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

University College London

Mike Taylor

Since the publication of

 Brontomerus

, which let’s remember was only a couple of weeks ago, Matt’s had the rather bad manners to post about another new paper of his — a review of prosauropod pneumaticity which might be uncharitably summarised as “Were prosauropods pneumatic?  The fossils say yes”.

Ask A Biologist — yet another new paper

Darren Naish

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

The hitherto hidden half of BMNH R46870

University of Bristol

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)

Western University of Health Sciences

Matt Wedel

Now considered a junior synonym of

 Supersaurus

, on very solid grounds. Incidentally, unlike the neural spines of most non-titanosaurian sauropods, the neural spine of this vertebra is not simply a set of intersecting plates of bone. It is hollow and has a central chamber, presumably pneumatic.

The holotype dorsal vertebra of Dystylosaurus

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”

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?

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.

Windpipe and lungs in pink, air sacs in teal. Steps 1 and 3 happen at the same time — one breath of air is moving through the lungs and into the air sacs in back (1) at the same time as an earlier breath of air is moving out of the lungs and into the air sacs up front (3). Steps 2 and 4 happen at the same time as well — the air sacs in back are blowing air through the lungs (2) while the air sacs in front are blowing air out the windpipe (4).

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

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

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

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)

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!

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.

Picture is unrelated. Seriously. I’m just allergic to posts with no visuals. Stand by for more random brachiosaurs. 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.

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

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. This will hopefully sort things out: The ventrolateral processes (1) are nothing new.

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

Here’s a frozen pig head being hemisected with a band saw. The head in question, and the other bits we’ll get to later on in this post, both came from Jessie Atterholt’s Thanksgiving pig. As soon as Jessie knew she was cooking a pig for Thanksgiving, she had a plan for the head and the feet: cut ’em in half, skeletonize one half (like Mike did with his pig head), and plastinate the other.

What half a pig head looks like

UPDATE much later:

most of the links in this post are dead, but happily rights to my Cosmos article reverted to me a long time ago, and it’s now freely available here: Click to access wedel-2011-we-are-all-airheads.pdf – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Busy days. I just published a popular article on skeletal pneumaticity as a web feature at the Australian science magazine Cosmos.

Pneumaticity article in Cosmos

I am finalising an article for submission to

 Palaeontologia Electronica

. Regarding the acknowledgements, the Contributor Instructions say: “Initials are used rather than given names.” WHY?! What on earth is gained by forcing authors to thank R. Cifelli instead of Rich Cifelli for access to specimens? And of course this is the tiniest tip of the pointless-reformatting iceberg.

A completely pointless mini-rant on journal guidelines

UPDATE April 16, 2012:

The paper is officially published now. I’ve updated the citation and link below accordingly. More new goodies: Yates, A.M., Wedel, M.J., and Bonnan, M.F. 2012. The early evolution of postcranial skeletal pneumaticity in sauropodomorph dinosaurs. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 57(1):85-100. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4202/app.2010.0075 This is only kinda sorta published.

Prosauropod pneumaticity strikes back

I wrote yesterday that Open Access had been the front-page story in the

 Guardian

.  Thanks to Mark Wainwright of the Open Knowledge Foundation, I now have photos of both the front cover and the double-page inside spread: For anyone who doesn’t know, the

 Guardian

is one of the four “broadsheets” or “qualities” among Britain’s national daily newspapers.

Open access in the public eye

This is the third post in a series on neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, inspired by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). In the first post, I looked at neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropod genera based on the classic monographic descriptions. In the second post, I showed that size is an unreliable criterion for assessing age and that serial variation can mimic ontogenetic change in sauropod cervicals.

Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 3: the evidence from ontogenetic series

In the previous post in this series I looked at the some of the easily available raw data on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods. In this post I’ll explain how serial variation–that is, variation along the vertebral column in one individual–is relevant to the inferences made in the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). But first, a digression, the relevance of which will quickly become clear.

Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 2: why serial position matters

Folks — important news on Research Councils UK’s new draft open access policy.  A while back I wrote to RCUK asking when the deadline for submissions is, and I did eventually hear back from Jane Wakefield, Press and Communications Manager.

 The deadline is Tuesday 10th April

— not today, as I’d originally thought thanks to a game of Chinese whispers.

The call for comments on RCUK’s draft open-access policy is open till Tuesday 10th April

As previously reported, the lot of us are in Bonn for the sauropod biology workshop. Last night we met up at the welcome reception at the Goldfuss Museum.

Mike, Darren, rex, Vanessa, and Matt. Photo by Paco Gasco. As previously reported, the lot of us are in Bonn for the sauropod biology workshop. Last night we met up at the welcome reception at the Goldfuss Museum. It was the first time for Mike and Darren to meet Vanessa Graff and Paco Gasco in person, and of course we all got to meet people we didn’t know previously who are here for the workshop.

Many meetings

Needless to say, one of the things I love most about Paco’s

 Brontomerus

artwork is that it’s a rare and welcome example of the much neglected Sauropods Stomping Theropods school of palaeo-art. When I reviewed the examples I know of, I was a bit disappointed to find that they number only five.  Here they are, in chronological order.

Sauropods stomping theropods: a much neglected theme in palaeo-art

Back in 2005, I made this drawing of the scapula of what would become

 Brontomerus

. By the time we actually got the manuscript together to submit, I completely forgot that it existed! Which is just as well–I like the color photos of the bones in the PDF better than line drawings.

Friday follies: Raiders of the lost scap

I noticed a spike recently in people tweeting about the post Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse, and it made me wonder how it ranks among the most-viewed posts on this blog. Turns out it’s

 by far

the most viewed.

The top 10 most popular SV-POW! posts

After a couple of relatively hardcore posts on ilial osteology, we though it would be good to look at something lighter this time.  If you’re interested in dinosaurs, or indeed alive, you will hardly have been able to avoid seeing Francisco Gascó’s glorious life restoration of

 Brontomerus

.

Genesis of an instant palaeo-art classic

Let’s look a bit more closely at the holotype element of

 Brontomerus mcintoshi

, which as we all remember is the juvenile left ilium OMNH 66430.  Much of what we’ve said about

 Brontomerus

is based on the shape of that ilium, so it’s important to get right.

Reconstructing the ilium of Brontomerus

Newly out in VAMP: Danison, Andy D., Wedel, Mathew J., Barta, Daniel E., Woodward, Holly N., Flora, Holley M., Lee, Andrew H., and Snively, Eric. 2024. Chimerism of specimens referred to Saurophaganax maximus reveals a new species of Allosaurus (Dinosauria, Theropoda). Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology 12:81-114.

{.size-large .wp-image-23159 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“23159” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2024/12/22/about-that-saurophaganax-paper/allosaurus-anax-claw/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/allosaurus-anax-claw.jpg” orig-size=“2280,1824” comments-opened=“1”

About that Saurophaganax paper

For anyone who doesn’t already know,

 Palaeontologia Electronica

is an on-line, open-access palaeontology journal — the only one in the world (unless you count

 Acta Pal Pol

, which is freely available online and also published on paper.)

 PE

is sponsored by the Palaeontological Association, the Paleontological Society and the Society of Vertebrtate Paleontology, the big three professional associations, so you

An open letter to Palaeontologia Electronica

The big noise on the Dinosaur Mailing List at the moment is this thread about Rob Gay’s newly self-published book

 Notes on Early Mesozoic Theropods

, which you can buy from print-on-demand house lulu.com.

Notes on Early Mesozoic Theropods and the future of zoological nomenclature

For various arcane reasons, the SV-POW!sketeers are all neck-deep in   work, so the blog may actually become somewhat more of the APOD-style  picture-n-paragraph  thing we originally envisioned, and less of the TetZoo-style   monograph-of-the-week thing it’s often leaned toward, at least for a   while.

