Here are three fun things to do with Aquilops , in descending order of how much gear they require.

Arriving as an early Christmas present, and coming in just a week before the end of what would otherwise have been a barren 2014, my paper Quantifying the effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs is out!

A friend’s daughter owned a pet corn snake, and a hamster. About a month ago, the former got into the latter’s cage — and in a reversal of the usual course of such events, sustained some nasty injuries. As snakes often do, it struggled to recover, and the wound seems to have necrotised.

{.wp-image-11203 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-11203” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11203” permalink=“http://svpow.com/papers-by-sv-powsketeers/foster-and-wedel-2014-on-the-snowmass-haplocanthosaurus/foster-and-wedel-2014-fig-3-dorsals/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/foster-and-wedel-2014-fig-3-dorsals.png” orig-size=“4000,4500” comments-opened=“1”

I wrote last week that I can’t support Nature’s new broken-access initiative for two reasons: practically, I can’t rely on it; and philosophically I can’t abide work being done to reduce utility. More recently I read a post on Nature’s blog: Content sharing is *not* open access and why NPG is committed to both. It’s well worth reading: concise, clear and helpful.

{.alignnone .size-large .wp-image-11244 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11244” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/12/13/aquilops-in-todays-la-times/aquilops-in-la-times-scan/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/aquilops-in-la-times-scan.jpg” orig-size=“1030,1542” comments-opened=“1”

{.wp-image-11140 .size-large aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-11140” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11140” permalink=“http://svpow.com/papers-by-sv-powsketeers/farke-cifelli-maxwell-and-wedel-2014-on-aquilops/handling-aquilops-by-brian-engh/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/handling-aquilops-by-brian-engh.jpg” orig-size=“2800,2648” comments-opened=“1”

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.

{.size-full .wp-image-11131 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-11131” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11131” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/12/10/please-welcome-aquilops-americanus/aquilops-head-by-brian-engh/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/aquilops-head-by-brian-engh.jpg” orig-size=“6437,4839” comments-opened=“1”

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.