Hey sports fans! I met David Lindblad at Beer ‘N Bones at the Arizona Museum of Natural History last month, and he invited me to talk dinosaurs on his podcast. So I did (LINK). For two hours.

Anterior view. Dorsal is to the upper right. The neural spine and left transverse process are missing. Here’s a closeup of the condyle. The outer layer of cortical bone is gone, allowing a glimpse of the pneumatic chambers inside the vert.

Here is your occasional reminder of how very misleading feathers can be in understanding the true shape of an animal. An owl: And the same owl showing a bit of leg: And here are the two photos side by side: We’ve often told you here on SV-POW! that necks lie. But legs lie, as well.

This tired old argument came up again on Twitter this evening, in light of Elsevier’s me-too announcement of a preprint archive: Brian Nosek‏: Elsevier enters the biology #preprints space: https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/ssrn/biorn Me: KILL IT WITH FIRE Brian Lucey‏: I’ve used SSRN from its inception. Never ever felt it as anything but useful. That’s not changed with Elsevier.

For a long while, there has been a lot of anger among researchers and academic librarians towards the legacy publishers: the big corporations that control access to most of the world’s scholarly output. But what exactly is the problem? Let’s briefly consider several possibilities, and see if we can figure out which ones really matter.

The best-preserved presacral vertebra of Vouivria damparisensis (Mannion et al. 2017: fig. 10). New goodies out today in PeerJ: Tschopp and Mateus (2017) on the new diplodocid Galeamopus pabsti , and Mannion et al. (2017) redescribe and name the French ‘Bothriospondylus’ as Vouivria damparisensis . C7 of Galeamopus pabsti (Tschopp and Mateus 2017: fig.

Turns out that if Mike and I don’t post about sauropods for a while, people start doing it for us! This very interesting project by Tom Johnson of Loveland, Colorado, first came to my attention when Tom emailed Mark Hallett about it and Mark kindly passed it on to me. I got in touch with […]

Here’s my face. I went to the dentists’ office recently for a regular checkup and cleaning, and when my dentist learned that I taught human anatomy, he volunteered to send me a high-res copy of my panoramic x-ray.

This morning, I was invited to review a paper — one very relevant to my interests — for a non-open-access journal owned by one of the large commercial barrier-based publishers. This has happened to me several times now; and I declined, as I have done ever since 2011. I know this path is not for everyone.

Cryptic Aquilops , by Brian Engh. Available as a poster print – see below. One of the many nice things about getting to help name new taxa is that once you let them out into the world, other people can unleash their considerable talents on ‘your’ critters.

Come gawk at this weirdo in public! I’ll be signing copies of The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants at regional events the next two weekends. This this coming Saturday, April 22, I’ll be at the Inland Empire Science Festival, which will run from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. There will be a ton of other special exhibits and activities, too.