SV-POW!  ...  All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695

Western University of Health Sciences

Matt Wedel

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-1243 attachment-id=“1243” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2009/08/02/little-big-the-reveal/wnv-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/wnv-1.jpg” orig-size=“480,303” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}” image-title=“WNV-1” image-description=““

Little, big: the reveal

University of Bristol

Mike Taylor

Suppose you’re working on a Wealden sauropod — for example, the disturbingly

 Camarasaurus

-like isolated dorsal vertebra NHM R2523 — and for some reason you desperately want to publish your work in

 Cretaceous Research

. {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8841 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8841” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/09/14/who-owns-journals/bmnh-r2523-orthogonal/”

Who owns journals?

I have discovered a new nugget of information in my ongoing quest (part 1, part 2, part 3) to discover what the licence terms are for author-pays Gold Open Access articles in Elsevier journals. You will recall from way back in part 1 that Elsevier’s own “Sponsored Articles” page doesn’t include that information. A while after I posted that, they added a link to this page.

Understanding Elsevier’s open-access licence, part 4: who owns copyright?

I was searching for some information — what proportion of Elsevier’s revenue is from journal subscriptions.  So far, I’ve been unsuccessful with that (can anyone help?), but along the way I stumbled across Elsevier’s Annual Reports and Financial Statements for 2011. And it makes happy reading.

It’s not all doom and gloom in academia: at least Elsevier are increasing their profits!

Friday evening I was in a pub with Mike, Darren, John Conway, and Emma Lawlor. We were killing time waiting for the Pink Giraffe Chinese restaurant down the street to open. I was chatting with John about “All Todays”, his speculative presentation with Cevdet Kosemen (a.k.a. Nemo Ramjet) on how future sentients might reconstruct Holocene animals if they were known only from fossils.

Speculative sauropod sketches of SVPCA 2012

Darren Naish

It’s no secret – at least, not if you’re a regular SV-POW!

The hitherto hidden half of BMNH R46870

I made this for my own amusement, and thought you guys may as well get to benefit from it, too.

Here’s that juvenile Barosaurus pectoral vertebra sequence anaglyph you ordered

I recently handled the revisions on a paper that hopefully will be in press very soon. One of the review comments was “Be very careful not to make

 ad hominem

attacks”. I was a bit surprised to see that — I wasn’t aware that I’d made any — so I went back over the manuscript, and sure enough, there were no

 ad hom

s in there. There was criticism, though, and I think that’s what the reviewer meant.

What is an ad-hominem attack?

A short one, because I’ve been commenting on other people’s blogs a lot recently (

 Scholarly Kitchen

,

 Open and Shut

,

 The Scientist

) and it infuriates me how hard it is get a good back-and-forth discussion going in those venues. The contrast of course is with SV-POW!

Tutorial 18: how to have fruitful discussions in your blog’s comments

Remember at the start of the year, Matt and I had a contest to design a cover for a random book in half an hour?

Hey! They stole my book cover!

I was recently bemoaning the lack of published diplodocid cervical illustrations in dorsal view. Subsequently I mentioned that Upchurch et al. (2005) had illustrated five cervicals of an

 Apatosaurus

specimen. I was overlooking one other paper that contains such an illustration. Which is a bit embarrassing, as it’s one of ours. In fact, it’s our most recent paper, Wedel and Taylor (2013) on sauropod neural spine bifurcation.

Multiview of a cervical vertebra of the Apatosaurus ajax holotype YPM 1860

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8757 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8757” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/08/30/heres-that-brachiosaurus-altithorax-skeleton-you-ordered/fmnh-brachiosaurus-mount-lateral/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/fmnh-brachiosaurus-mount-lateral.jpg” orig-size=“2000,1673” comments-opened=“1”

Here’s that Brachiosaurus altithorax skeleton you ordered

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-323 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“323” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2008/12/15/just-passing-through/mike-on-ladder-with-cetiosaurus-neck-500/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/mike-on-ladder-with-cetiosaurus-neck-500.jpg” orig-size=“500,667” comments-opened=“1”

…just passing through…

As the conference season heaves into view again, I thought it was worth gathering all four parts of the old Tutorial 16 (“giving good talks”) into one place, so it’s easy to link to. So here they are:

 Part 1: Planning: finding a narrative

Make us care about your project. Tell us a story. You won’t be able to talk about everything you’ve done this year. Omit much that is relevant. Pick a single narrative. Ruthlessly prune.

