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After my short post on what to leave out of a conference talk, here are few more positive thoughts on what to include , based on some of the SVPCA talks that really stayed with me. First, Graeme Lloyd’s talk in the macroevolution symposium did a great job of explaining very complex concepts well (different ways of mapping morphospace onto phylogeny). It was a necessarily difficult talk to follow, and I did get lost a few times.

I deliberately left a lot of things out of the poster I presented at SVPCA: an abstract (who needs repetition?), institutional logos (who cares?), references (no-one’s going to follow them up that couldn’t find what they need in other ways), headings (all the text was in figure captions) and generally as much text as I could omit without compromising clarity.

Yesterday, Matt and I showed our posters in a two-hour session at SVPCA, as two of about thirty.

We’ve not done many picture-of-the-week posts here recently. Let’s change that! Here’s a lovely little specimen that we saw in BYU on the 2016 Sauropocalypse trip.

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.

Lots of discussion online lately about unpaid peer reviews and whether this indicates a “degraded sense of community” in academia, improper commoditization of the unwritten responsibilities of academics, or a sign that we should rethink incentives in academia.

Here is a fascinating sequence of five consecutive posterior dorsal vertebra — AMNH FARB 291 from the“Big Bone Room“ at the AMNH: {.wp-image-14329 .size-full aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-14329” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“14329” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2017/08/15/biconcavoposeidon/figure-d-lateral-view-dscn6126/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/figure-d-lateral-view-dscn6126.jpeg”

A bunch of stuff, loosely organized by theme. Media First up, I need to thank Brian Switek, who invited me to comment on Patagotitan for his piece at Smithsonian. I think he did a great job on that, arguably the best of any of the first-day major media outlet pieces.

“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.