Back in 2013, when we were in the last stages of preparing our paper Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus (Wedel and Taylor 2013b), I noticed that, purely by chance, all ten of the illustrations shared much the same limited colour palette: pale brows and blues (and of course black and white). I’ve always found this strangely appealing.

Recently, I published an old manuscript of mine as a PeerJ Preprint. I wrote this paper in 2003-4, and it was rejected without review when I submitted it back then. (For, I think, specious reasons, but that’s a whole nother discussion. Forget I mentioned it.) I haven’t touched the manuscript since then (except to single-space it for submission as a preprint). It’s ten years old.

Today, available for the first time, you can read my 2004 paper A survey of dinosaur diversity by clade, age, place of discovery and year of description . It’s freely available (CC By 4.0) as a PeerJ Preprint. It’s one of those papers that does exactly what it says on the tin — you should be able to find some interesting patterns in the diversity of your own favourite dinosaur group.

I think it’s fair to say that this “bifurcation heat-map”, from Wedel and Taylor (2013a: figure 9), has been one of the best-received illustrations that we’ve prepared: (See comments from Jaime and from Mark Robinson.) Back when the paper came out, Matt rashly said “Stand by for a post by Mike explaining how it came it be” — a post which has not materialised. Until now!

It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper.

Well, folks, I’m back from Berlin. And what an extraordinary couple of days it was. There were in fact three days of open-access talks, though I was only able to be there for the first two. Day one was the satellite conference, aimed at early-career researchers;

A few bits and pieces about the PLOS Collection on sauropod gigantism that launched yesterday. First, there’s a nice write-up of one of our papers (Wedel and Taylor 2013b on pneumaticity in sauropod tails) in the Huffington Post today. It’s the work of PLOS blogger Brad Balukjian, a former student of Matt’s from Berkeley days.

Yesterday I announced that our new paper on Barosaurus was up as a PeerJ preprint and invited feedback. I woke up this morning to find its third substantial review waiting for me. That means that this paper has now accumulated as much useful feedback in the twenty-seven hours since I submitted it as any previous submission I’ve ever made.

I recently handled the revisions on a paper that hopefully will be in press very soon. One of the review comments was “Be very careful not to make ad hominem attacks”. I was a bit surprised to see that — I wasn’t aware that I’d made any — so I went back over the manuscript, and sure enough, there were no ad hom s in there. There was criticism, though, and I think that’s what the reviewer meant.

If you’ll forgive me a rather self-indulgent post, the neck-anatomy paper that I and Matt recently had published in PeerJ is important to me for three reasons beyond the usual satisfaction of getting a piece of work out in a good journal. Taylor and Wedel (1023:figure 4). Extent of soft tissue on ostrich and sauropod necks.