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Now that Matt and I have blogged various thoughts about how to orient vertebra (part 1, part 2, relevant digression 1, relevant digression 2, part 3) and presented a talk on the subject at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress, it’s time for us to strike while the iron is hot and write the paper.

Last year about this time I wrote: Here’s a stupid thing: roughly 2-3 times a year I go to the field or to a museum and get hundreds of SV-POW!-able photos. Then I get back to the world and catch up on all of the work that piled up while I was away.

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The 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress is underway now, and will run through December 15. Mike and I have two presentations up: {.aligncenter .wp-image-15560 .size-large loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“15560” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2018/12/05/our-presentations-are-up-at-the-1st-palaeo-virtual-congress/taylor-and-wedel-2018-1pvc-cover-slide/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/taylor-and-wedel-2018-1pvc-cover-slide.jpg”

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We’ve posted a lot here about how crazy the cervical vertebrae of apatosaurines are (for example: 1, 2, 3), and especially the redonkulosity of their cervical ribs.

Scholastica is a publishing platform that offers support for super-low-cost open-access journals such as Discrete Analysis , led by Tim Gowers. They’re putting together the first Academic-Led Publishing Day on 7 February next year, and as part of the build-up, they kindly invited me to do an interview for them, kicking off their Academic-Led Publishing From the Experts series.

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Matt’s drawn my attention to a bizarre fact: despite 17 separate posts about Xenoposeidon on this blog (linked from here and here), we’ve never shown a decent scan of Lydekker’s (1893) original illustration of NHMUK PV R2095, the partial mid-to-posterior dorsal vertebra that since Taylor and Naish (2007) has been the holotype specimen of Xenoposeidon proneneukos — and since Taylor (2018) has been known to represent a