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Today should be a day of rejoicing, as it brings us a new sauropod: Arackar licanantay Rubilar-Rogers et al. 2021., a small titanosaur from Chile. It’s not, though. Because not only is this paper behind a paywall in Elsevier’s journal Cretaceous Research , but the paywalled paper is what they term a “pre-proof” — a fact advertised in a tiny font half way down the page rather than in a giant red letters at the top.

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Have you been reading Justin Tweet’s series, “Your Friends the Titanosaurs“, at his awesomely-named blog, Equatorial Minnesota? If not, get on it. He’s been running the series since June, 2018, so this notice is only somewhat grotesquely overdue. The latest installment, on Alamosaurus from Texas and Mexico, is phenomenal.

Today marks the one-month anniversary of my and Matt’s paper in Qeios about why vertebral pneumaticity in sauropods is so variable. (Taylor and Wedel 2021). We were intrigued to publish on this new platform that supports post-publication peer-review, partly just to see what happened.

What if I told you that when Matt was in BYU collections a while ago, he stumbled across a cervical vertebra — one labelled DM/90 CVR 3+4, say — that looked like this in anterior view?

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Fiona made me a cake for tomorrow.

Here are cervicals 4 and 8 from MB.R.2180, the big mounted Giraffatitan in Berlin. Even though this is one of the better sauropod necks in the world, the vertebrae have enough taphonomic distortion that trying to determine what neutral, uncrushed shape they started from is not easy.

Bonaparte’s (1999) description of the Early Cretaceous sauropod Agustinia ligabuie was notable for its identification of nine bony fragments as representing dermal armour, which he classified into Types 1–4. Here are some examples: {.size-full .wp-image-18481 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-18481” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“18481”

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for a while, about my changing ideas about scholarly publishing. On one hand, it’s hard to believe now that the Academic Spring was almost a decade ago.