I noticed a spike recently in people tweeting about the post Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse, and it made me wonder how it ranks among the most-viewed posts on this blog. Turns out it’s by far the most viewed.

Yesterday, Alex Holcome’s tweet drew my attention to Shahar Avin’s paper “Centralised Funding and Epistemic Exploration”, currently in press at The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. You can read the accepted manuscript on PhilSci Archive. My colleague Filip Jakobsen asked me to explain in layman’s terms what the paper was saying.

The opening remarks by the hosts of conferences are usually highly forgettable, a courtesy platform offered to a high-ranking academic who has nothing to say about the conference’s subject. NOT THIS TIME! This is the opening address of APE 2018, the Academic Publishing in Europe conference.

On Thursday an animatronic T. rex at the Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience in Colorado caught fire and burned down to a stark metal endoskeleton. The story is all over the place – here’s the version from the Washington Post, with a couple of videos. Naturally people started making memes out of this arresting image.

Someone on Facebook asked whether sauropods had subcutaneous fat, and by the time my answer hit five paragraphs I thought, “The merciful thing to do here is blog this and link to it.” So here are some things to keep in mind regarding the integumentary systems of sauropods.

I was in Philadelphia and New York last week, visiting colleagues on the East Coast and getting in some collaborative research. Much more to say about that in the future – even just the touristy stuff will fill several posts.

By contrast to the very delicate pelican humerus and ulna in the previous post, here is the left femur of Aepyornis OUMNH 4950 — an “elephant bird” from Antolanbiby, Madagascar.

Here are the humerus and ulna of a pelican, bisected: What we’re seeing here is the top third of each bone: humerus halves on the left, ulna halves on the right, in a photo taken at the 2012 SVPCA in one of our favourite museums.

One of the field trips for last year’s SVPCA meeting was a jaunt to Nottingham to see the Dinosaurs of China exhibit at Wollaton Hall. We got to see a lot of stuff, including original fossils of some pretty famous feathered dinos – but of course what really captured our attention was the mounted Mamenchisaurus.

Back in 2009, I posted on a big cervical series discovered in Big Bend National Park. Then in 2013 I posted again about how I was going to the Perot Museum in Dallas to see that cervical series, which by then was fully prepped and on display but awaiting a full description.

Left side, posterolateral oblique view, wide shot. Same thing, close up. Right side, lateral, wide. Same thing, close up. For more on this and other pneumatic sauropod tails, please see Wedel and Taylor (2013, here). And for more on the currently unresolved taxonomic status of FMNH P25112, see this post.