As I mentioned in my first post on Aquilops , I drew the skull reconstructions that appear in figure 6 of the paper (Farke et al. 2014). I’m writing this post to explain that process.

Today sees the description of Aquilops americanus (“American eagle face”), a new basal neoceratopsian from the Cloverly Formation of Montana, by Andy Farke, Rich Cifelli, Des Maxwell, and myself, with life restorations by Brian Engh.

It’s been a week since Nature announced what they are now calling “read-only sharing by subscribers” — a much more accurate title than the one they originally used on that piece, “Nature makes all articles free to view” [old link, which now redirects]. I didn’t want to leap straight in with a comment at the time, because this is a complex issue and I felt it better to give my thoughts time to percolate.

I have sent this message to David Loydell and Beris Cox, the editors of the Palaeontographical Society’s monograph series.

I just got off a chat with Matt. Here is the whole thing, all but unedited, for your enjoyment. All you need to know is that my wife, Fiona, built a symphony, which Matt refers to as a boxomophone in tribute to Homer Simpson refering to Lisa’s instrument as a saxomophone. Mathew: Hey, how is Fiona’s boxomophone working out? me: O HAI.

Despite the flagrant trolling of its title, Nature ’s recent opinion-piece Open access is tiring out peer reviewers is mostly pretty good. But the implication that the rise of open-access journals has increased the aggregate burden of peer-review is flatly wrong, so I felt obliged to leave a comment explaining why. Here is that comment, promoted to a post of its own (with minor edits for clarity):

Matt’s post yesterday was one of several posts on this blog that have alluded to Clay Shirky’s now-classic article How We Will Read [archived copy]. Here is the key passage that we keep coming back to: … and of course as SV-POW! itself demonstrates, it doesn’t even need a WordPress install — you can just use the free online service. This passage has made a lot of people very excited;

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Back in 2013, when we were in the last stages of preparing our paper Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus (Wedel and Taylor 2013b), I noticed that, purely by chance, all ten of the illustrations shared much the same limited colour palette: pale brows and blues (and of course black and white). I’ve always found this strangely appealing.

I’ve been reading The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (Wood 1982) again. Here’s what he says on pages 98-99 about the strength of crocodiles, and what happens when they bite off more than they can chew.