It seems the world is conveniently arranging itself for the benefit of this occasional series.  Every time I am about to post an installment, something apposite happens out there.  Just as I was preparing part 0, Bernstein Research’s investment report Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck? came out; just before part 1, Elsevier decided that the solution to their problems was to hire a PR guy;

This arrived in my inbox last week, but I’ve been too busy to blog about it until now.

Something I’ve always intended to do but never gotten around to is posting on some of the immense Apatosaurus elements from the Oklahoma panhandle. Here’s one of the most impressive, OMNH 1670, an isolated dorsal.

Harvard University is probably the single richest school on the planet.

Last time we looked at the state Elsevier has got itself into, and how it needs to make significant changes to regain the trust of researchers (and librarians for that matter). By coincidence, literally as I was writing that, Elsevier’s Liz Smith tweeted: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-5983 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“5983” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/04/22/how-elsevier-can-save-itself-part-1-easy/2012-04-21-elsevier-social-media/”

Background Today has seen the release of a Bernstein Research investment report by Claudio Aspesi, entitled Reed Elsevier: Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck? It contains some stark warnings to potential investors: And: And most importantly, this conclusion: I’m not here to gloat.

I’ve been thinking about Barosaurus lately. <homer>Mmmm … Barosaurus …</homer> The best (and only, really) good recent treatment of Barosaurus is in John McIntosh’s chapter of the 2005 IUP Thunder Lizards volume.

Item 1 : With his new piece at the Guardian,  “Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing”, Mike continues to be a thorn in the side of exploitative commercial publishers, who just can’t seem to keep their facts straight.

Last time, we saw why Haplocanthosaurus couldn’t be a juvenile of Apatosaurus or Diplodocus , based on osteology alone.  But there’s more: Ontogenetic status of Haplocanthosaurus Here is where is gets really surreal.

Introduction Last time around, Matt walked through a lot of the detailed cervical morphology of Suuwassea and known diplodocids to show that, contra the suggestion of Woodruff and Fowler (2012), Suuwassea is distinct and can’t be explained away as an ontogenomorph of a previously known genus. Although Suuwassea is singled out for special treatment in this paper, other genera do not escape unscathed.

As everyone now knows, last week the respected and trusted Today programme on BBC Radio 4 ran an absurd nonscience piece on Brian Ford’s wild, ignorant, uninformed speculation that all dinosaurs lived in shallow lakes because that was the only way they could support their weight.