from our trip.

In quest of monsters – last week’s Utah adventure

In writing the recent preprint “

 Xenoposeidon

is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur” (Taylor 2017), it was invaluable to have a 3D model of the

 Xenoposeidon

vertebra available. Here’s a short clip of viewing the model in the free MeshLab program.

Xenoposeidon: the crucial importance of 3D models

Apatosaurus louisae CM 555, centra of C2-C6

Promoting this to a post of its own, because dang, it deserves it. Frequent commenter Warren just brought to our attention this video, in which legendary* make-up artist Michael Westmore reveals that he based the design of the Klingon foreheads in

 Star Trek: The Next Generation

on dinosaur vertebrae. Lots of discussion on this point between 3:40 and about 5:40 in the video.

Stop the presses: Klingon foreheads were based on dinosaur vertebrae!

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Tutorial 33: Checklist for a book signing

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Sauropods stomping turtles: a much neglected theme in palaeo art

Building on the pioneering work of Myhrvold and Currie (1997), Darren Naish (circa 2003) conceived a theory of sauropod defence that has not been as widely accepted as he might have hoped. Sadly, other projects captured Naish’s attention, and his interest in writing up his theory waned.

The unique artistic talents of Darren Naish: the whiplash tail of flagellicaudatan sauropods

I wanted to do a three-way comparison between my carnivoran skulls, but I’m too impatient to wait till I’ve got the fox’s skull out of its head.

Badgers are better than cats

The progressive RCUK policy on open access has recently come under fire, particularly from humanities scholars, for favouring Gold OA over Green.

Can repositories solve the access problem?

The

 Chronicle of Higher Education

’s piece on Sci-Hub contains a disturbing claim that I’ve not seen elsewhere. I’ll quote: If this is true, then it certainly undermines the narrative of Sci-Hub as hero.

Does Sci-Hub phish for credentials?

Like Stephen Curry, we at SV-POW! are sick of impact factors. That’s not news. Everyone now knows what a total disaster they are: how they are signficantly correlated with retraction rate but not with citation count; how they are higher for journals whose studies are less statistically powerful; how they incentivise bad behaviour including p-hacking and over-hyping.

All right then, how should we evaluate research and researchers?

As predicted, the popular and useful Social Sciences repository SSRN, having been acquired by Elsevier, is now being destroyed.

Elsevier has started destroying SSRN

A few months ago I got an email from Nathan Myers, who asked me:  In many ways, I’m the wrong person to ask: I’ve never started a journal, OA or otherwise, nor even served on an editorial board. But, hey, I’m not one to let something like that stop me. So here’s what I told Nathan. I’m sure I missed a lot of important possibilities: please point them out in this comments. I’ll try to keep this post updated as the landscape changes.

Tutorial 31: ways to start a new open-access journal

Jeffrey Beall’s fatuous pronouncement that The Serials Crisis is Over has been nagging away at me since it was posted yesterday. I admit my first reaction was that it was some kind of parody or satire, but Beall’s subsequent comments seem to rule out that charitable interpretation.

Of course the serials crisis is not over, what the heck are you talking about?

Last week I went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the twice-yearly meet-up with my Index Data colleagues. On the last day, four of us took a day-trip out to Peggy’s Cove to eat lunch at Ryer Lobsters.

Vertebrates and invertebrates of Nova Scotia

This is the fifth part of a series on the Moral Dimensions of Open, in preparation for the forthcoming OSI2016 meeting, where I’ll be in the Moral Dimensions group.

Moral dimensions of Open, part 4: “on the shoulders of giants”

[The title of this post is an allusion to Matt’s older post Authors versus publishers.]  Following on from yesterday’s rant, I’m moved to write this one by Stephen Curry’s report on the latest Finch Committee meeting.

Publishers versus everyone

Today sees the description of Aquilops americanus (“American eagle face”), a new basal neoceratopsian from the Cloverly Formation of Montana, by Andy Farke, Rich Cifelli, Des Maxwell, and myself, with life restorations by Brian Engh.

