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

University of Bristol

Mike Taylor

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?

Western University of Health Sciences

Matt Wedel

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Dödös need röck döts

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

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.

To what extent is science a strong-link problem?

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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

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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

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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”

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

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

(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?

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)

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?

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

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

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?

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.

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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)

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

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

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

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Giraffatitan skull photos

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

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

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A sauropod on Mars

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.

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

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!

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

It’s a bit shocking to find that SV-POW! is going on for twelve years old. (Our very first post was on 1st October 2007, so we’re about fifty days short of that anniversary.)  It’s cost us almost nothing to run the blog in that time — in financial terms, at least.

Would you like to give SV-POW! your money? Seriously? Well, OK then.

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?

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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

I’ll see your face-of-the-blessed-virgin-in-a-waffle and raise you the fourth dorsal vertebra of the

 Giraffatitan brancai

paralectotype BM.R.2181 (formerly HMN S II) in a dandelion leaf: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-16141 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16141” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/06/30/its-a-miracle/img_20190629_131844/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/img_20190629_131844.jpg” orig-size=“1600,1200”

It’s a miracle!

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

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

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.

Black Lives Matter

{.size-large .wp-image-17677 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“17677” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2020/05/30/giraffe-and-human-metacarpals-compared/giraffe-and-human-metacarpals-compared/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/giraffe-and-human-metacarpals-compared.jpg” orig-size=“1705,3850” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

Giraffe and human metacarpals compared

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

{.size-large .wp-image-15166 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15166” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2018/07/21/the-camarasaur-that-was-more-than-it-seeemed/camarasaurus-susa-515-on-display/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/camarasaurus-susa-515-on-display.jpg” orig-size=“4032,3024” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone

The camarasaur that was more than it seeemed

Darren Naish

Welcome to another SV-POW! world first: the first ever outing (to my knowledge) of a photo of BMNH R5333, an articulated set of two-and-a-bit titanosaur caudal vertebrae. These vertebrae come from the famous Wessex Formation of the Isle of Wight: they are from the Lower Cretaceous, and specifically from the Barremian.

Remember this broken

 Giraffatitan

dorsal vertebra, which Janensch figured in 1950?

Sauropod neural canals are weird, part 1c: unfused Giraffatitan dorsal

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Back in business

Here are the humerus and ulna of a pelican, bisected:  {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-14798 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“14798” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2018/03/17/bisected-pelican-arm-bones-of-the-oxford-museum-of-natural-history/img_0904/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/img_0904.jpg” orig-size=“4000,3000” comments-opened=“1”

Bisected pelican arm bones of the Oxford Museum of Natural History

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Shark week 3: free stuff for the shark-obsessed

What does it cost to publish a paper  in a non-open access Elsevier journal? The immediate cost to the author is often zero (though page charges, and fees for colour illustrations mean this is not always true). But readers have to pay to see the paper, either directly in the case of private individuals or through library budgets in the case of university staff and students. What is the total cost to the world?

What does it cost to publish a paper with Elsevier?

The Researcher to Reader (R2R) conference at the start of this week featured a debate on the proposition “The venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”. I’ve already posted Toby Green’s opening statement for the proposition and Pippa Smart’s opening statement against it.  Now here is my (shorter) response in favour of the motion, which is supposed to be a response specifically to Pippa’s opening sttement

The R2R debate, part 3: my response for the motion

If you check out the Shiny Digital Future page on this site, where we write about scholarly publishing, open access, open data and other such matters, you will see the following: 2009: 9 posts 2010: 5 posts 2011: 9 posts 2012: 116 posts! Woah! 2013: 75 posts 2014: 34 posts 2015: 31 posts 2016, up until the end of June: 34 posts 2016, July onwards: 8 posts 2017: 12 posts 2018: 6 posts 2019: 4 posts 2020: nothing yet.

I’ve been an idiot for three years; or, goodbye Brexit, hello Open Access!

