Back in the first post about our recent paper on bifurcated cervical ribs in apatosaurines, I noted: This has been much on my mind of late, especially as the majority of talks at SVPCA 2023 and many new papers involve numerical methods.

Years ago, when I was young and stupid, I used to read papers containing phylogenetic analyses and think, “Oh, right, I see now, Euhelopus is not a mamenchisaurid after all, it’s a titanosauriform”. In other words, I believed the result that the computer spat out.

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.

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As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers.

The reason most of my work is in the form of journal articles is that I didn’t know there were other ways to communicate. Now that I know that there are other and in some ways demonstrably better ways (arXiv, etc.), my enthusiasm for sending stuff to journals is flagging.