Tornieria caudals

Check out the new paper by Jerry Harris, “What exactly is a nuchal ligament and who exactly has one?” This is one of those papers that fires on lots of cylinders for me: it’s interesting, it’s useful, and holy crap, the work that went into it is humbling. Note that of the 75 pages in the PDF, only about the first 20 are text, and the rest comprise two massive, exhaustively-researched and exhaustively-referenced tables. It’s free at VAMP.

Interesting paper alert: Harris (2024) on nuchal ligaments

﻿Right after I saw the show Sunday night, I wrote to the folks at Dangerous Ltd to point out their dishonest editing and to request an explanation (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this first). Today I finally got a response. The message didn’t come with any formal or informal requests or warnings about not forwarding or reposting it whole or in part.

Clash of the Dinosaurs: Dangerous Ltd document their own dishonest editing

This year Santaposeidon comes to you courtesy of OMNH vert paleo head preparator and 20th-level fossil conservation wizard Kyle Davies, who took the photo, composed the card, and gave me kind permission to share it here. Needless to say, we’re happy to pass on the happy holiday wishes to all of you, wherever you are and whenever you are reading this.

It’s that time of year…

From the files of J. K. Rowling.

 Publisher #1

Dear Ms. Rowling, Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.

If Harry Potter was an academic work

I got an email a couple of days ago from Maija Karala, asking me a question I’d not come across before (among several other questions): how much poop did

 Argentinosaurus

produce in a day? I don’t recall this question having been addressed in the literature, though if anyone knows different please shout. Having thought about it a little, I sent the following really really vague and hand-wavy response.

How much poop did Argentinosaurus produce in a day?

I’m at the Royal Society today and tomorrow as part of the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication conference. Here’s the programme. I’m making some notes for my own benefit, and I thought I might as well do them in the form of a blog-post, which I will continuously update, in case anyone else is interested.

Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication

I’ve mentioned my ardent love for the Big Bone Room at BYU before. One of the cool things that you can find there and nowhere else is BYU 9047, the holotype of

 Cathetosaurus lewisi

, referred in 1996 to

 Camarasaurus

. In referring to the beast as

 Cathetosaurus

in the title I’m not casting aspersions on that referral. I’m just wondering.

Cathetosaurus lewisi and the pseudoforamen of doom

So I finally got to see the Discovery Channel’s new series,

 Clash of the Dinosaurs

. The show follows the common Discovery Channel MO of cutting between CGI critters and talking heads. I’m one of the talking heads, and I get a lot of air time, and I suppose I should be happy about that. But I’m not, for reasons I’ll explain. I need to preface what follows by saying that I thought the other talking heads did a great job.

Lies, damned lies, and Clash of the Dinosaurs

It’s a strange thing, but no-one seems to bother properly figuring their sauropods’ cervical ribs — that is, the long, thin, posteriorly directed ribs of the neck vertebrae.

Your cervical ribs are (probably) non-existent

Trying two new things this morning: grilling a turkey, and live-blogging on SV-POW! I like to grill. Steak, chicken, kebabs, yams, pineapple, bananas–as long as it’s an edible solid, I’m up for it. But I’ve never grilled a turkey before. Neighbor, colleague, fellow paleontologist and grillmeister Brian Kraatz sent me his recipe, which is also posted on Facebook for the edification of the masses.

Grilling your Thanksgiving dinosaur: live-blogging the bird

Get on over to Art Evolved and scope out the sauroponderous Sauropod Gallery. It’s brobdingnaginormous. I don’t want to seem biased, but there’s a lot of hot brachiosaurian action on display.

Scaled restoration of the giant titanosaur Puertasaurus by Nima Sassani, from the Art Evolved Sauropod Gallery  Get on over to Art Evolved and scope out the sauroponderous Sauropod Gallery. It’s brobdingnaginormous. I don’t want to seem biased, but there’s a lot of hot brachiosaurian action on display.

Sauropod-art-O-rama!

I can’t even count how many sauropod vertebra pictures we’ve posted here across the last ten years, but I am confident that the total comes to at least a lot. Here’s a picture from each year of the blog’s existence so far — let’s vote on which is the best!

