I was a bit disappointed to hear David Attenborough on BBC Radio 4 this morning, while trailing a forthcoming documentary, telling the interviewing that you can determine the mass of an extinct animal by measuring the circumference of its femur.
I’ve always thought of SVPCA as a pretty well gender-balanced conference: if not 50-50 men and women, then no more than 60-40 slanted towards men. So imagine my surprise when I ran the actual numbers. 1. Delegates. I went through the delegate list at the back of the abstracts book, counting the men and women. Those I knew, or whose name made it obvious, I noted down;
In a comment on the last post, on the mass of Dreadnoughtus , Asier Larramendi wrote: So I did. The table of measurements in the supplementary material is admirably complete. For all of the available dorsal vertebrae except D9, which I suppose must have been too poorly preserved to measure the difference, Lacovara et al. list both the total centrum length and the centrum length minus the anterior condyle.
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We’ve touched on this several times in various posts and comment threads, but it’s worth taking a moment to think in detail about the various published mass estimates for the single specimen MB.R.2181 (formerly known as HMN SII), the paralectotype of Giraffatitan brancai , which is the basis of the awesome mounted skeleton in Berlin.
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.
Way back in November 2011, I got this inquiry from Keiron Pim: I replied at the time, and said that I’d post that response here on SV-POW!. But one thing and another prevented me from getting around to it, and I forgot all about it until recently. Since we’re currently in a sequence of Brachiosaurus -themed posts [part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6], this seems like a good time to fix that.
You’ve probably seen a lot of yapping in the news about a new “world’s largest dinosaur”, with the standard photos of people lying down next to unfeasibly large bones. Here’s my favorite–various versions of it have been making the rounds, but I grabbed this one from Nima’s post on his blog, The Paleo King.
It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper.
