I got back on Tuesday from OpenCon 2015 — the most astonishing conference on open scholarship. Logistically, it works very different from most conferences: students have their expenses paid, but established scholars have to pay a registration fee and cover their own expenses. That inversion of how things are usually done captures much of what’s unique about OpenCon: its focus on the next generation is laser-sharp.

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Many SV-POW! readers will already be aware that the entire editorial staff of the Elsevier journal Lingua has resigned over the journal’s high price and lack of open access. As soon as they have worked out their contracts, they will leave en bloc and start a new open access journal, Glossa — which will in fact be the old journal under a new name.

Here’s the jar of wasps sitting out on the table in our back garden: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-12526 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“12526” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/11/03/things-to-make-and-do-part-18-jar-of-wasps/img_2026/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/img_2026.jpg” orig-size=“2000,1500” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"4","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

When I separated my cat’s head from its body, the first five cervical vertebrae came with it. Never one to waste perfectly good cervicals, I prepped them as well as the skull. Here they are, nicely articulated. (Click through for high resolution.) Dorsal view at the top, then right lateral (actually, slightly dorsolateral) and ventral view at the bottom.

I’d hoped that we’d see a flood of BRONTOSMASH-themed artwork, but that’s not quite happened. We’ve seen a trickle, though, and that’s still exciting. Here are the ones I know about. If anyone knows of more, please let me know and I will update this post.

I just gave an answer to this question on Quora, and it occurred to me that I ought to also give it a permanent home here.

I imagine that by now, everyone who reads this blog is familiar with Mark Witton’s painting of a giant azhdarchid pterosaur alongside a big giraffe.

Following on from his recent, and extensively discussed, offer to host SVPCA 2017, and a plan for the future, Richard Butler is now circulating his update, soliciting volunteers for the committee that virtually everyone agreed was a good idea. Dear SVPCA/SPPC friends and colleagues, We have identified you as a member of the SVPCA/SPPC community through having attended the meeting within the last five years.

In my recent preprint on the incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck specimens, I discuss three well-known sauropod specimens in detail, and show that they are not as well known as we think they are. One of them is the Giraffatitan brancai lectotype MB.R.2181 (more widely known by its older designation HMN SII), the specimen that provides the bulk of the mighty mounted skeleton in Berlin.