Poll: sauropod vertebra picture of the decade

Jessie Atterholt and I are helping one of our students write up a pathological dinosaur bone (you’ll definitely hear more about this in time), and we needed a good example paper for our student to use as a model. We chose several, but for me the standout was Scott et al. (2015), and that’s the one I’m focusing on here.

A great paper: Scott et al. (2015) on a traumatically amputated timber wolf femur

Earlier this spring London and I got on a building dinosaurs kick, inspired by this post at Tumblehome Learning. I used a few of these photos as filler in this post, but I haven’t talked much about what we did and what we learned. Above is my first attempt at a wire skeleton for a papier mache dinosaur. Yes, despite being a dino-geek from the age of three on, I had never made a papier mache dinosaur before this spring.

DIY Dinosaurs, Part 1: papier mache

Brachiosaurus: uglier than you think (we’re sorry, but it’s true). UPDATE: Fig. 1 from Witmer (2001) showing hypothesized position of the fleshy nostrils in Brachiosaurus. How awesome was our trip to Germany?

Brachiosaurus

: uglier than you think (we’re sorry, but it’s true). How awesome was our trip to Germany? I’ll tell you: it was easily the best conference AND the best research trip I’ve ever been on. We started out with three solid days of sauropod talks at the University of Bonn. I’ve been going to SVP for ten years, and usually I’m lucky if there are three or four sauropod talks at the whole meeting, plus maybe half a dozen posters.

Shedloads of Awesome, part 2: Mike and Matt’s excellent adventure

A 3D reconstruction of the paranasal sinuses in a human (from Koppe et al. 1999). You also have paratympanic sinuses that pneumatize the mastoid process of the temporal bone (feel for an inferiorly-directed, thumb-size protuberance right behind each ear).    An x-ray of a pig skull, from here. Can you see the outline of the brain-shaped endocranial cavity? How about in this x-ray of a rhino skull? Image courtesy of Kent Sanders.

Airheads

Three years ago, Tom Redd made a very generous commitment to the SV-POW! Patreon, and he remains our most generous donor in total. When I wrote to thank him his reply included “I have thousands of questions about apatosaurus that I would like to ask you some day.”  It seemed only fair to invite him to ask some of those questions, so we asked him to give us five and said we’d try to answer them.

Five questions from Tom Redd

University of California, Merced

First, some horn-tooting. A few years ago I realized that I good lateral-view photos of lots of big stuff–a blue whale skeleton, a

 Brachiosaurus

skeleton, a big bull elephant, myself–and I put together a composite picture that showed everything together and correctly scaled. Various iterations of the project, which I undertook solely for my own amusement, are here, here, and here.

SV-POW! showdown: sauropods vs whales

MAKE MONEY FAST!!!

It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.


 Such a little thing….

— Prepare yourselves, true believers.

 Pleurocoelus

is coming!

One vert to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

I know it’s a bit soon to follow up my own post, but I’ve been in correspondence with You Hai-Lu, lead author of the Proc. B paper describing the new putative brachiosaurid

 Qiaowanlong

.  He’s been very gracious in response to my questioning the new taxon, and I wanted to pass on the fruits of that exchange.

More on Qiaowanlong already

I’ve written four posts about the R2R debate on the proposition “the venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”: part 1: opening statement in support part 2: opening statement against the motion part 3: my response for the motion part 4: the video!

The R2R debate, part 5: what I actually think

In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why

 Scientific Reports

, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate

 Nature

, is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, the

Why do people publish in Scientific Reports?

I’m just back from a three-day conference in Bonn, Germany, which I unhesitatingly nominate as the best I’ve ever been to.  To begin with, the subject was a guaranteed winner: sauropod gigantism.  I can hardly overstate how awesome it was to hear 43 talks about or relevant to sauropod gigantism (sixteen on the first day, fifteen on the second and twelve on the third).

Best. Conference. Ever.