Life restoration of

 Aquilops

by Brian Engh. Farke et al. (2014: fig. 6C). CC-BY. Today sees the description of

 Aquilops americanus

(“American eagle face”), a new basal neoceratopsian from the Cloverly Formation of Montana, by Andy Farke, Rich Cifelli, Des Maxwell, and myself, with life restorations by Brian Engh.

Please welcome Aquilops americanus

A while back, Ben Miller reminded me that when I posted about the old Yale “

 Brontosaurus

” skull, I promised: So how did the YPM come to make such a monstrosity? What was it based on? Tune in next time for the surprising details! I told him at the time that I’d soon get around to writing a post. But before I did, he wrote a post on this himself: Bully for

 Camarasaurus

. And it’s excellent.

How did the horrible Yale “Brontosaurus” skull come to be?

Just a quick post today, to refute an incorrect idea about open access that has unfortunately been propagated from time to time. That is the idea that if (say) PLOS were acquired by a barrier-based publisher such as Taylor and Francis, then its papers could be hidden behind paywalls and effectively lost to the world.

CC-By documents cannot be re-enclosed if their publisher is acquired

I got back on Tuesday from OpenCon 2015 — the most astonishing conference on open scholarship. Logistically, it works very different from most conferences: students have their expenses paid, but established scholars have to pay a registration fee and cover their own expenses. That inversion of how things are usually done captures much of what’s unique about OpenCon: its focus on the next generation is laser-sharp.

#OpenCon 2015: absolutely, indisputably, the best conference ever

Remember I picked up those three sheep skulls (and some other bones, including a complete neck) from a shallow pit in a field near where we live? Here is first of the skulls, cleaned up and photographed in orthogonal views. It’s interesting to compare it to the pig skull from way back: Sheep and pigs are both perfectly well-behaved artiodactyls, but their skulls are

 dramatically

different.

Here’s that sheep-skull multiview you ordered

Mike and I are in York for SVPCA — more on that soonish — and I just wanted to get out some quick thoughts about the world’s newest giant sauropod. First off, the paper (Lacovara et al. 2014) is open access, which is great.

Yay, vertebrae! Lacovara et al. (2014: fig. 1)  Mike and I are in York for SVPCA — more on that soonish — and I just wanted to get out some quick thoughts about the world’s newest giant sauropod. First off, the paper (Lacovara et al. 2014) is open access, which is great. And, hey, 3D PDFs of the whole skeleton and selected elements — I’m going to be having some fun with those.

Brief thoughts on Dreadnoughtus

I just gave an answer to this question on Quora, and it occurred to me that I ought to also give it a permanent home here.

Which was the biggest dinosaur? (Answer: it’s complicated)

Recently, I published an old manuscript of mine as a PeerJ Preprint. I wrote this paper in 2003-4, and it was rejected without review when I submitted it back then. (For, I think, specious reasons, but that’s a whole nother discussion. Forget I mentioned it.)  I haven’t touched the manuscript since then (except to single-space it for submission as a preprint). It’s ten years old.

How should I cite my old/new diversity preprint?

I just read this on Zen Faulkes’ NeuroDojo blog:

 How should scientists, and reporters, discuss work that has failed to replicate?

The original Barr and colleagues article remains in the scientific literature; failed replication alone is not grounds for retraction.

We need different types of citation: Replicates, Falsifies, DependsOn, Acknowledges …

Regulars will remember that nearly two years ago, I reviewed a paper for the Royal Society’s journal

 Biology Letters

, recommended acceptance with only trivial changes (as did both other reviewers) and was astonished to see that it was rejected outright. There was an invitation to resubmit, with wording that made it clear that the resubmission would be treated as a brand new manuscript;

Fumbling towards transparency: the Royal Society’s “reject &amp; resubmit” and submitted/published dates

Today, available for the first time, you can read my 2004 paper

 A survey of dinosaur diversity by clade, age, place of discovery and year of description

. It’s freely available (CC By 4.0) as a PeerJ Preprint. It’s one of those papers that does exactly what it says on the tin — you should be able to find some interesting patterns in the diversity of your own favourite dinosaur group.

New (but very old) preprint: A survey of dinosaur diversity by clade, age, place of discovery and year of description

A few weeks ago I threw this picture into the “Night at the Museum” post and promised to say more later. Later is now. I started sculpting dinosaur claws because of the coincidental arrival of two things in my life. One was a cast of OMNH 780, the horrifically awesome thumb claw of Jurassic megapredator

 Saurophaganax maximus

, which I blogged about here.

