It’s been pretty quiet around here, huh? Why? It’s all just too awful to write about sauropod vertebrae at the moment. Trump. Brexit. Perverse incentives in academia. I can’t even get up enough enthusiasm to do the revisions for my own accepted-with-revisions manuscripts, let along write blog-posts. Oh, western civilisation. And you were doing so well.

I got an email this morning from Jim Kirkland, announcing: And by the time I read that message, the sixth talk had appeared! Each talk is 20-25 minutes long, so there’s a good two and a quarter hours of solid but accessible science here, freely available to anyone who wants to watch them.

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It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend. To get this out of the way: it’s always a bad thing when legal threats make information quietly disappear;

Back in February last year, I had the privilege of giving one of the talks in the University of Manchester’s PGCert course “Open Knowledge in Higher Education”. I took the subject “Should science always be open?” My plan was to give an extended version of a talk I’d given previously at ESOF 2014.

Welcome to 2017! Let’s start the year with a cautionary tale. I’ll leap straight to the moral, then give an example: it’s very easy to reach the wrong conclusion about fossils from photos. That’s because no single photo can give an accurate impression of distortion. For that, you need at least a much bigger selection of photos; or better still, a 3d model; or of course best of all, the fossil itself.

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In the summer of 2015, Brian Engh and I stopped at the Copper Ridge dinosaur trackway on our way back from the field. The Copper Ridge site is 23 miles north of Moab, off US Highway 191. You can find a map, directions, and some basic information about the site in this brochure. The BLM has done a great job of making this and other Moab-area dinosaur trackways accessible to the public, with well-tended trails and nice interpretive signage.

Back at the start of September, I noted that Tschopp and Mateus (2016) had published a petition to the ICZN, asking them to establish Diplodocus carnegii as the type specimen of the genus Diplodocus — a role that I argued it already fulfils in practice. I wrote a formal comment in support of the petition, which I submitted on 7 September;

So I came across this tweet from Laurent Gatto, who’s head of the Computational Proteomics Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK: https://twitter.com/lgatt0/status/802189887860592640 My immediate reaction was not to retweet . Why? Because I am not comfortable recommending rejection (or acceptance!) of something I’ve not seen.

The question of whether sauropod cervicals got longer through ontogeny came up in the comment thread on Mike’s “How horrifying was the neck of Barosaurus?” post, and rather than bury this as a comment, I’m promoting it to a post of its own.