Tutorial 16: giving good talks (in four parts)

Despite the flagrant trolling of its title,

 Nature

’s recent opinion-piece Open access is tiring out peer reviewers is mostly pretty good. But the implication that the rise of open-access journals has increased the aggregate burden of peer-review is flatly wrong, so I felt obliged to leave a comment explaining why. Here is that comment, promoted to a post of its own (with minor edits for clarity):

Open-access megajournals reduce the peer-review burden

Long time readers may remember the stupid contortions I had to go through in order to avoid giving the Geological Society copyright in my 2010 paper about the history of sauropod research, and how the Geol. Soc. nevertheless included a fraudulent claim of copyright ownership in the published version. The way I left it back in 2010, my wife, Fiona, was the copyright holder.

I hold the copyright in my 2010 article on the history of sauropod research

I just found out — thanks to a tweet from abertonykus — that this exists:  {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9237 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9237” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/11/10/sv-pow-fan-art-yes-thats-a-thing-now/sauropod_vertebra_picture_adventure__by_classicalguy-d6ssfil/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/sauropod_vertebra_picture_adventure__by_classicalguy-d6ssfil.jpeg” orig-size=“2025,2767”

SV-POW! fan-art? Yes, that’s a thing now

I first met Wann at SVP in 1997, in Chicago. I was an undergrad, still three months away from my B.S., presenting a poster arguing that OMNH 53062 (which would eventually become the holotype of

 Sauroposeidon

) was a new sauropod.

Wann Langston, Jr. 1921-2013

The SVP 2024 abstract book dropped earlier this week. You can download it here.

{.wp-image-22930 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-22930” attachment-id=“22930” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2024/10/20/about-that-saurophaganax-abstract/rebor-snax-jungle-variant-6/” orig-file=“https://svpow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/rebor-snax-jungle-variant-6.jpg” orig-size=“1000,667” comments-opened=“1”

About that Saurophaganax abstract

University of Portsmouth

Just a quick post to feed the desire for sheer sauropodous beauty. This picture shows a single partial vertebra in six different views.

Mystery sauropod dorsals of the Wealden, part 1: BMNH R2523

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10328 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10328” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/05/19/the-holotype-dorsal-vertebra-of-dystylosaurus/olympus-digital-camera-13/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/utah-2008-05-25-006-dystylo-dorsal-full.jpg” orig-size=“1200,1600” comments-opened=“1”

The holotype dorsal vertebra of Dystylosaurus

Brian Curtice and Colin Boisvert are presenting our talk on this project at 2:00 pm MDT this afternoon, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.

None

{.wp-image-21038 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-21038” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“21038” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2023/06/09/new-paper-curtice-et-al-2023-on-the-first-haplocanthosaurus-from-dry-mesa/haplocanthosaurus-from-across-the-morrison-curtice-et-al-2023-fig-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/haplocanthosaurus-from-across-the-morrison-curtice-et-al-2023-fig-1.jpg” orig-size=“1822,757”

New paper: Curtice et al. (2023) on the first Haplocanthosaurus from Dry Mesa

As described in the last post, Jessie Atterholt is presenting our poster on this project today, at the 14th Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota (MTE14) in Salt Lake City, and the related paper is in the MTE14 volume in The Anatomical Record.

{.wp-image-21021 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-21021” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“21021” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2023/06/09/new-paper-wedel-and-atterholt-2023-on-expanded-neurocentral-joints-in-sauropods/wedel-atterholt-mte-neurocentral-joint-figure-3/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/wedel-atterholt-mte-neurocentral-joint-figure.jpg” orig-size=“4500,1900” comments-opened=“1”

New paper: Wedel and Atterholt (2023) on expanded neurocentral joints in sauropods

New paper out today: Tito Aureliano, Aline M. Ghilardi, Rodrigo T. Müller, Leonardo Kerber, Marcelo A. Fernandes, Fresia Ricardi-Branco, Mathew J. Wedel. 2023. The origin of an invasive air sac system in sauropodomorph dinosaurs.

pala_623 207..222

Yates_20100075.vp

{.wp-image-20903 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-20903” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20903” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2023/03/28/new-paper-out-today-aureliano-et-al-2023-on-pneumaticity-in-the-early-dinosaur-macrocollum/aureliano-et-al-2023-fig-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/aureliano-et-al-2023-fig-1.jpg” orig-size=“2128,1652” comments-opened=“1”

New paper out today: Aureliano et al. (2023) on pneumaticity in the early dinosaur Macrocollum

In a third “open letter to the mathematics community”, Elsevier have announced that, for “the primary mathematics journals”, they now offer free access to all articles over four years old. The details page shows that 53 journals are involved.