DIY Dinosaurs, Part 2: sculpting dino claws

In a couple of weeks (in the early afternoon of 25 June), I’ll be speaking at ESOF 2014 (the EuroScience Open Forum) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The session I’m part of is entitled “Should science always be open?“, and the irony is not lost on me that, as that page says, “You must be registered and signed in to download session materials.”  So here is the abstract for my talk — one of four in the session, to be followed by an open discussion.

I’m speaking at ESOF2014 on “Should science always be open?”

As promised, some thoughts on the various new brachiosaur mass estimates in recent papers and blog-posts. Back in 2008, when I did the GDI of

 Giraffatitan

and

 Brachiosaurus

for my 2009 paper on those genera, I came out with estimates of 28688 and 23337 kg respectively. At the time I said to Matt that I was suspicious of those numbers because they seemed too low.

How much is our intuition about sauropod mass worth?

I need to be sleeping, not blogging, so here are just the highlights, with no touch-ups and minimal commentary. I don’t know what these real street signs were doing sitting on the ground when I walked to the museum this morning, but it was a good omen for the conference. Home base for this part of the conference. We head to Green River, Utah, on Friday for the Early Cretaceous half. I had never seen this on exhibit.

Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 1: Dinosaur National Monument field trip

My camera had a possibly-fatal accident in the field at the end of the day on Saturday, so I didn’t take any photos on Sunday or Monday. From here on out, you’re either getting my slides, or photos taken by other people. On Sunday we were at the John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, Utah, for the Cretaceous talks.

Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 6: Sauroposeidon and kin

Today for the first time I saw Saegusa and Ikeda’s (2014) new monograph describing the Japanese titanosauriform

 Tambatitanis amicitiae

. I’ve not yet had a chance to read the paper — well, it’s 65 pages long — but it certainly looks like they’ve done a nice, comprehensive job on a convincing new taxon represented by good material: teeth, braincase, dentary, atlas, and as-yet unprepared fragmentary cervical, fragmentary dorsals,

The bizarre caudal neural spines of Tambatitanis amicitiae

This morning sees the publication of the new

 Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework

from HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

HEFCE’s new open-access policy for post-2014 outputs

In discussion of Samuel Gershman’s rather good piece

 The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing

, I got into this discusson on Twitter with David Mainwaring (who is usually one of the more interesting legacy-publisher representatives on these issues) and Daniel Allingon (who I don’t know at all). I’ll need to give a bit of background before I reach the key part of that discussion, so here goes.

A “nuanced” position isn’t always correct

University of Portsmouth

Matt is staying here at Taylor Towers for a couple of weeks while his wife spends some quality time with some leprous human remains in Bradford (yes, really). Since both Matt and I are big fans of sushi, I took a stab at making some at home on Sunday night: Fig.

Tutorial 6: Air-space proportion in pneumatic sushi

I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to Academia.edu represent at best a grotesque PR mis-step, an idiot manoeuvre that I thought Elsevier would immediately regret and certainly avoid repeating.

Elsevier steps up its War On Access

When we last left my better half, Dr. Vicki Wedel, she was helping to identify a Jane Doe who had been dead for 37 years by counting growth rings in the woman’s teeth. That case nicely illustrated Vicki’s overriding interest: to advance forensic anthropology by developing new methods and refining existing ones.

Vicki’s book, Broken Bones, is out!

THIS POST IS RETRACTED. The reasons are explained in the next post. I wish I had never posted this, but you can’t undo what is done, especially on the Internet, so I am not deleting it but marking it as retracted. I suggest you don’t bother reading on, but it’s here if you want to.

There were some surprises in the the contents of the SVPCA programme this year.

Unhappy thoughts on student projects at SVPCA 2015

Last time I argued that traditional pre-publication peer-review isn’t necessarily worth the heavy burden it imposes. I guess no-one who’s been involved in the review process — as an author, editor or reviewer — will deny that it imposes significant costs, both in the time of all the participants, and in the delay in getting new work to press. Where I expected more pushback was in the claim that the benefits are not great.

