I had an email out of the blue this morning, from someone I’d not previously corresponded with, asking me an important question about PeerJ. I thought it was worth sharing the question, and its answer, more generally.

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I have a new paper out today in PeerJ: “Ecological correlates to cranial morphology in leporids (Mammalia, Lagomorpha)”, with coauthors Brian Kraatz, Emma Sherratt, and Nick Bumacod. Get it free here. I know, I know, I have fallen from grace. First Aquilops, now rabbits. And, and…skulls!

In 2012, Matt and I spent a week in New York, mostly working at the AMNH on “ Apatosaurus “ minimus and a few other specimens that caught our eye.

Just launched: a new open-access journal of vertebrate paleontology, brought to you by the University of Alberta, Canada! It’s called VAMP (Vertebrate Anatomy Morphology Palaeontology), and it charges no APC. Here’s a illustration from one of the two articles in its first issue.

We have a new page on the sidebar – here – where we’re collecting as many museum abbreviations as possible, the idea being that you can copy and paste them into your papers to rapidly populate the ‘Museum Abbreviations’ section.

I’ve been taking a long-overdue look at some of the recently-described giant sauropods from China, trying to sort out just how big they were. Not a new pursuit for me, just one I hadn’t been back to in a while. Also, I’m not trying to debunk anything about this animal – as far as I know, there was no bunk to begin with – I’m just trying to get a handle on how big it might have been, for my own obscure purposes.

Last October, Mike posted a tutorial on how to choose a paper title, then followed it up by evaluating the titles of his own papers. He invited me to do the same for my papers. I waited a few days to allow myself to forget Mike’s comments on our joint papers – not too hard during my fall anatomy teaching – and then wrote down my thoughts. And then did nothing with them for three and a half months.

The Carnegie Quarry, at Dinosaur National Monument, near Jensen, Utah, is arguably the most impressive dinosaur-fossil exhibit anywhere in the world — a covered, semi-excavated quarry that’s absolutely packed with big dinosaur fossils. It’s also notoriously difficult to photograph: too big to fit into a single photo, and with poor contrast between the bones and matrix.

One thing that I’ve never understood is why some people are skeptical about sauropods using their tails defensively, when lizards do this all the time.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly seven years since the “resolution”, if you want to call it that, of Aetogate, the aetosaur plagiarism-and-claim-jumping scandal. I was contacted privately today by someone wanting to know if I had copies of the SVP’s documents published in response to this. I didn’t — and the documents are hard to find since they have been moved at least twice from their original addresses on the SVP site.