Elsevier allows free access to all articles over four years old in “primary math journals”

It’s pretty amazing to realise we’ve been running SV-POW! for nearly seventeen years now, since 1st October 2007. And it’s astonishing, and gratifying, and even a tiny by humbling, to see how popular it’s been in its niche. That niche has turned out to be a bit bigger than we could have imagined, and I am delighted to say that earlier today we notched up our five millionth view!

Five million hits!

As promised, some thoughts on the various new brachiosaur mass estimates in recent papers and blog-posts. Back in 2008, when I did the GDI of

 Giraffatitan

and

 Brachiosaurus

for my 2009 paper on those genera, I came out with estimates of 28688 and 23337 kg respectively. At the time I said to Matt that I was suspicious of those numbers because they seemed too low.

How much is our intuition about sauropod mass worth?

(First of all, for anyone who’s not familiar with the plural of “pubis”, it’s spelled “pubes” but pronounced “pyoo-bees”. Stop sniggering at the back.) As Matt and I struggle to figure out the partial pubis that is one of the elements of the “

 Apatosaurus

”

 minimus

specimen AMNH 675, one of the most helpful references is Osborn and Mook’s (1921) epic monograph on

 Camarasaurus

. It’s not that 675 particularly resembles

Camarasaurus pubes of the AMNH

I am co-authoring a manuscript that, among other things, tries to trace the history of the molds made by the Carnegie Museum in the early 1900s, from which they cast numerous replica skeletons of the

 Diplodocus carnegii

mount (CM 84, CM 94, CM 307 and other contributing specimens). This turns out to be quite a mystery, and I have become fascinated by it. Below is the relevant section of the manuscript as it now stands.

Help SV-POW!: what happened to the original Carnegie Diplodocus molds?

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9252 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9252” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/11/12/dodos-need-rock-dots/dodo-skull-drawing-mjw-2013/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/dodo-skull-drawing-mjw-2013.jpg” orig-size=“2350,1440” comments-opened=“1”

Dödös need röck döts

Matt and I are writing a paper about

 Barosaurus

cervicals (yes, again). Regular readers will recall that the best

 Barosaurus

cervical material we have ever seen was in a prep lab for Western Paleo Labs.

Seriously, though, what are we going to do about privately held specimens?

Naturally I was grateful when Cary invited me to be part of the team working on Dolly, the diplodocid with lesions in its neck vertebrae (Woodruff et al. 2022; see previous posts on Dolly here and here). I was also intellectually excited, not only to see air-filled bones with obvious pathologies, but also for what those pathologies could tell us about Dolly and other sauropods. That’s the part of our new paper I want to unpack in this post.

Sauro-throat, Part 3: what does Dolly’s disease tell us about sauropods?

We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a profoundly fallible AI summary, we could read a summary written by the actual authors, who know the material inside out? We can, of course.

Tutorial 46: how to write an abstract

I was at the SVP meeting in Albuquerque in 2018 when Cary Woodruff called me over and said he had something cool to show me. “Something cool” turned out to be photos of infected sauropod vertebrae from the Morrison Formation of Montana. Specifically, some gross, cauliflower-looking bony lesions bubbling up in the air spaces on the sides of the vertebrae.

New paper: Dolly, the dinosaur with a sauro-throat

Our lungs are made up of millions of tiny bags. Breath in, fill the bags with fresh air, breathe out, empty the bags of spent air. But bird lungs are very different.

{.wp-image-19529 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-19529” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“19529” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/02/03/how-birds-breathe-in-184-words/bird-breathing-diagram-jessie-atterholt-cc-by/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/bird-breathing-diagram-jessie-atterholt-cc-by.jpg” orig-size=“2558,1920” comments-opened=“1”

How birds breathe, in 184 words

Here at SV-POW!, we are an equal-opportunity criticiser of publishers: Springer, PLOS, Elsevier, the Royal Society, Nature, we don’t care. We call problems as we see them, where we see them. Here is one that has lingered for far too long.

