Here’s a dorsal vertebra of Camarasaurus in anterior view (from Ostrom & McIntosh 1966, modified by Wilson & Sereno 1998). It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen in a sauropod. It makes my skin crawl.

This is an important question, and one that is all too easy to overlook. No doubt the editorial board of Lingua assumed that they owned and controlled their journal, right up to the moment they decided to find a different publisher who would help them transition to reasonably priced open access.

Step 1: Include the Share-Alike provision in your Creative Commons license, as in the mysteriously popular CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA. Step 2: Listen to the crickets. You’re done. Congratulations! No-one will ever use your silhouette in a scientific paper, and they probably won’t use your stuff in talks or posters either.

Hey sports fans! I met David Lindblad at Beer ‘N Bones at the Arizona Museum of Natural History last month, and he invited me to talk dinosaurs on his podcast. So I did (LINK). For two hours.

Anterior view. Dorsal is to the upper right. The neural spine and left transverse process are missing. Here’s a closeup of the condyle. The outer layer of cortical bone is gone, allowing a glimpse of the pneumatic chambers inside the vert.

Here is your occasional reminder of how very misleading feathers can be in understanding the true shape of an animal. An owl: And the same owl showing a bit of leg: And here are the two photos side by side: We’ve often told you here on SV-POW! that necks lie. But legs lie, as well.

This tired old argument came up again on Twitter this evening, in light of Elsevier’s me-too announcement of a preprint archive: Brian Nosek‏: Elsevier enters the biology #preprints space: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/ssrn/biorn Me: KILL IT WITH FIRE Brian Lucey‏: I’ve used SSRN from its inception. Never ever felt it as anything but useful. That’s not changed with Elsevier.

For a long while, there has been a lot of anger among researchers and academic librarians towards the legacy publishers: the big corporations that control access to most of the world’s scholarly output. But what exactly is the problem? Let’s briefly consider several possibilities, and see if we can figure out which ones really matter.

The best-preserved presacral vertebra of Vouivria damparisensis (Mannion et al. 2017: fig. 10). New goodies out today in PeerJ: Tschopp and Mateus (2017) on the new diplodocid Galeamopus pabsti , and Mannion et al. (2017) redescribe and name the French ‘Bothriospondylus’ as Vouivria damparisensis . C7 of Galeamopus pabsti (Tschopp and Mateus 2017: fig.

Turns out that if Mike and I don’t post about sauropods for a while, people start doing it for us! This very interesting project by Tom Johnson of Loveland, Colorado, first came to my attention when Tom emailed Mark Hallett about it and Mark kindly passed it on to me. I got in touch with […]

Here’s my face. I went to the dentists’ office recently for a regular checkup and cleaning, and when my dentist learned that I taught human anatomy, he volunteered to send me a high-res copy of my panoramic x-ray.