Measuring metadata completeness is a great way to identify good examples and low-hanging fruit for improvement. A Pidapalloza talk from last week described results from a recent assessment of 144 repositories from the TIB DataCite Consortium with respect to recommendations for FAIR metadata. Overall, the seven mandatory DataCite fields dominate these repositories, but several great examples that go beyond the mandatory were identified.

Gilmore (1936:243) says of the mounted skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018 in the Carnegie Museum that “with the skull in position the specimen has a total length between perpendiculars of about 71 feet and six inches.

If you’ve been around SV-POW!

Oh, hey, so you know how the most tedious thing you can ever hear is someone recounting one of their dreams? I want to tell you about a dream I had last night.

We’re way late to this party, but better late than never I guess. Wu et al. (2013) described Xinjiangtitan shanshanesis as a new mamenchisaurid from the Middle Jurassic of China.

Early in my 2015 preprint on the incompleteness of sauropod necks, I wrote “Unambiguously complete necks are known from published account of only six species of sauropod, two of which are species of the same genus”, and listed them.

In honor of PIDapalooza 2021 and 25 hours of Persistent Identifier discussion happening today, we thought a post celebrating the power of PIDs for increasing connectivity and how to measure that connectivity is in order. Let’s party on 🥳 Discovery Before Conectivity (BC) : For many years we have thought about discovery in terms of web portals with text search boxes, maps, timelines, facets, or some other kind of interface.

People naturally focus on big news and Geo-scientists also pay more attentions to big earthquakes happening in plate boundaries rather than the 'boring' small earthquakes in stable continents. Does this mean the intraplate earthquakes are negligible in scientific research?

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We’ve noted many times over the years how inconsistent pneumatic features are in sauropod vertebra. Fossae and formamina vary between individuals of the same species, and along the spinal column, and even between the sides of individual vertebrae.