These are the days of miracle and wonder, especially for all you right-minded people out there who are lovers of fine brachiosaurs.  I heard yesterday evening about a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: You and Li’s (2009, duh) description of a new brachiosaur, the first one known from the Cretaceous of Asia:

 Qiaowanlong kangxii

. Best of all, it’s based primarily on vertebral material: You and Li (2009:fig.

Bifid Brachiosaurs, Batman!

Was this just a half-lame attempt to fulfill our titular mandate whilst plugging my new astronomy blog? Of

 course

it was (and I just did it again!). Doesn’t mean you lot are off the hook for figuring out what it is. So here’s another image with more views. You have a week. Don’t let me down. Oh, and to sweeten the pot, 351 SV-POW!bucks to the person who first figures it out.

 UPDATE:

Too late, suckers!

Mystery vert revisited – SV-POW!bucks now on the line

I’ve been interested in astronomy my whole life, but I only got serious about it in the past two years. In the internet age, “getting serious” about something usually means “starting a blog”, so I did. My aim is to show people that enjoying the night sky doesn’t have to be time-consuming or expensive.

Mare Imbrium from my driveway, Feb. 3, 2009  I’ve been interested in astronomy my whole life, but I only got serious about it in the past two years. In the internet age, “getting serious” about something usually means “starting a blog”, so I did. My aim is to show people that enjoying the night sky doesn’t have to be time-consuming or expensive. Stop by if you’re interested.  Here’s your token sauropod vert. What do you reckon it might be?

Off-topic: Shameless cross-promotion

I mentioned last time that, as I sat next to Bob Nicholls in an SVPCA session, I started sketching an apatosaur combat in the hope that my horrible drawing would provoke Bob to do a good one. That worked admirably, which means there is no good reason for me to subject you to my own sketch. So here it is.    I think the main lessons to draw from this piece are: I can’t draw heads. I can’t draw limbs. I can’t draw torsos.

Fighting apatosaur art #4: #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt

University of Portsmouth

Those of you who have been paying attention to my recent posts will have pretty much known this was coming.

Your coccyx is contemptible

Left:

 Homo sapiens

, head, neck and upper trunk in right lateral view (unprepared specimen). Right:

 Camarasaurus

sp., skull in left lateral view. Photograph at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. 2016.

The stupidest head

Last Friday I got an email from Dr Stuart Taylor, Commercial Director of the Royal Society, wanting to set up a phone-call to talk about the issue I raised about the editorial procedure on

 Biology Letters

. I got back to him with my Skype handle, but without fixing a date or time. Then on Monday this week I was approached by Lucas Brouwers, a journalist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Discussing Biology Letters with the Royal Society

This week the SV-POW!sketeers are off to Bonn, Germany, for the Second International Workshop on Sauropod Biology and Gigantism. All three of us will be there, plus SV-POW! guest blogger Heinrich Mallison, plus Wedel Lab grad student Vanessa Graff, plus about 50 other awesome scientists from around the world. So we’ll have a ton of fun, but we probably won’t get much posted.

Hello again, old friend

Back in 1999 or 2000 Jaime Headden sent me his skeletal reconstruction of what was then known as

 Titanosaurus colberti

(Jain and Bandyopadhyay 1997), but which has recently been renamed

 Isisaurus colberti

by Upchurch and Wilson (2004). Jaime’s skeletal reconstruction and life restoration are here. Somebody threw a skin over the recon to produce this life restoration.

How shortweird was Isisaurus?

Again, another exclusive peek at an interesting specimen: the MIWG.7306 vertebra, aka ‘Angloposeidon’ (Naish

 et al

. 2004). Apologies if, by now, you’re bored of my show-casing of this specimen, but – not only is it the only sauropod vertebra of which I personally have multiple unpublished images – it is also a really nice demonstration of the fact that, even in just a single vertebra, there are

 multiple

interesting, bizarre, and

Invading the postzyg

This is the final post reviewing the

 Apatosaurus

maquette from Sideshow Collectibles. Previous posts in the series are: Part 1: intro Part 2: the head Part 3: the neck Part 4: body, tail, limbs, base, and skull Part 5: posture Part 6: texture and color First, the objective verdict.