Dear PLOS ONE: time to sort out your multiple review tracks

This is super cool: my friend and lead author on the new saltasaur pneumaticity paper, Tito Aureliano, made a short (~6 min) video about the fieldwork that Aline Ghilardi and Marcelo Fernandes and their team — many of whom are authors on the new paper — have been doing in Brazil, and how it led to the discovery of a new, tiny titanosaur, and how that led to the new paper. It’s in Portuguese, but with English subtitles, just hit the CC button.

Here’s a video on the new saltasaur pneumaticity paper by Aureliano et al. (2021)

Background Today has seen the release of a Bernstein Research investment report by Claudio Aspesi, entitled

 Reed Elsevier: Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck?

It contains some stark warnings to potential investors: And: And most importantly, this conclusion: I’m not here to gloat.

How Elsevier can save itself, part 0: Introduction

A quick note to remind everyone that although the RWA is dead, that only brings us back to the status quo.  At present, it’s still the case that

 the great majority of US government-funded research goes behind paywalls

.  Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a public access policy that is resulting in a lot of papers being posted for general access at PubMed Central, the NIH is only one of a dozen U.S.

Sign the White House’s public access petition!

Wouldn’t it be great if, after a meeting like the 2015 SVPCA, there was a published set of proceedings? A special issue of a journal, perhaps, that collected papers that emerge from the work presented there. Of course the problem with special issues, and edited volumes in general, is that they take

 forever

to come out.

A “special issue” for SVPCA 2015 proceedings

I am just back from SVPCA, where I saw fifty 20-minute talks in three days. (I try to avoid missing any talks at all if I can avoid it, and this year I did.) As always, there was lots of fascinating stuff, and much of it not about the topics that I would necessarily have expected to enjoy.

Give a talk that holds attention!

Mysterious, never-yet-outed titanosaur caudals

condyle

For a paper that I and Matt are preparing, we needed to measure the centrum length of a bunch of turkey cervicals. That turns out to be harder than you’d think, because of the curious negative curvature of the articular surfaces.

Tutorial 21: how to measure the length of a centrum

I just read Mark Witton’s piece on the new new titanosaur

 Rukwatitan

(as opposed to the old new titanosaur

 Dreadnoughtus

). I was going to write something about it, but I realised that Mark has already said everything I would have, but better. So get yourselves over to his piece and enjoy the titanosaurianness of it all!

Please welcome Rukwatitan (over on Mark Witton’s blog)

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8818 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8818” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/09/06/now-this-is-a-man-who-truly-loves-his-sauropod-vertebrae/img_0465/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/img_0465.jpg” orig-size=“4000,2664” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"2.5","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

Now this is a man who truly loves his sauropod vertebrae

Last time, we looked at the difference between cost, value and price, and applied those concepts to simple markets like the one for chairs, and the complex market that is scholarly publication. We finished with the observation that the price our community pays for the publication of a paper (about $3,333 on average) is about 3–7 times as much as its costs to publish ($500-$1000)?  How is this possible?

Why the price of scholarly publishing is so much higher than the cost

Back in 2013, John Conway was doing some paintings and Darren Naish was drawing lots of animals for a book. I chipped in to help with their artwork and some back and forth ensued. All this happened on Twitter, and I wrote it up in an SV-POW! post with lots of embedded tweets.  But with the progressing enshittification of Twitter (I refuse to call it X), that post is rendering less and less well, and at some point will probably fail completely.

Move over, All Yesterdays: It’s time for #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt, redux!

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”

The case of the bandy-legged Diplodocus

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9741 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9741” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/02/10/giraffatitan-skull-photos/giraffatitan-skull-left-lateral/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/giraffatitan-skull-left-lateral.jpg” orig-size=“1704,1704” comments-opened=“1”

Giraffatitan skull photos

I sent this letter to Wiley today, in response to their announcement of elective open access being available in 81% of their journals.

Dear Wiley: please use Creative Commons Attribution for your open-access activities

While I was thinking about

 Diplodocus

atlas ribs, I was reminded of the ribs on the atlas of a diplodocine skull-and-three-cervicals exhibit that Matt and I saw at MOAL(*) back in the heady days of the Sauropocalypse. And that reminded me that I have other pairs of photos from the MOAL visit, which I took with the intention of making anaglyphs. like the one I did of the diplodocine.

