This week, psychologists are the newest group of scholars to learn that their “publishers” are dedicated to preventing their work from being made public. The American Psychological Association launched a pilot to monitor and seek removal of unauthorized online postings of APA journal articles.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a database of all dinosaur specimens? Well, there is — or at least, it’s on its way. Gunnar Bivens, who we know from SV-POW!

I floated this idea on Fist Full of Podcasts, and Andrew Stuck gave it a shout-out in the comments, so I’m promoting it to a post.

Just got the APP new issue alert and there are three papers that I think readers of this blog will find particularly interesting: Ibiricu, L.M., Lamanna, M.C., Martí nez, R.D.F., Casal, G.A., Cerda, I.A., Martí nez, G., and Salgado, L. 2017.

Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a few sauropod-themed mugs, most of them designed by myself and relating to papers that I’ve been involved with.

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.