Sideshow Collectibles Apatosaurus maquette, Part 7: verdict

This is the fourth in a series of posts in which I review the

 Apatosaurus

maquette from Sideshow Collectibles. Other posts in the series are: Part 1: intro Part 2: the head Part 3: the neck Part 5: posture Part 6: texture and color Part 7: verdict A long-running theme here at SV-POW!

Sideshow Collectibles Apatosaurus maquette, Part 4: body, tail, limbs, base, and skull

A package!  A package has arrived! What can it be? All

 right

!  Let’s get down to business? Now, where did I leave that monitor-lizard neck skeleton?  Ah yes …

 That’s

what I’m talkin’ about. … Stay tuned for exciting news about turkey zygapophyses.

The gloves are off!

One thing that I’ve never understood is why some people are skeptical about sauropods using their tails defensively, when lizards do this all the time.

Murphy and Mitchell (1974: fig. 1)  One thing that I’ve never understood is why some people are skeptical about sauropods using their tails defensively, when lizards do this all the time.

Defensive use of the tail in monitors – and also sauropods?

Two things to briefly report.  First, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has just announced its new policy that “all published EPSRC-funded research articles submitted for publication from 1 September 2011 must be made available on an Open Access basis”.  This policy brings EPSRC in line with other UK Research Councils (EPSRC is one of seven), the Wellcome Trust, and US funding bodies such as the NSF and NIH.

More moves towards universal open access

I have just sent this letter to the Editorial Office of the brand new open-access journal Biology Open, which has just published its very first issue. I feel like a bit of a jerk sending a criticism when they’re just up and running, but I think it’s the best thing in the long run.  I will let you know what they say if/when they reply.

 Update (28 March 2012).

They did: read all about it.

Biology Open journal uses not-quite-open CC-BY-NC-SA licence

On the right, under the list of Pages, is a new one called Human anatomy study materials. It’s a bunch of stuff I’ve made for students over the years. As I wrote on the page, if you like them, use them; if not, ignore ‘em; and if you find errors, please let me know.

New on the sidebar: human anatomy resources

Last time I argued that traditional pre-publication peer-review isn’t necessarily worth the heavy burden it imposes. I guess no-one who’s been involved in the review process — as an author, editor or reviewer — will deny that it imposes significant costs, both in the time of all the participants, and in the delay in getting new work to press. Where I expected more pushback was in the claim that the benefits are not great.

Some more of peer-review’s greatest mistakes

In a comment on the last post, Anonymous wrote: I was wondering, in the course of your career, have you ever gotten tired of studying sauropods?

In a comment on the last post, Anonymous wrote:  I am going to answer first for myself, and then invite Mike and Darren and everyone else to share their thoughts. For me, two things. First, I don’t always work on sauropods–I have a human anatomy paper in press, and two different projects on mammal skull osteology struggling toward publication, and a couple of bird things.

On breadth in research interests

Introduction

I’m sure we all remember the White House OSTP’s recent memo on open access — a huge step forward that extends an NIH-like Green OA policy to all US federally funded research. It was a triumph for common sense, an explicit repudiation of the mindset behind the Research Works Act, and an affirmation for the ongoing FASTR legislation.

All joined with a single voice to praise CHORUS, thus: “meh.”

The best part of a month ago, we posted the first two articles in a series of four on giving good talks: part 1 on planning, and part 2 on preparing the actual slides.  Then we got distracted and posted a whole sequence of articles on Open Access ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]).

Tutorial 16: giving good talks, part 3: rehearsal

My 40th birthday present from Vicki. I commissioned the art from Brian Engh. I bow to no one in my love for his original

 Aquilops

head reconstruction: Life restoration of Aquilops by Brian Engh. Farke et al. (2014: fig. 6C). CC-BY. BUT it’s waaay too detailed for a tattoo unless I wanted a full back piece.

