A quick note to let you all know that George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist has been published in The Guardian, one of the four respected “broadsheet” national daily newspapers of the UK.  (It was online yesterday, and is in today’s print edition.) A few key quotes: I encourage you to read the whole thing. None of this will be news to long-time SV-POW!

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Last month, over at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs , David Orr wrote about the dinosaur conflicts he’d like to see, in place of the ubiquitous T . rex -vs.- Triceratops .  Among the fights he wanted to see was: 2. Four strategically placed Incisivosaurus vs. Giraffatitan : Two words: beaver style.

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It’s an anniversary of sorts. Not today, nor any particular day this year, but this year, 2011, marks my 15th year doing research. The last time I blogged about this was the 10th anniversary, back in 2006. Back then I was in my fifth year as a PhD student in Kevin Padian’s lab at Berkeley. I knew I’d have to finish and get a job, but I had no idea how either of those things was going to happen.

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Matt just wrote this, in an email exchange.  It struck a chord in me, and I thought it deserved a wider audience: Rats.

This just in, forwarded to the ICZN mailing list by Donat Agosti: In short, this means that if you work on plants, you will be able, starting in January, to name new species in electronic-only publications such as PLoS ONE and Palaeontologia Electronica — publications that are becoming increasingly important due to their openness and easy accessibility. This is great news for botanists.

Matt recently told us how to get ideas for papers, but if you’ve not previously published, you may be wondering how you get from idea to actual manuscript.  I’ve written about twenty palaeontology papers now, not counting trivial ones like encyclopaedia entries and corrections (plus a few in computer science).

Every now and then, you come across a sauropod skull so beautiful, it’s almost enough to distract you from the vertebrae that it was attached to.  One such is the Giraffatitan brancai skull HMN T1, which you’ve seen here before if you’ve been around for a while.