A quiz. What is this?

Predatory publishers are an increasingly prevalent problem. Jeffrey Beall’s list is getting a lot of coverage recently, including stories in Nature and in the New York Times . But the most recent and troubling predatory-publisher story I’ve read is about a lawsuit. No, not the Edwin Mellen Press libel suit.

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Generally when we present specimen photos in papers, we cut out the backgrounds so that only the bone is visible — as in this photo of dorsal vertebrae A and B of NHM R5937 “The Archbishop”, an as-yet indeterminate Tendaguru brachiosaur, in right lateral view: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8381 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“8381”

A while back, I posted about a squirrel mandible that I’d acquired, and how ridiculously huge its incisor was.

It’s well worth reading this story about Thomas Herndon, a graduate student who as part of his training set out to replicate a well-known study in his field. The work he chose, Growth in a Time of Debt by Reinhart and Rogoff, claims to show that “median growth rates for countries with public debt over roughly 90 percent of GDP are about one percent lower than otherwise;

Up top there is a commercially obtained cast sculpture of a thumb claw of Megaraptor. Down below is an unpainted urethane cast of one of my favorite inanimate objects in the universe: OMNH 780, a thumb claw of Saurophaganax.

I guess pretty much all researchers must suffer from Imposter Syndrome every now and then — the sense of not really belonging, not knowing enough, not getting enough done to justify our position.

Back in 2010, SVPCA was held in Cambridge. (It was the year that I gave the “why giraffes have short necks” talk [abstract, slides].) While we were there, I took a lot of photos in the excellent Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, which was just across the courtyard from the lecture theatre where the scientific sessions were held.

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