Our friends Tim and Michelle Williams moved into a local house a few months ago. In the garage, they found a jam jar containing the bones of a squirrel and the remains of its rotting flesh, dated 1985: presumably a zoologist lived in that house 28 years ago, began preparing a specimen, and moved out before finishing.

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.

Here’s a blast from the past: This alleged Compsognathus is a card from the “Flesh” card-game that was printed across several progs (issues) of the comic 2000 AD in 1977.

Incredible. We knew the tide was turning, but who saw it turning this swiftly? The full story is on the Guardian web-site. Update (an hour later) More information, and useful links to exactly what the Government said, on the Nature News blog.

My awesome employers Index Data flew us all out to Boston a few weeks ago, for six days of food, drink, work (yes, work!) and goofy tyrannosaurs. There is really no excuse for this, is there? SPECIAL BONUS: I am wearing my Xenoposeidon T-shirt.

Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up. You may recall a story from the Onion Our Dumb Century book, allegedly from 1904, about the skeleton of Satan being discovered in Wyoming.

An article in Times Higher Education tells of a new report, The Potential Effect of Making Journals Free After a Six Month Embargo , prepared by Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf for the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers [ALPSP] and our old friends The Publishers Association. And this report contains very good news.

Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable . It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments.

My mind was blown yesterday by a tweet from Stuart Shieber: @bmcmatt: … and $585 to email a copy to a colleague. Someone (@maryannliebert) didn't get the memo on what "#openaccess" means.

Good news! If you want to read research that was funded by the U.S. National Instututes of Health (NIH), you can. Their public access policy means that papers published on their dime become universally accessible in PubMed Central. Good news! If you want to read research that was funded by the Wellcome Trust, an international charitable foundation, you can.