Yesterday, I followed up Veronica’s second simmering by taking more flesh off the bones, and in doing this I stared to take apart the bones that constitute the skull.
Please welcome my new best friend, Veronica the ostrich. Well, Veronica the ostrich head , if you want to be picky. She arrived yesterday morning, courtesy of the good folks at Ostrichfayre, very well packaged and still frozen and with a convenient little chunk of distal neck still attached.
In a comment on the initial Shunosaurus tail-club post, Jaime Headden pointed out the passage in the Spinophorosaurus paper (Remes et al. 2009) that discusses the club of Shunosaurus (as justification for positioning the Spinophorosaurus osteoderms on the end of its tail): And this gives the reference that I needed for the Shunosaurus tail-spikes (as opposed to the club) — reference 26 is Zhang
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A comment by Charles Epting on the recent article about self-publication led me to check the relevant section of the draft Phylocode, which I’ve read once or twice before but not recently enough for this to have hit me with the force it ought: From Chapter II. Publication , and specifically Article 4. Publication Requirements : I am … flabbergasted, if that’s the word I want.
By now you’ve probably heard that the entire UC system is threatening to boycott the Nature Publishing Group over unsustainable business practices.* First, a few links to get you up to speed. The original letter, which was an in-house UC document that leaked (possibly deliberately, certainly understandably) and then propagated through academia like the proverbial brushfire.
In a comment on an earlier article, What’s the deal with your wacky postparapophyses, Shunosaurus ?, brian engh asked: It seems we’ve never actually featured the famous Shunosaurus tail-club here before — an amazing oversight, and one that I’m going to remedy right now, thanks to Dong et al. (1989). This short paper is written in Chinese, so I can’t tell you anything beyond what’s in the figures, captions and
The big noise on the Dinosaur Mailing List at the moment is this thread about Rob Gay’s newly self-published book Notes on Early Mesozoic Theropods , which you can buy from print-on-demand house lulu.com.
Just a quick note to let you know I (Mike) was interviewed for the Enlightenment podcast at The Twenty-First Floor, along with Dave “Archosaur Musings” Hone. Dave’s segment is on common misconceptions about dinosaurs; long-time readers will be less than wholly astonished to learn that mine is on: sauropods. It probably won’t contain much that SV-POW!
This one’s mostly a housekeeping post, to keep you abreast of some notable developments with SV-POW!sketeers and friends. Added April 29 – I’m such a tool, forgot to mention that another awesomely niche-y blog has been unleashed on the paleo-blogosphere: March of the Fossil Penguins, by our friend and sometime sauropod-describer Dan Ksepka.
Here at SV-POW! Towers, we have often lamented that so much dinosaur research is locked up behind the paywalls of big for-profit commercial publishers, and that even work that’s been funded by public money is often not available to the public.