Here’s that ornithopod-skeleton anaglyph you ordered

I was reading an article recently about crowd-funded startups. One of the featured startups aims to make divorce more painless.

Of divorce lawyers and scholarly publishers

In our

 PeerJ

neck-anatomy paper, we speculated on how long individual cervical vertebrae might have grown. Here is the relevant section: Now this speculation is shot through with uncertainty. As we’ve discussed before, at length,

 all

estimates of

 Amphicoelias fragillimus

length and mass are wildly speculative; and Parrish’s allometry result was extrapolated from an unconvincingly small data set.

Terrifying hypothetical cervical vertebrae of the Morrison Formation

I think we’ve all had enough of the Impact Factor as a way of measuring the quality of journals.

Introducing a new journal metric: the Objective Quality Factor (OQF)

vrpa_20_108.109_114.tp

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.

My talk on Oklahoma Morrison dinosaurs is now on YouTube

{.size-large .wp-image-19959 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“19959” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/03/31/new-book-chapter-challenges-of-studying-dental-cementum-in-deciduous-teeth/dental-cementum-in-anthropology-cover/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/dental-cementum-in-anthropology-cover.jpg” orig-size=“1527,2205” comments-opened=“1”

New book chapter: challenges of studying dental cementum in deciduous teeth

It’s been a looong time coming, but I just got this email from  Ellinor Michel, Executive Secretary of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature:  Fantastic news.

The ICZN now recognises electronic publication!

In a paper for which we’re currently handling the revisions, I and Matt cite several pieces of artwork, including Knight’s classic

 Brontosaurus

and Burian’s snorkelling

 Brachiosaurus

. All we have for the references are: Knight CR (1897) Restoration of

 Brontosaurus

. Burian Z (1941) Snorkelling

 Brachiosaurus

. But a reviewer asked us: I don’t really have any idea what the right way is to cite artwork — does

Citing artwork in academic papers

Sweet new paper out today by Bibi et al. in Biology Letters, on some awesome elephant tracks from the United Arab Emirates. I’ve known this was coming for a while, because the second author on the study, Brian Kraatz, has his office about 30 feet down the hall from mine.

{.size-full .wp-image-5293 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-5293” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“5293” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/02/22/bibi-et-al-2012-walking-with-oliphaunts/stegotetrabelodon-herd-colour-2/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/stegotetrabelodon-herd-colour1.jpg” orig-size=“1024,716” comments-opened=“1”

Walking with Oliphaunts: Bibi et al (2012) on the Mleisa elephant trackways

University College London

It’s been a couple of months since

 Brontomerus

came out, but new coverage continues to trickle in. For anyone who’s still following, I thought I’d draw attention to a few that I particularly like. A favourite is

 One Hip Dino

in

 The Scientist

.  It’s told largely from Matt’s perspective, and includes quotes by Mike D’Emic, Susie Maidment and Ray Wilhite.

What Brontomerus did on its holidays

{.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-15822 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15822” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/03/12/behold-the-glory-that-is-cm-555/img_9182/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/img_9182.jpg” orig-size=“4032,3024” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

Behold! The glory that is CM 555

Just a quick one for Matt Butler, who in a comment on the orignal postwrote:  I just looked as well, and here’s what I saw:  {.size-full .wp-image-6939 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-6939” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6939” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/10/06/biology-letters-does-trumpet-its-submission-to-acceptance-time/biology-letters/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/biology-letters.png” orig-size=“480,425”

Biology Letters does trumpet its submission-to-acceptance time

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for a while, about my changing ideas about scholarly publishing. On one hand, it’s hard to believe now that the Academic Spring was almost a decade ago.

{.wp-image-17474 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-17474” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“17474” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2020/03/12/storm-giant/storm-giant-brachiosaurus/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/storm-giant-brachiosaurus.jpg” orig-size=“2842,3789” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

A funny thing happened on the way to the Shiny Digital Future

Looking again at Clay Shirky’s “How we will read” interview, I re-read these now classic words: Here’s what Shirky could have gone on to say, but didn’t. An unfortunate side-effect of this shift is that we still have these big, lumbering publishing corporations clogging up the landscape, with

 nothing constructive to do

. And the reason that’s a problem rather than merely a waste, is that whereas it used to take special

Publishing is a button: what Clay Shirky didn’t say

Mathematician David Roberts has pointed me to a useful new five-part series by Martin Paul Eve, entitled

 Starting an Open Access Journal

. It’s well worth a look, for how it engages with so many practicalities and how tractable he makes it all seem. Part 1 — planning and social issues.

