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This just in from John Conway: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-17892 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“17892” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2020/08/21/saltapotamus-meet-obesethocoelicaudia/obese-saltasaurus-saltapotamus/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/obese-saltasaurus-saltapotamus.jpeg” orig-size=“2121,2121” comments-opened=“1”

Long before Matt and others were CT-scanning sauropod vertebrae to understand their internal structure, Werner Janensch was doing it the old-fashioned way.

I’ve got a problem. For a paper I’m working on, I need to run a phylogenetic analysis based on that of Mannion et al. (2013) — the Lusotitan paper. The most recent version of that matrix, greatly expanded from the original version, is that of Mannion et al. (2019) — the Jiangshanosaurus paper — so I am working from that matrix. But what exactly do I do with that Matrix?

As John himsef admits in the tweet that announced this picture, it’s five years late … but I am prepared to forgive that because IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO BRONTOSMASH!

I just stumbled across this tweet from bird photographer Gloria (@Lucent508). Four photos of the same individual, apparently a Green Heron.

For those following the saga of Oculudentavis (the beautiful tiny dinosaur preserved in amber that turned out to be a lizard), three more things.

For reasons that I will explain in a later post, I am parting with one of my most treasured possessions: the badger skull that I extracted from my roadkill specimen four years ago.

Since we wrote about the putative tiny bird Oculudentavis (Xing et al. 2020) last time, things have become rather weirder.

Back in March, Nature published “Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar” by Xing et al. (2020), which described and named a tiny putative bird that was preserved in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma). It’s a pretty spectacular find.

I think we’ve all had enough of the Impact Factor as a way of measuring the quality of journals.