In the last post I pointed out some similarities between Davide Bonadonna’s new Spinosaurus painting and Brian Engh’s Spinosaurus *painting from 2010.

This is guest post by Angelique Hjarding in response to discussion on this blog about the paper below. Thank you for highlighting our recent publication and for the very interesting comments. We wanted to take the opportunity to address some of the issues brought up in both your review and from reader comments. One of the most important issues that has been raised is the sharing of cleaned and vetted datasets.

Today we have a guest posting from F1000’s Iain Hrynaszkiewicz covering the topic of medical data sharing One of the world’s most influential medical journals recently highlighted data sharing as an important issue to be addressed if we are to improve the quality of reporting of biomedical research.

[ Introduction from Mike. I’m on the OKFN’s open-access mailing list, where we’re currently embroiled in a rather tedious reiteration of the debate about the merits of the various open-access licences.

This is a guest post by Elita Baldridge (@elitabaldridge). She is a graduate student in our group who has been navigating the development of a chronic illness during graduate school. She is sharing her story to help spread awareness of the challenges faced by graduate students with chronic illnesses.

The following is a guest blog post by David Schindel and colleagues and is a response to the paper by Antonio Marques et al. in Science doi:10.1126/science.341.6152.1341-a. Marques, Maronna and Collins (1) rightly call on the biodiversity research community to include latitude/longitude data in database and published records of natural history specimens.

The following is a first for iPhylo, a guest post by Bob Mesibov. Rod Page introduced 'dark taxa' here on iPhylo in April 2011. He wrote: Rod suggested that 'quite a lot' of biology can be done without taxonomic names. For the dark taxa in GenBank, that might well mean doing biology without organisms – a surprising thought if you're a whole-organism biologist.

Ethan and I have been watching the emergence of crowdfunding in science with great interest. We meant to blog about it, but our rate of blog idea generation is >> our rate of blog writing.

Re-posted with permission.

[This is a guest post by frequent commenter Heinrich Mallison .  Heinrich is maybe best known to SV-POW! readers for his work on digital modelling of sauropodomorphs, though that may change now that his paper on sauropod rearing mechanics is out.  Read on …] Maybe this post should have been titled “How sauropods breathed, ate, and farted”. Or maybe not.