For those following the saga of Oculudentavis (the beautiful tiny dinosaur preserved in amber that turned out to be a lizard), three more things.

Since we wrote about the putative tiny bird Oculudentavis (Xing et al. 2020) last time, things have become rather weirder.

Back in March, Nature published “Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar” by Xing et al. (2020), which described and named a tiny putative bird that was preserved in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma). It’s a pretty spectacular find.

I got a wonderful surprise a couple of nights ago!

Before we get on to the home stretch of this series — which is turning out waaay longer than I expected it to be, and which I guess should really have been a paper instead — we need to resolve an important detail. We all know there are two scapulocoracoids in the BYU Supersaurus material, and that one of them is the holotype: but which one?

As I was clearing out some clutter, I came across this hand-written list of projects that I wanted to get completed: {.aligncenter .size-large .wp-image-13257 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“13257” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2016/04/11/projects-that-happen-projects-that-dont/old-poop/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/old-poop.jpeg” orig-size=“1522,2078” comments-opened=“1”

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly seven years since the “resolution”, if you want to call it that, of Aetogate, the aetosaur plagiarism-and-claim-jumping scandal. I was contacted privately today by someone wanting to know if I had copies of the SVP’s documents published in response to this. I didn’t — and the documents are hard to find since they have been moved at least twice from their original addresses on the SVP site.

Short post today. Go and read this paper: Academic urban legends (Rekdal 2014). It’s open access, and an easy and fascinating read. It unfolds a tale of good intentions gone wrong, a chain of failure, illustrating an important single crucial point of academic behaviour: read what you cite. References Rekdal, Ole Bjørn.

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;

That last one really hurts. Here’s the original image, which should have gone in the paper with the interpretive trace next to it rather than on top of it: The rest of the series. Papers referenced in these slides: Taylor, M.P., and Wedel, M.J. 2013b. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10): e78214. 17 pages.