After my short post on what to leave out of a conference talk, here are few more positive thoughts on what to include, based on some of the SVPCA talks that really stayed with me. First, Graeme Lloyd’s talk in the macroevolution symposium did a great job of explaining very complex concepts well (different ways […]
I deliberately left a lot of things out of the poster I presented at SVPCA: an abstract (who needs repetition?), institutional logos (who cares?), references (no-one’s going to follow them up that couldn’t find what they need in other ways), headings (all the text was in figure captions) and generally as much text as I […]
Yesterday, Matt and I showed our posters in a two-hour session at SVPCA, as two of about thirty.
We’ve not done many picture-of-the-week posts here recently. Let’s change that! Here’s a lovely little specimen that we saw in BYU on the 2016 Sauropocalypse trip. (At least, this is catalogued as Diplodocus. Jaime Headden suggested, and Emanuel Tschopp corroborated, the idea that it’s more likely Kaatedocus.) References Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor.
If you don’t get to give a talk at a meeting, you get bumped down to a poster. That’s what’s happened to Matt, Darren and me at this year’s SVPCA, which is coming up next week.
Or, how a single lateral fossa becomes two foramina: through a finely graded series of intermediate forms. Darwin would approve. The ‘oblique lamina’ that separates the paired lateral foramina in C6 starts is absent in C2, but C3 through C5 show how it grows outward from the median septum.
Lots of discussion online lately about unpaid peer reviews and whether this indicates a “degraded sense of community” in academia, improper commoditization of the unwritten responsibilities of academics, or a sign that we should rethink incentives in academia.
Here is a fascinating sequence of five consecutive posterior dorsal vertebra — AMNH FARB 291 from the”Big Bone Room” at the AMNH: Matt and I first saw this specimen back in February 2009, when we were mostly there to look at “Apatosarus” minimus (and then again in 2012). As soon as our eyes lit on it, […]
A bunch of stuff, loosely organized by theme. Media First up, I need to thank Brian Switek, who invited me to comment on Patagotitan for his piece at Smithsonian. I think he did a great job on that, arguably the best of any of the first-day major media outlet pieces.
“But wait, Matt”, I hear you thinking. “Every news agency in the world is tripping over themselves declaring Patagotitan the biggest dinosaur of all time. Why are you going in the other direction?” Because I’ve been through this a few times now. But mostly because I can friggin’ read.
Matt just sent me an email entitled Are there “basal” sauropodomorphs?, in which he pointed me to Mario Bronzati’s (2017) opinion piece in Palaeontologia Electronica, “Should the terms ‘basal taxon’ and ‘transitional taxon’ be extinguished from cladistic studies with extinct organisms?” Here’s the reply I sent Matt, which at his suggestion I am posting here essentially unedited.