If you don’t get to give a talk at a meeting, you get bumped down to a poster. That’s what’s happened to Matt, Darren

 and

me at this year’s SVPCA, which is coming up next week.

The “Biconcavoposeidon” poster is published

“But wait, Matt”, I hear you thinking. “Every news agency in the world is tripping over themselves declaring

 Patagotitan

the biggest dinosaur of all time. Why are you going in the other direction?” Because I’ve been through this a few times now.

Don’t believe the hype: Patagotitan was not bigger than Argentinosaurus

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Sauropods stomping turtles: a much neglected theme in palaeo art

A couple of weeks ago, I was given a pheasant, which I reduced to science and food. When we last saw it, it was down to a skinned and partially defleshed head/neck and feet.

The pheasant comes apart

University College London

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

This beautiful image is bird 52659 from Florida Museum, a green heron

 Butorides virescens

, CT scanned and published on Twitter.

Herons don’t just lie, they cheat (or at least their tracheas do)

A couple of months ago, Darren (the silent partner in the SV-POW!

The Felch Quarry brachiosaur skull

My eldest son Dan went out to visit his girlfriend Beth, shortly before the Coronavirus crisis began, during her university placement in Toulouse.

The Nanoblock Brachiosaurus

Taylor_20090007.vp

Daniel Vidal et al.’s new paper in

 Scientific Reports

(Vidal et al. 2020) has been out for a couple of days now. Dealing as it does with sauropod neck posture, it’s obviously of interest to me, and to Matt.

What can sauropod sacra tell us about neck posture?

It’s been interesting seeing the response to my comment on the ICZN petition to establish

 Diplodocus carnegii

as the replacement type species of the genus

 Diplodocus

. In particular, Mickey Mortimer’s opposition to the petition seems to be based primarily on this argument: I find this unconvincing, on the basis that the ICZN was never designed with dinosaurs in mind in the first place.

What is the nature and purpose of a type specimen?

It is pretty darned satisfying to be heading to the Isle of Wight for SVPCA next week. My only other visit was in the spring of 2004, when Vicki and I were in England on a spring break vacation/research trip.

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Cut and polished ichthyosaur vertebrae from the Isle of Wight

As explained in careful detail over at Stupid Patent of the Month, Elsevier has applied for, and been granted, a patent for online peer-review. The special sauce that persuaded the US Patent Office that this is a new invention is cascading peer review — an idea so obvious and so well-established that even The Scholarly Kitchen was writing about it as a commonplace in 2010.

Another day, another Elsevier power-grab

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.

As predicted, the popular and useful Social Sciences repository SSRN, having been acquired by Elsevier, is now being destroyed.

Elsevier has started destroying SSRN

A few months ago I got an email from Nathan Myers, who asked me:  In many ways, I’m the wrong person to ask: I’ve never started a journal, OA or otherwise, nor even served on an editorial board. But, hey, I’m not one to let something like that stop me. So here’s what I told Nathan. I’m sure I missed a lot of important possibilities: please point them out in this comments. I’ll try to keep this post updated as the landscape changes.

Tutorial 31: ways to start a new open-access journal

Everyone knows that the very first thing you should do to improve your specimen photography is to use a tripod: it eliminates hand-shake and gives you much crisper photos. In most respects, my photographs have got much, much better since I’ve been habitually using a tripod.

Accidental anaglyphs

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

Thanks to a comment from long-time reader Andrew Stuck, I realised he is also the tweeter @dinodadreviews, who pointed us to

 Xenoposeidon

in a kids’ book. Now, a review on his website of Ted Rechlin’s comic-book

 Jurassic

has pointed me to what I

 think

is the first depiction of the BRONTOSMASH!

BRONTOSMASH! in a kids’ book

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Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

My early Christmas present: a dead corn snake

Roadside reptiles of Gila Bend, Arizona

Opening today: Snakes on a ‘Pod