I have long intended to write a paper entitled Why Elephants Are So Small, as a companion piece to Why Giraffes Have Short Necks (Taylor and Wedel 2013). I’ve often discussed this project with Matt, usually under the acronym WEASS, and its substance has come up in the previous post, and especially Mickey Mortimer’s comment: That is exactly what the WEASS project was supposed to consist of: a list of many candidate limitations on how big animals

Consider a small sauropod of length x , as shown on the left above. Its mass is proportional to x cubed, it stands on leg bones whose cross-sectional area is x squared, and it ingests food through a gullet whose cross-sectional area is x squared. Now consider a larger sauropod of length 2 x , as shown on the right above.

A new rOpenSci package katex is now on CRAN.This package allows for converting latex math expressions to HTML and MathML for use in markdown documents or package documentation. The R package uses the katex javascript library, but the rendering is done directly in R using the V8 engine (i.e. server-side), which eliminates the need for embedding the MathJax library into html pages.

Various Internet rumours have suggested that the Archbishop is a super-giant sauropod one third larger than the mounted Giraffatitan specimen MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN SII). This is incorrect.

I have several small ordered sequences of data, each of about five to ten elements. For each of them, I want to calculate a metric which captures how much they vary along the sequence. I don’t want standard deviation, or anything like it, because that would consider the sequences 1 5 2 7 4 and 1 2 4 5 7 equally variable, whereas for my purposes the first of these is much more variable.

I got a wonderful surprise a couple of nights ago!

In part 2, we concluded that BYU 9024, the large cervical vertebra assigned by Jensen to the Supersaurus holotype individual, is in fact a perfectly well-behaved Barosaurus cervical — just a much, much bigger one than we’ve been used to seeing.

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.

I got an email a couple of days ago from Maija Karala, asking me a question I’d not come across before (among several other questions): how much poop did Argentinosaurus produce in a day? I don’t recall this question having been addressed in the literature, though if anyone knows different please shout. Having thought about it a little, I sent the following really really vague and hand-wavy response.

“But wait, Matt”, I hear you thinking. “Every news agency in the world is tripping over themselves declaring Patagotitan the biggest dinosaur of all time. Why are you going in the other direction?” Because I’ve been through this a few times now.