It is pretty darned satisfying to be heading to the Isle of Wight for SVPCA next week. My only other visit was in the spring of 2004, when Vicki and I were in England on a spring break vacation/research trip.

I was fortunate to get to visit some pretty cool places last year, and to photograph some awesome critters, many of which I had never seen so well before. Here are the best of the lot.

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In a couple of weeks (in the early afternoon of 25 June), I’ll be speaking at ESOF 2014 (the EuroScience Open Forum) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The session I’m part of is entitled “Should science always be open?“, and the irony is not lost on me that, as that page says, “You must be registered and signed in to download session materials.” So here is the abstract for my talk — one of four in the session, to be followed by an open discussion.

I actually have no photos from Saturday morning. One of the vans had a flat tire, and we didn’t have enough reserve capacity in the other vans for everyone from the afflicted van to go on, so a handful of people had to go back to Green River. My talk wasn’t finished and I needed time to work on it, so I was one of the volunteers who went back to town. Happily the flat got fixed pretty quickly and we were back out in the field by lunchtime.

A short post this time, partly because it’s late, partly because the hotel internet is sucking bigtime–probably as the hotels fill up for the weekend. I simply don’t have the bandwidth to post more, and in fact I had to downsize these few photos to get them to upload in polynomial time. Today we left Fruita, Colorado, and hit several Lower Cretaceous sites in eastern Utah on our way to Green River, Utah.

Just a quick post to let you know that I will be presenting two different talks at the Berlin 11 open access conference on Monday and Tuesday next week.

In the last few weeks, it’s been my pleasure and privilege to give invited talks on open access to both UCL and the University of Ulster. (Both of them went well, thanks for asking.) Now they come to process expenses, and both universities have asked for scans of my passport. I explained to UCL that I was only expecting expenses, not a fee, and they backed down;

Thanks to the kind offices of the folks at the Field Museum, especially Fossil Vertebrates collection manager Bill Simpson, on Wednesday I got to hop the fence and spend some quality time with FMNH PR 2209, the mounted holotype specimen of Rapetosaurus krausei . I took a tape measure with me, to get some dimensions from the mounted skeleton.