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Sorry for the short notice, but I just wanted to let you all know: Today is Academic-Led Publishing Day, which the official website describes as “a global digital event to foster discussions about how members of the scholarly community can develop and support academic-led publishing initiatives”. More informally, it’s about how we can throw off the shackles of “publishers” that have made themselves our masters rather than our servants.

I was delighted today to see a tweet from dinodadreviews: https://twitter.com/dinodadreviews/status/1086494527345623040 (Here is it, archived, in case it goes away for any reason): This is a nice, elegant bit of artwork, based of course on the old brachiosaurid interpretation of Xenoposeidon — which has been superseded by the new rebbachisaurid interpretation, but the author and designer weren’t to know that.

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In short, no. I discussed this a bit in the first post of the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga, but it deserves a more thorough unpacking, so we can put this dumb idea to bed once and for all. As Marco brought up in the comments on the previous post, glycogen bodies are probably to blame for the idea that some dinosaurs had a second brain to run their back ends.

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Ray Wilhite posted this gorgeous image on a Facebook thread, and we’re re-posting it here with his permission.

If you followed along with the last post in this series, you now have some bird vertebrae to play with. Here are some things to do with them. 1. Learn the parts of the vertebrae, and compare them with those of other animals Why are we so excited about bird vertebrae around here?

Last year about this time I vowed to return SV-POW! to its nominal roots: a new post at least once a week for all of 2018. It had been a while since the blog had lived up to the letter of its name, and I thought it would be a fun challenge to see if blogging to a schedule again would be inspiring or oppressive.