Norwescon 41 Guests of Honor: Ken Liu, Galen Dara, and, er, me. Mike would like to remind you that you can get your own ‘Kylo Stabbed First’ t-shirt here. The week before last I was fortunate to be the Science Guest of Honor at Norwescon 41 in Seattle (as threatened back when). I had a fantastic time.

Marten skull on top, opossum on bottom. Internal (medial) view of the right half of each skull. These have been in my collection for ages, I just hadn’t gotten around to posting pictures. I don’t remember where I got them, but they were definitely purchased rather than collected. It’s funny, I remember the origin story of almost every bone and skull I’ve collected myself, but stuff I’ve bought tends to slide out of recollection.

Click to titanosaurize. Trust me. I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to work with Liguo Li, of Yongjinglong fame, and I took a day to run up to New York for a quick day’s work at the American Museum of Natural History.

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.

Yesterday, Alex Holcome’s tweet drew my attention to Shahar Avin’s paper “Centralised Funding and Epistemic Exploration”, currently in press at The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. You can read the accepted manuscript on PhilSci Archive. My colleague Filip Jakobsen asked me to explain in layman’s terms what the paper was saying.

The opening remarks by the hosts of conferences are usually highly forgettable, a courtesy platform offered to a high-ranking academic who has nothing to say about the conference’s subject. NOT THIS TIME! This is the opening address of APE 2018, the Academic Publishing in Europe conference.

On Thursday an animatronic T. rex at the Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience in Colorado caught fire and burned down to a stark metal endoskeleton. The story is all over the place – here’s the version from the Washington Post, with a couple of videos. Naturally people started making memes out of this arresting image.

Someone on Facebook asked whether sauropods had subcutaneous fat, and by the time my answer hit five paragraphs I thought, “The merciful thing to do here is blog this and link to it.” So here are some things to keep in mind regarding the integumentary systems of sauropods.

I was in Philadelphia and New York last week, visiting colleagues on the East Coast and getting in some collaborative research. Much more to say about that in the future – even just the touristy stuff will fill several posts.

By contrast to the very delicate pelican humerus and ulna in the previous post, here is the left femur of Aepyornis OUMNH 4950 — an “elephant bird” from Antolanbiby, Madagascar.

Here are the humerus and ulna of a pelican, bisected: What we’re seeing here is the top third of each bone: humerus halves on the left, ulna halves on the right, in a photo taken at the 2012 SVPCA in one of our favourite museums.