No time right now for me to dig into the interesting and important discussion on how we should orient vertebrae (here and here so far) – that will be coming soon. In the meantime, here’s something else.

Many datasets and products are documented using approaches and tools developed by data collectors to support their analysis and understanding. This documentation exists in notebooks, scientific papers, web pages, user guides, word processing documents, spreadsheets, data dictionaries, PDF’s, databases, custom binary and ASCII formats, and almost any other conceivable form, each with associated storage and preservation strategies.

Thanks to everyone who’s engaged with yesterday’s apparently trivial question: what does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”? I know Matt has plenty of thoughts to share on this, but before he does I want to clear up a couple of things. This is not about life posture First, and I really should have led with this: the present question has nothing to do with life posture.

I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that Xenoposeidon is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial disagreement about one of the autapomorphies that I proposed in the revised diagnosis: “Neural arch slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character was also in the original Xenoposeidon

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Robin N. Kok asked an interesting question on Twitter: For all the free money researchers throw at them, they might as well be shareholders. Maybe someone could model a scenario where all the APC money is spent on RELX shares instead, and see how long it takes until researchers own a majority share or RELX.

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