Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer. I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute.

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Last Thursday I gave a public lecture for the No Man’s Land Historical Society in the Oklahoma Panhandle, titled “Oklahoma’s Jurassic Giants: the Dinosaurs of Black Mesa”. It’s now on YouTube, on the No Man’s Land Museum’s channel. There’s a point I want to make here, that I also made in the talk: we can’t predict the value of natural history collections.

Here’s how I got my start in research. Through a mentorship program, I started volunteering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in the spring of 1992, when I was a junior in high school.

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{.aligncenter .wp-image-14560 .size-large loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“14560” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2017/12/20/omnh-1670-a-fat-shark-the-past-and-the-future/matt-with-big-apato-dorsal/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/matt-with-big-apato-dorsal.png” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

{.size-large .wp-image-14133 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“14133” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2017/05/23/omnh-2162-probable-dorsal-2-of-the-big-apatosaur/omnh-2162-apato-d2-anterior-view/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/omnh-2162-apato-d2-anterior-view.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

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Here’s an update from the road–get ready for some crappy raw images, because that’s all I have the time or energy to post (with one exception). {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8148 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8148” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/03/24/omnh-1331-is-my-new-hero/omnh-1331/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/omnh-1331.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

In the recent post on OMNH 1670, a dorsal vertebra of a giant Apatosaurus from the Oklahoma panhandle, I half-promised to post the only published figure of this vertebra, from Stovall (1938: fig.