Some more of peer-review’s greatest mistakes

It’s a strange time of year for me. Teaching and SVP are both behind me, my tenure dossier is in (I’ll find out how that goes next April, probably), and for the first time in a while, I’m not shepherding any pressing manuscripts through the valley of potential rejection. Urgency has dissipated. Flights of fancy are very in right now. Take this post.

Dödös need röck döts

I just found out — thanks to a tweet from abertonykus — that this exists: That’s me on top of the

 Giraffatitan

, Matt to the right, and Darren swinging from its wattle. It’s the work of classicalguy on Deviant Art. He provides a poem and some brief commentary along with the original. There also one for the Tetrapod Zoology podcats, and one for Tom Holtz.

SV-POW! fan-art? Yes, that’s a thing now

Last time, we took a very quick look at YPM 1910, a mounted skeleton that is the holotype of

 Camarasaurus

(= “

 Morosaurus

“)

 lentus

, in the dinosaur hall of the Yale Peabody Museum. Here’s the whole skeleton, in various views. Skip down to the bottom for the science; or just enjoy the derpiness. First, in anterior view: Here’s a more informative right anterolateral view.

The full story on Morosaurus lentus

In a comment on the last post, Anonymous wrote: I was wondering, in the course of your career, have you ever gotten tired of studying sauropods?

In a comment on the last post, Anonymous wrote:  I am going to answer first for myself, and then invite Mike and Darren and everyone else to share their thoughts. For me, two things. First, I don’t always work on sauropods–I have a human anatomy paper in press, and two different projects on mammal skull osteology struggling toward publication, and a couple of bird things.

On breadth in research interests

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we’re keenly aware that some of our fans are just here for the hardcore sauropod vertebra action. These folks start to shift in their seats when we put up too many posts in a row on open access or rabbits or…okay, mostly just OA and bunnies. If that’s you – or, heck, even if it isn’t – your good day has come. Saddle up. Let’s ride.

Early Cretaceous titanosauriform cervical UMNH 21054, or, “Hello again, beautiful”

The

 Sauroposeidon

stuff is cribbed from this post. For the pros and cons of scale bars in figures, see the comment thread after this post. MYDD is, of course, a thing now. Previous posts in this series. Reference: Wedel, M.J., and Taylor, M.P. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications.

Photography and illustration talk, Part 9: Perspective and scale bars

Ontogeny in the tube-crested dinosaurParasaurolophus(Hadrosauridae) and heterochrony in hadrosaurids

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to regular readers that PeerJ is Matt’s and my favourite journal. Reasons include its super-fast turnaround, beautiful formatting that doesn’t look like a facsimile of 1980s printed journals, and its responsiveness to authors and readers.

The world’s most open-access dinosaur

University College London

A month ago, I posted an article containing all the examples known to me of that sadly neglected palaeo-art theme, Sauropods Stomping Theropods: Mark Hallet’s

 Jobaria

squishing

 Afrovenator

, Luis Rey’s

 Astrodon

biting/carrying a raptor, Mark Witton’s

 Camarasaurus

grinding juvenile theropods to dust, and of course Francisco Gascó’s and Emily Willoughby’s

 Brontomerus

pieces, both of them showing Bronto

Sauropods stomping theropods, redux

Introduction

I’m sure we all remember the White House OSTP’s recent memo on open access — a huge step forward that extends an NIH-like Green OA policy to all US federally funded research. It was a triumph for common sense, an explicit repudiation of the mindset behind the Research Works Act, and an affirmation for the ongoing FASTR legislation.

All joined with a single voice to praise CHORUS, thus: “meh.”

Yvonne Nobis

[Today’s live-blog is brought to you by Yvonne Nobis, science librarian at Cambridge, UK. Thanks, Yvonne! — Mike.] Session 1 — The Journal Article: is the end in sight? Slightly late start due to trains – !  Just arrived to hear Aileen Fyfe University of St Andrews saying that something similar to journal articles will be needed for ‘quite some time’. Steven Hall, IOP.

Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication: Part 2, day 2

Suppose, hypothetically, that you worked for an organisation whose nominal goal is the advancement of science, but which has mutated into a highly profitable subscription-based publisher. And suppose you wanted to construct a study that showed the alternative — open-access publishing — is inferior.

