It’s well worth reading this story about Thomas Herndon, a graduate student who as part of his training set out to replicate a well-known study in his field. The work he chose, Growth in a Time of Debt by Reinhart and Rogoff, claims to show that “median growth rates for countries with public debt over roughly 90 percent of GDP are about one percent lower than otherwise;

Here’s a cool skeleton of the South American pleurodire Podocnemis in the Yale Peabody Museum. What’s that you’re hiding in your neck, Podocnemis ? Laminae! Here’s a closeup: The laminae run from the transverse processes to the prezygapophyses and the centrum, which I reckon makes them analogues of the PRDLs and ACDLs of sauropods.

In the recent post on serial variation in sauropod cervicals, I wrote: Even in ‘adult’ sauropods like the big mounted Apatosaurus and Diplodocus skeletons, the anterior cervicals are less complex than the posterior ones.

When my youngest brother was about eight years old, he quipped, “French fries: they may be high in fat, they may be high in cholesterol, but doggone it, they’re salty .” I often think about that in reference to barrier-based academic publishing. It doesn’t serve authors, it doesn’t serve readers, it doesn’t serve academic libraries, but doggone it, at least it costs vastly more than it should.

Today was one of the most interesting days of my life. Vanessa and I needed ostrich parts for dissection, so I had gotten in touch with Doug Osborne of OK Corral Ostrich Farms in Oro Grande.

Sweet new paper out today by Bibi et al. in Biology Letters, on some awesome elephant tracks from the United Arab Emirates. I’ve known this was coming for a while, because the second author on the study, Brian Kraatz, has his office about 30 feet down the hall from mine.

As previously reported, the lot of us are in Bonn for the sauropod biology workshop. Last night we met up at the welcome reception at the Goldfuss Museum.