There’s a new paper out, describing the Argentinian titanosaur Mendozasaurus in detail (Gonzalez Riga et al. 2018): 46 pages of multi-view photos, tables of measurement, and careful, detailed description and discussion.
I imagine that by now, everyone who reads this blog is familiar with Mark Witton’s painting of a giant azhdarchid pterosaur alongside a big giraffe.
In my recent preprint on the incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck specimens, I discuss three well-known sauropod specimens in detail, and show that they are not as well known as we think they are. One of them is the Giraffatitan brancai lectotype MB.R.2181 (more widely known by its older designation HMN SII), the specimen that provides the bulk of the mighty mounted skeleton in Berlin.
We’ve touched on this several times in various posts and comment threads, but it’s worth taking a moment to think in detail about the various published mass estimates for the single specimen MB.R.2181 (formerly known as HMN SII), the paralectotype of Giraffatitan brancai , which is the basis of the awesome mounted skeleton in Berlin.
When Fiona checked her email this morning, she found this note from our next-door neighbour Jenny: What a delightful surprise!
Christine Argot of the MNHN, Paris, drew our attention to this wonderful old photo (from here, original caption reproduced below): [{.size-full .wp-image-9874 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-9874” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9874” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/03/01/the-case-of-the-bandy-legged-diplodocus/1-7_diplodocus_2_l/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/1-7_diplodocus_2_l.jpg” orig-size=“2362,1772”
As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers.
It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper.
In what is by now a much-reported story, @DNLee, who writes the Urban Scientist blog on the Scientific American blog network, was invited by Biology Online to write a guest-post for their blog.
Suppose, hypothetically, that you worked for an organisation whose nominal goal is the advancement of science, but which has mutated into a highly profitable subscription-based publisher. And suppose you wanted to construct a study that showed the alternative — open-access publishing — is inferior.