Well, who knew? There I was posting images of “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesi ’s humerus, radius and ulna, and skin impression. There I was saying that this beast is due a proper description, and warrants its own generic name. And what should come out today but a new paper by Paul Upchurch, Phil Mannion and, oh yes, me, which does exactly that.
We’ve seen the humerus of the Wealden-supergroup putative titanosaur “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesi . We’ve seen the bones of the forearm, the radius and ulna. That’s it for bony remains: no other bones have been found.
Yesterday, we looked at (mostly) the humerus of the Wealden sauropod “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii , which you will recall is known from humerus, radius, ulna and a skin impression, and — whatever it might be — is certainly not a species of Pelorosaurus . Now let’s look at the radius and ulna.
It’s an oddity that in eight years of SV-POW!, we’ve never written about one of the best of all the Wealden-formation sauropod specimens: the forelimb and associated skin impression NHMUK R1870 that is known as “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii . Let’s fix that.
[I am using the term “megajournal” here to mean “journal that practices PLOS ONE -style peer-review for correctness only, ignoring guesses at possible impact”. It’s not a great term for this class of journals, but it seems to be becoming established as the default.] Bo-Christer Björk’s (2015) new paper in PeerJ asks the question “Have the “mega-journals” reached the limits to growth?”, and suggests that the answer may be yes.
Provoked by Mike Eisen’s post today, The inevitable failure of parasitic green open access, I want to briefly lay out the possible futures of scholarly publishing as I see them.
A couple of months ago, Darren (the silent partner in the SV-POW!
Somehow this seems to have slipped under the radar: National Science Foundation announces plan for comprehensive public access to research results. They put it up on 18 March, two whole months ago, so our apologies for not having said anything until now! This is the NSF’s rather belated response to the OSTP memo on Open Access, back in January 2013.
Matt drew my attention to an old paper I’d not seen before: Riggs (1903) on the vertebral column of Brontosaurus . The page I linked there shows only the first page (which in fact is half a page, since Riggs’ work is only in the right column). Why only the first page? As Matt put it, “It’s been 110 years, just give us the PDF already.
{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-11950 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11950” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/05/14/two-important-new-palaeobiological-hypotheses-regarding-diplodocids/fat-necked-apatosaurs-make-the-world-go-round/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fat-necked-apatosaurs-make-the-world-go-round.jpeg” orig-size=“1754,2113” comments-opened=“1”
{.size-large .wp-image-11937 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“11937” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/05/13/the-scale-model-of-the-amnh-apatosaurine-skeleton-amnh-460/amnh-460-skeleton-model-2/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/amnh-460-skeleton-model-2.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1113” comments-opened=“1”