Anti-tutorial: how to design and execute a really bad study

[This is a guest-post by

 Richard Poynder

, a long-time observer and analyst of academic publishing now perhaps best known for the very detailed posts on his

 Open and Shut

blog. It was originally part of a much longer post on that blog, the introduction to an interview with the publisher MDPI.

Richard Poynder on the need for transparency in publishing

Last time, we looked at how including intervertebral cartilage changes the neutral pose of a neck — or, more specifically, of the sequence of cervical vertebrae.

How thick is the cartilage in necks of extant animals?

I’ve been taking a long-overdue look at some of the recently-described giant sauropods from China, trying to sort out just how big they were. Not a new pursuit for me, just one I hadn’t been back to in a while. Also, I’m not trying to debunk anything about this animal – as far as I know, there was no bunk to begin with – I’m just trying to get a handle on how big it might have been, for my own obscure purposes.

How big was ‘Huanghetitan’ ruyangensis? I mean, really?

Well, I guess that’s that

Hey, just a quick announcement this time: today’s LA Times has a nice little article on

 Aquilops

on page A6. It’s also available online here. Good luck tracking down a hardcopy – our local Barnes &amp; Noble doesn’t carry the LA Times (not sure which party that reflects worse on), and I got the last copy from a gas station down the street. I’m so happy that they used Brian’s artwork!

Aquilops in today’s LA Times

I guess pretty much all researchers must suffer from Imposter Syndrome every now and then — the sense of not really belonging, not knowing enough, not getting enough done to justify our position.

How to overcome Imposter Syndrome

Back in 2013, when we were in the last stages of preparing our paper Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs

 Giraffatitan

and

 Apatosaurus

(Wedel and Taylor 2013b), I noticed that, purely by chance, all ten of the illustrations shared much the same limited colour palette: pale brows and blues (and of course black and white). I’ve always found this strangely appealing.

The freakily consistent colour palette of Wedel and Taylor (2013) on caudal pneumaticity

There’s an awful lot of talk about “predatory open access publishers” recently. So much talk that I can’t help wondering whether the phrase is being pushed by barrier-based publishers in another attempt to smear open access.

Tutorial 23: How to avoid giving your work to a “predatory open access publisher”

Today our paper on sauropod neck anatomy is formally published in PeerJ.

Apatosaurus lousiae

1/12 scale skeleton in left antero-lateral view, modelled by Phil Platt, assembled and photographed by Brant Bassam. Image courtesy of BrantWorks.com. Today our paper on sauropod neck anatomy is formally published in PeerJ.

PeerJ launches today! (and we’re in it!)

I think the most painful part of the Elsevier-eats-Mendeley deal has been watching good people acting as apologists for Elsevier and then feeling hurt when people don’t accept their protestations. You can see a good example (but far from the only one) in the comments to Danah Boyd’s post on her #mendelete. I don’t know what Elsevier have been feeding their new minions, but whatever it is it seems to be working.

Seriously, Mendeley people, what did you expect?

As many of you will know, it’s now official that Elsevier has bought Mendeley, previously a force for openness in the world of reference management. There’s some good commentary at The Scholarly Kitchen. Lots of open advocates — Ross Mounce, for example — are shutting down their accounts and moving to free alternatives such as Zotero. Unequivocal good guys at Mendeley, such as William Gunn, are painting this as optimistically as they can.

A few words on Elsevier’s acquisition of Mendeley

I first met Wann at SVP in 1997, in Chicago. I was an undergrad, still three months away from my B.S., presenting a poster arguing that OMNH 53062 (which would eventually become the holotype of

 Sauroposeidon

) was a new sauropod.

Wann Langston, Jr. 1921-2013

A couple of times now, I’ve pitched in an abstract for a Masters project looking at neck cartilage, hoping someone at Bristol will work on it with me co-supervising, but so far no-one’s bitten. Here’s how I’ve been describing it:

 Understanding posture and motion in the necks of sauropods: the crucial role of cartilage in intervertebral joints

The sauropod dinosaurs were an order of magnitude bigger than any other terrestrial animal.