How to start a new open-access journal: practicalities

A few days ago I explained why I don’t think “hybrid OA” is a legitimate path to the full-open-access world we all want. The TL;DR is first that it’s offered at stupidly high prices, and secondly that it’s completely impossible to detect or prevent double-dipping because journal subscriptions are the most opaquely priced good in the known universe.

Funders have all the power in OA negotiations. So why aren’t they using it?

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?  {.size-large .wp-image-18254 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“18254” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2021/01/15/hey-look-sauropod-vertebrae/cm-diplo-and-apato-compared/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/cm-diplo-and-apato-compared.jpg” orig-size=“1800,2103” comments-opened=“1”

Hey, look, sauropod vertebrae!

A couple of months ago, I asked for your help in compiling a list of all known complete sauropods necks. This has gone really well, and I want to thank everyone who chipped in, and all the various authors I have contacted for details as a result.

The catalogue of complete sauropods necks nears completion

Revisiting Calohypsibiidae and Microhypsibiidae: Fractonotus Pilato, 1998 and its phylogenetic position within Isohypsibiidae (Eutardigrada: Parachela)

For those following the saga of

 Oculudentavis

(the beautiful tiny dinosaur preserved in amber that turned out to be a lizard), three more things.

Oculudentavis: three more things

Yesterday I told you all about the Researcher to Reader (R2R) conference and its debate on the proposition “The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”. I posted the opening statement

 for

the proposition, which was co-written by Toby Green and me. Now here is the opening statement

 against

the proposition, presented by Pippa Smart of

 Learned Publishing

, having been co-written by

The R2R debate, part 2: opening statement against the motion

vrpa_23_208.344_357.tp

Because I’ve worked a lot on the anatomy and evolution of air-filled bones in sauropod dinosaurs, I’ve spent most of my career looking at images like this:  {.wp-image-17072 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-17072” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“17072” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2020/01/28/natures-ct-machine/apatosaurus-cervical-ct-wedel-2003b-fig-5/”

Nature’s CT machine

It warmed my crooked little heart to see Mike Taylor, noted sauropodologist and disdainer-of-mammal-heads, return mammal skulls to the blog’s front page yesterday. Naturally I had to support my friend and colleague in this difficult time, when he may be experiencing confusing feelings regarding nasal turbinates, multi-cusped teeth, and the dentary-squamosal jaw joint.

{.wp-image-19588 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-19588” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“19588” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/02/09/skull-audit-wedel-responds/wedel-skull-collection-work/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/wedel-skull-collection-work.jpg” orig-size=“2720,1530” comments-opened=“1”

Skull audit: Wedel responds

First, a short personal backstory. Vicki’s and my extended families both live mostly in Oklahoma and Kansas, so they only get to see our son, London, at the holidays or at infrequent mid-year visits. Starting when London was five, every year I’ve made a photo book of his adventures through the year to give as Christmas presents to all of our relatives. These have also become cherished mementos for the three of us here in Cali.

Pro tip: turn your talks into photo books

I’ve been on vacation for a couple of weeks, hence the radio silence here at SV-POW! after the flood of

 Supersaurus

posts and Matt’s new paper on aberrant nerves in human legs. But the world has not stood still in my absence (how rude of it!) and one of the more significant things to have happened in this time is the announcement of RVHost, a hosted end-to-end scholarly publishing solution provided by River Valley Technologies.

There are more and more options for non-exploitative publishers

The history of Supersaurus — and its buddies Ultrasauros and Dystylosaurus — is pretty complicated, and there seems to be no one source for it. But having read a lot about these animals in the process of writing eleven mostly pretty substantial posts about them, I feel like I’m starting to put it all together.

Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in the 21st Century

Daily universe : Associated Students of Brigham Young University : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Lovelace et al.’s 2005 poster about the WDC Supersaurus

The history of

 Supersaurus

— and its buddies

 Ultrasauros

and

 Dystylosaurus

— is pretty complicated, and there seems to be no one source for it. But having read

 a lot

about these animals in the process of writing eleven mostly pretty substantial posts about them, I feel like I’m starting to put it all together. This post is an attempt at recognising the landmarks in this history, in chronological order.

