Tonight, I sent my submission to Research Councils UK in response to their call for comments on the recently issued docment RCUK Proposed Policy on Access to Research Outputs .  I am now posting my comments publicly.

In the middle of February, Times Higher Education ran a piece by Elsevier boycott originator Tim Gowers, entitled Occupy publishing .

In a comment on an previous post, wycx articulated a position that sounds all too familiar: I have heard a lot of people say things like this in the last couple of months.  It makes pretty depressing reading. “Non-open scholarly publishing? Don’t talk to me about non-open scholarly publishing. Oh God, it’s so depressing.” But how true is it?

Vanessa Graff and I spent yesterday working in the herpetology and ornithology collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM). The herpetology collections manager, Neftali Comacho, pointed us to this skull of Alligator mississippiensis . It’s not world’s biggest gator–about which more in a second–but it’s the biggest I’ve seen in person.

Preparing a talk is a time-consuming process, and there’s no question that getting the slides ready is where the bulk of that time goes.  But unless you understand exactly what it is that you’re going to talk about, even the best slides won’t rescue your talk from mediocrity, so before you fire up PowerPoint, go and read part 1 of this tutorial, on finding the narrative.  Seriously.

Matt, Darren and I were all in Lyme Regis last week for SVPCA 2011, the Symposium of Vertebrate Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy — an excellent technical conference similar in some ways to SVP, but much nicer because it’s small enough that you can see all the talks and meet all the people. This is the seafront, from the Cobb (harbour wall) at the west end of the beach, looking east.

Last time around, I referred in passing, rather flippantly, to what I called Tutorial n: how to become a palaeontologist .  Since then, I realised that actually I could write a tutorial on this, and that it could be surprisingly short and sweet — much shorter than it would have needed to be even a few years ago. So here it is: how to be a published palaeontologist.

In an interesting comment on Matt’s “Amphiocoelias brontodiplodocus” post, an anonymous commenter wrote (among much else): I started to write a reply to this, then realised it was important enough to merit its own post — so here it is. The amateur and commercial palaeontologists alluded to in the comment are wrong, plainly and simply.

Every year the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis in Teruel, Spain, gives out the International Award in Palaeontology Research, a.k.a. Paleonturology. ‘Paleonturology’ is a bit of a pun–it’s actually Paleon Turol ogy; Turol is the old Roman name for the area, from which the Turia river, Turiasaurus , and the city and province of Teruel are all derived.