Something cool came in the mail today: a fossil tooth of a great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. The root is a bit eroded, but the enamel-covered crown is in great shape, and it’s almost exactly the same size as my cast tooth from a modern great white. I got this for a couple of reasons.
Long-time readers will recall that I’m fascinated by neurocentral joints, and not merely that they exist (although they are pretty cool), but that in some vertebrae they migrate dorsally or ventrally from their typical position (see this and this). {.size-large .wp-image-20346 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20346”
Darren, the silent partner at SV-POW!, pointed me to this tweet by Duc de Vinney, displaying a tableau of “A bunch of Boners (people who study bones) Not just paleontologists, some naturalists and cryptozoologists too”, apparently commissioned by @EDGEinthewild: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20314 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20314” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/10/08/im-not-100-sure-what-this-is-but-it-exists/twenty-one-naturalists/”
It’s been a while since we checked in on our old friends Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley — collectively, the big legacy publishers who still dominate scholarly publishing. Like every publisher, they have realised which way the wind is blowing, and flipped their rhetoric to pro-open access — a far cry from the days when they were hiring PR “pit bulls” to smear open access. These days, it’s clear that open access is winning.
This is a lovely cosmic alignment: right after the 15th anniversary of this blog, Mike and I have our 11th coauthored publication (not counting abstracts and preprints) out today. Taylor, Michael P., and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022. What do we mean by the directions “cranial” and “caudal” on a vertebra?
They grow up so fast, don’t they? Matt and I, with our silent partner Darren, started SV-POW! fifteen years ago to the day, as a sort of jokey riff on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Here’s something that’s been in the works for a while: a popular article in Scientific American on stretch growth of axons in large, fast-growing animals: Smith, Douglas H., Rodgers, Jeffrey M., Dollé, Jean-Pierre, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022.
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Years ago, when I was young and stupid, I used to read papers containing phylogenetic analyses and think, “Oh, right, I see now, Euhelopus is not a mamenchisaurid after all, it’s a titanosauriform”. In other words, I believed the result that the computer spat out.
