I have several small ordered sequences of data, each of about five to ten elements. For each of them, I want to calculate a metric which captures how much they vary along the sequence. I don’t want standard deviation, or anything like it, because that would consider the sequences 1 5 2 7 4 and 1 2 4 5 7 equally variable, whereas for my purposes the first of these is much more variable.

A couple of months ago, I asked for your help in compiling a list of all known complete sauropods necks. This has gone really well, and I want to thank everyone who chipped in, and all the various authors I have contacted for details as a result.

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.

Early in my 2015 preprint on the incompleteness of sauropod necks, I wrote “Unambiguously complete necks are known from published account of only six species of sauropod, two of which are species of the same genus”, and listed them.

I’ve got a problem. For a paper I’m working on, I need to run a phylogenetic analysis based on that of Mannion et al. (2013) — the Lusotitan paper. The most recent version of that matrix, greatly expanded from the original version, is that of Mannion et al. (2019) — the Jiangshanosaurus paper — so I am working from that matrix. But what exactly do I do with that Matrix?

I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that Xenoposeidon is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial disagreement about one of the autapomorphies that I proposed in the revised diagnosis: “Neural arch slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character was also in the original Xenoposeidon

I got an email a couple of days ago from Maija Karala, asking me a question I’d not come across before (among several other questions): how much poop did Argentinosaurus produce in a day? I don’t recall this question having been addressed in the literature, though if anyone knows different please shout. Having thought about it a little, I sent the following really really vague and hand-wavy response.

I have before me the reviews for a submission of mine, and the handling editor has provided an additional stipulation: In other words, the first time I mention Diplodocus , I should say “ Diplodocus Marsh 1878″; and I should add the corresponding reference to my bibliography.

I’ve been lucky enough to acquire another beautiful specimen.

Folks, For a forthcoming minor paper, I need a good-quality scan of Hatcher’s 1901 monograph on Diplodocus carnegii — specifically, plate VI, the photographs of the cervicals in posterior view.