Does anyone want a project? How can we understand sauropod neck cartilage better?

My thanks for Richard Van Noorden for drawing my attention to his new piece Open access: The true cost of science publishing in

 Nature

. I wrote a detailed comment on this article, but when I went to post it, I was told “This account has been banned from commenting due to posting of comments classified as inappropriate or other violations of our Terms of Service”: This news to me. No-one at

 Nature

thought to tell

Banned from commenting at Nature

Another raw photo from the road. The Morrison fossils from the Oklahoma panhandle were dug up and prepped out by  WPA workers in the 1930s, and their preparation toolkit consisted of hammers, chisels, pen-knives, and sandpaper.

The poor man’s CT machine

We’ve seen a lot of arguments recently about the RCUK open-access policy and the length of embargoes that it allows on Green OA articles under various circumstances. When is it reasonable to insist on six months? When might publishers have cause to want to stretch it out to 24 months? And so on.  The truth here is terribly simple.

All Green-OA embargoes are iniquitous

This photograph is of what I consider the closest thing to the Platonic Ideal sauropod vertebra: it’s the eighth cervical of our old friend the

 Giraffatitan brancai

paralectotype MB.R.2181.

Plateosaurus is pathetic

I just stumbled across this tweet from bird photographer Gloria (@Lucent508). Four photos of the same individual, apparently a Green Heron.

Herons lie, part 2

As we saw last time, the appeal of the Gold route to open access is that the publisher does the work of making the article freely available in an obvious, well-known place in its final typeset format. Conversely the appeal of the Green route is that it doesn’t cost the author or her institution any money. What happens when we combine these two advantages, and get publishers to typeset, publish and archive open-access articles at no charge?

Tutorial 19c: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 3: a brief note on Platinum/Diamond

Way back in November 2011, I got this inquiry from Keiron Pim: I replied at the time, and said that I’d post that response here on SV-POW!. But one thing and another prevented me from getting around to it, and I forgot all about it until recently. Since we’re currently in a sequence of

 Brachiosaurus

-themed posts [part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6], this seems like a good time to fix that.

How big was Brachiosaurus altithorax? I mean, really?

Continuing with what seems to have turned out to be Brachiosaur Humerus Week here on SV-POW! (part 1, part 2, part 3), let’s consider the oft-stated idea that brachiosaurs have the most slender humeri of any sauropod.

How slender were the humeri of Giraffatitan?

Item 1

: With his new piece at the Guardian,  “Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing”, Mike continues to be a thorn in the side of exploitative commercial publishers, who just can’t seem to keep their facts straight.

Two new dispatches from the Shiny Digital Future

Now considered a junior synonym of

 Supersaurus

, on very solid grounds. Incidentally, unlike the neural spines of most non-titanosaurian sauropods, the neural spine of this vertebra is not simply a set of intersecting plates of bone. It is hollow and has a central chamber, presumably pneumatic.

The holotype dorsal vertebra of Dystylosaurus

As I was figuring out what I thought about the new paper on sauropod posture (Vidal et al. 2020) I found the paper uncommonly difficult to parse.

Scientific Reports is an objectively bad journal

A short post this time, partly because it’s late, partly because the hotel internet is sucking bigtime–probably as the hotels fill up for the weekend. I simply don’t have the bandwidth to post more, and in fact I had to downsize these few photos to get them to upload in polynomial time. Today we left Fruita, Colorado, and hit several Lower Cretaceous sites in eastern Utah on our way to Green River, Utah.

Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 4: Into the Lower Cretaceous

I was in Oklahoma and Texas last week, seeing Sauroposeidon, Paluxysaurus, Astrophocaudia, and Alamosaurus, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU, and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, respectively.

I was in Oklahoma and Texas last week, seeing

 Sauroposeidon

,

 Paluxysaurus

,

 Astrophocaudia

, and

 Alamosaurus

, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, the Shuler Museum of Paleontology at SMU, and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, respectively.

Sauroposeidon in 3D

In the previous post in this series I looked at the some of the easily available raw data on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods. In this post I’ll explain how serial variation–that is, variation along the vertebral column in one individual–is relevant to the inferences made in the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). But first, a digression, the relevance of which will quickly become clear.

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week