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.

Normally I crop, rotate, and color balance every photo within an inch of its life, but right now I have a talk to polish, hence the as-shot quality here. See you in the future — the real near future if you’re attending the 2024 Tate summer conference, “The Jurassic: Death, Diversity, and Dinosaurs”.

As I noted a week ago, to my enormous surprise I was invited to be one of the two participants in the plenary debate the closes the annual meeting of my long-term nemesis, the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was to propose the motion “The open access movement has failed” in ten minutes or less, followed by Jessica Polka’s statement against the motion;

Show your love!

Show your love!

As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote on the misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him? We did start making tentative plans for a Wyoming Sauropocalypse centered on the Tate conference, but we couldn’t find a way to make it work for various reasons.

Here’s something I’m going to be yapping about in my keynote talk, “The sauropod heresies: evolutionary ratchets, the taphonomic event horizon, and all the evidence we cannot see”, at the 2024 Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference (link): how the fossil record of sauropods is probably wildly at variance with standing populations in life, at least in terms of sizes and maturity of the individuals that got fossilized.

I know this is hardly news any more, but here is a particularly spectacular example of a Large Language model (“artificial intelligence”) making mistake after mistake. My question: Who described Xenoposeidon, when and where?

I have a new paper out: Bas, A., Kay, K., Labovitz, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2024. New double and multiple variants of fibularis tertius. Extremitas 11: 111-118. This is a straight human anatomy paper, with a dual origin. But first let me tell you a little about the fibularis tertius muscle.