New information on the integumentary ornamentation of Aquilops americanus (that I have on my shoulder)

In the spirit of Your neck is pathetic and Your torso is also pretty lame, I note that your sacrum is negligible: We have here the sacrum of the

 Haplocanthosaurus priscus

holotype CM 572, in ventral view with the ilia still in place (so that the slightly hourglass-shaped dark regions you see on either side are the acetabular regions of the ilia, facing downwards). To the right is the sacrum of a good-sized adult male human such as my

Your sacrum is negligible

Jennifer Raff wrote a useful guest post on the PeerJ Blog: How To Become Good At Peer-Review.

 Most of its advice is excellent

, and I’d heartily recommend it to anyone starting out on reviewing. But there are three points where I disagree with it. Here are the three things Jennifer said, and my counter-points.

How to become good at peer-review: three points of disagreement

In an email, Vladimir Socha drew my attention to the fact that Tom Holtz’s dinosaur encyclopaedia estimates the maximum height of

 Sauroposeidon

as 20 meters plus, and asked whether that was really possible.  Here’s what Tom actually wrote: “

 Sauroposeidon

was one of the largest of all dinosaurs.

How tallweird was Sauroposeidon?

New paper out today, in Geology of the Intermountain West (free at this link): Boisvert, Colin, Bivens, Gunnar, Curtice, Brian, Wilhite, Ray, and Wedel, Mathew. 2025. Census of currently known specimens of the Late Jurassic sauropod

 Haplocanthosaurus

from the Morrison Formation, USA.

New paper out today: Boisvert et al. (2025) on all the Haplos

I keep wishing there was a single place out there where I could look up Jensen’s old BYU specimen numbers for

 Supersaurus

,

 Ultrasaurus

and

 Dystylosaurus

elements, and find the modern equivalents, or vice versa. Then I realised there’s no reason not to just make one. So here goes! The first column shows the specimen numbers as used in Jensen (1985), and last column contains Jensen’s own assignments except where noted.

Table of old and new BYU specimen numbers

Great news! I just got off the phone with someone at the Discovery Channel. He asked not to be named, but he has responsibility for

 Clash of the Dinosaurs

and the authority to do what he promised, which is to fix the “second brain” segment exactly as I asked in the previous post! He said that the program would not be broadcast again until that segment was fixed, and that the fixed version would be in the DVD/Blu-ray release.

Clash of the Dinosaurs: The Discovery Channel steps up

Last October, we published a sequence of posts about misleading review/reject/resubmit practices by Royal Society journals (Dear Royal Society, please stop lying to us about publication times; We will no longer provide peer reviews for Royal Society journals until they adopt honest editorial policies;

 Biology Letters

does trumpet its submission-to-acceptance time;

The Royal Society has taken some steps to improving reporting of submit/resubmit/accept times

Credit: anonymous tattoo, Grant Harding for the caption.  Update. Here is the Instagram post that Grant got this from. Unfortunately it seems to be from an account that specialises in reposting others’ work without attribution, so we don’t know where the tattoo photo originated.

Stevens &amp; Parrish 1999 vs. Taylor et al. 2009

Folks, just a short post to let you know that, together with my colleagues in the @access Working Group, I have just launched a new web-site. One of the problems we have in promoting Open Access is getting non-scholars involved.  So the whole enterprise can feel like an ivory-tower issue, one that just doesn’t affect the great majority of people.  But that’s not true. The new site is called

 Who needs access?

A new site: Who needs access? You need access!

Here’s the answer to last week’s riddle. The big vertebra was obviously cervical 8 of

 Sauroposeidon

, which you’ve seen here more than once. The small vertebra is also a mid-cervical, also from the Early Cretaceous, but from Croatia rather than Oklahoma. The very long centrum, unbifurcated neural spine, and extensive pneumatic sculpturing mark it as a brachiosaurid.

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

A great paper: Scott et al. (2015) on a traumatically amputated timber wolf femur