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I don’t know if this exists in the US, but here in Britain it’s common for kids in Year 11 at school (age 15 or 16) to have a week allocated where they find a position (usually unpaid) and do some work outside the school. It’s called “work experience”. A friend of a friend has a son that age, and he wants to be a palaeontologist. I was asked if I had any advice. Here’s what I wrote, lightly edited: I hope it’s useful to other enthusiastic kids.

After this year’s SVPCA, Vicki and London and I spent a few days with the Taylor family in the lovely village of Ruardean. It wasn’t all faffing about with the Iguanodon pelvis, the above photo notwithstanding.

Matt and I are about to submit a paper. One of the journals we considered — and would have really liked in many respects — turned out to use the CC By-NC-SA license. This is a a very well-intentioned licence that allows free use except for commercial purposes, and which imposes the same licence on all derivative works. While that sounds good, there are solid reasons to prefer the simpler CC By licence.

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Regular readers will remember that we followed up our 1VPC talk about what it means for a vertebra to be horizontal by writing it up as a paper, and doing it in the open.

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As usual I came back from SVPCA to a mountain of un-dealt-with day-job work, which is why it’s taken me so long to get this post done and up. I wanted to get it posted as quickly as I could decently arrange, because I had a fantastic time at this year’s meeting and I wanted to document a few reasons why, both to thank this year’s hosts and to perhaps inspire the organizers of future meetings.

I’ll have more to say about both of these in the near future, but for now suffice it to say that this (link): {.aligncenter .wp-image-16586 .size-large loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“16586” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2019/09/25/the-atterholt-wedel-and-plain-old-wedel-talks-from-svpca-2019-are-now-peerj-preprints/atterholt-and-wedel-2019-svpca-neural-canal-ridges-title-slide/”

Years ago, I wrote a tutorial on how to get a “nearly finished” paper over the finishing line in which I said “Do you really need a printed copy for this? YES YOU DO! Can’t you just do it on the screen? NO YOU CAN’T!” I was so right.