Back in our annus mirabilis of 2013, one of the Wedel-and-Taylor papers was Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications (Wedel and Taylor 2013). We this published in PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology , which we chose because it was a small, open-access journal in our field that was obviously mission-driven and did not charge an APC.

TL;DR: This blog now has an ISSN (3033-3695), and each new post gets a DOI, usually a day or two after it’s published. Read on for the details. Over the years, we and others have cited a lot of SV-POW! posts in the formal literature.

It’s pretty amazing to realise we’ve been running SV-POW! for nearly seventeen years now, since 1st October 2007. And it’s astonishing, and gratifying, and even a tiny by humbling, to see how popular it’s been in its niche. That niche has turned out to be a bit bigger than we could have imagined, and I am delighted to say that earlier today we notched up our five millionth view!

If you want to find the paleontology and anatomy videos that Mike and I have done (plus one video about open access), they have their own sidebar page now, for your convenience and for our own. It’s, uh, just to the right of where your eyes are pointing right now.

My friend and frequent collaborator (one, two, three) Tito Aureliano invited me to give a talk on his YouTube channel, I suggested pneumaticity and gigantism, and here we are. There’s a decently lengthy Q&A, moderated by Tito, after the talk itself.

I intended for the next post to be a follow-up on the new paper describing the Dry Mesa Haplocanthosaurus, as I hinted/promised in the last post.

This morning saw the publication of my new paper with Colin Boisvert, Brian Curtice, and Ray Wilhite: Boisvert, Colin, Curtice, Brian, Wedel, Mathew, & Wilhite, Ray. 2024. Description of a new specimen of Haplocanthosaurus from the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry.

Hey guess what? It’s gonna be another really short photo post. Here are some pix of the Jimbo material on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Many thanks to Tom Moncrieffe of the WDC for taking a good chunk of his day to show me around.

Another quick photo post from the road. The Tate Museum has a quality in common with the Oxford Museum of Natural History, where the guiding philosophy seems to have been, “Let’s put one of every interesting thing in the world in one big room.” Tucked into a corner is this small assemblage of cast bits of ‘Jimbo’, the Wyoming Supersaurus specimen described by Lovelace et al. (2008).  Here’s a tibia. And a dorsal vertebra.

I gave my keynote talk last evening at the 28th Annual Tate Conference. I also passed out the handout shown above so people could have a handy reference for sauropod biology while I was talking. I have a link to a PDF version at the bottom of this post if you’d prefer it that way. Now that the talk’s done, I’m letting my “abstract” out into the world, here (link) and at the bottom of this post.

In opposition to my speech supporting the motion “the open access movement has failed”, here’s what Jessica Polka said in opposition to the motion. The open access movement has not failed. It is in the process of succeeding. Indeed, over 50% of papers are now open access.