Supersaurus timeline

UPDATE 19 May 2016

I belatedly realized that I caused some confusion in the original version of this post.

What’s up with your irregular ventral ridges, diplodocines?

{.size-large .wp-image-17712 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“17712” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2020/07/14/the-dilophosaurus-redescription-by-marsh-and-rowe-is-now-freely-available/dilophosaurus-skull-marsh-and-rowe-2020-fig-36/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/dilophosaurus-skull-marsh-and-rowe-2020-fig-36.jpg” orig-size=“1200,1500” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"0","credit":"Mathew

The Dilophosaurus redescription by Marsh and Rowe is now freely available

Our old friend Ray Wilhite sent us this glorious photo of a horse neck that he dissected recently, with permission to post here:  {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20849 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20849” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2023/03/13/the-equine-interspinal-ligaments-of-ray-wilhite/equine-neck-dissection-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/equine-neck-dissection-1.jpg” orig-size=“4080,3072” comments-opened=“1”

The equine interspinal ligaments of Ray Wilhite

Last time, I told you about my new paper, The Concrete

 Diplodocus

of Vernal (Taylor et al. 2023), and finished up by saying this: “But Mike, you ask — how did you, a scientist, find yourself writing a history paper? It’s a good question, and one with a complicated answer. Tune in next time to find out!” Paper 1 The truth is, I never set out to write a history paper. My goal was

How the Concrete Diplodocus paper came to be

Apatosaurus louisae CM 555, centra of C2-C6

If you followed along with the last post in this series, you now have some bird vertebrae to play with. Here are some things to do with them. 1. Learn the parts of the vertebrae, and compare them with those of other animals   Why are we so excited about bird vertebrae around here?

Things to Make and Do, Part 25b: what to do with your bird vertebrae

{.size-large .wp-image-15536 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15536” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2018/12/04/what-half-a-pig-head-looks-like/pig-sectioning-1-jessie-sawing-pig-head-close/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/pig-sectioning-1-jessie-sawing-pig-head-close.jpg” orig-size=“1800,2400” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

What half a pig head looks like

I wasted some time today making memes. I blame the Paleontology Coproliteposting group on Facebook.

Coproliteposting time!

The afternoon of Day 1 at TetZooCon 2018 was split into two parallel streams: downstairs, some talks that I would have

 loved

to see; and upstairs, a palaeoart workshop that I was even keener not to miss out on. There were talks by Luis Rey (on how palaeoart has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting feathers and bright colours) and by Mark Witton (on the future of palaeoart — sadly, bereft of slides). Both fascinating.

#MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt at TetZooCon 2018

{.size-large .wp-image-15370 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15370” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2018/09/25/vertebral-orientation-varanus-komodoensis-would-like-a-word/varanus-komodoensis-caudal-right-lateral-1600/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/varanus-komodoensis-caudal-right-lateral-1600.jpg” orig-size=“1200,1600” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

Vertebral orientation: Varanus komodoensis would like a word

Here’s the story of my fascination with supramedullary airways over the last 20 years, and how Jessie Atterholt and I ended up working on them together, culminating with her talk at SVPCA last week. (Just here for the preprint link?

The Atterholt and Wedel (2018) SVPCA abstract and talk are now available on PeerJ Preprints

Peer Review #3 of "Xenoposeidon is the earliest known rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur (v0.2)"

I was lucky enough to have Phil Mannion as one of the peer-reviewers for my recent paper (Taylor 2018) showing that

 Xenoposeidon

is a rebbachisaurid. During that process, we got into a collegial disagreement about one of the autapomorphies that I proposed in the revised diagnosis: “Neural arch slopes anteriorly 30°–35° relative to the vertical”. (This same character was also in the original

 Xenoposeidon

What does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”?

Mark Witton says this better than I could: Like many white folks, I have traditionally assumed that simply not being racist was doing my part, and that the actions of others would eventually convert society at large to seeing race as the non-issue it should be. I have also felt that, as a white, straight […]

Mark Witton says this better than I could:  Go and read his post. I endorse it.  And remember: the opposite of Black Lives Matter is not All Lives Matter; it’s Black Lives Don’t Matter. Don’t be That Guy.

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Long and short-necked sloths of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology

Ratites at the OK Corral

Opening today: Snakes on a ‘Pod