THIS POST IS RETRACTED. The reasons are explained in the next post. I wish I had never posted this, but you can’t undo what is done, especially on the Internet, so I am not deleting it but marking it as retracted. I suggest you don’t bother reading on, but it’s here if you want to. There were some surprises in the the contents of the SVPCA programme this year.

Here I am at SVPCA in 2015. I am haunted by the fact that ten years ago at SVPCA 2005, I gave a talk about the NHM’s Tendaguru brachiosaurid, NHMUK R5937. And the description is still not done and submitted a full decade later.

As stinkin’ ornithischians go, Tenontosaurus is near and dear to my heart. For some reason beyond the ken of mortals, the Antlers Formation of southeast Oklahoma has yielded only a small handful of Acrocanthosaurus (Stovall and Langston 1950;

Back in 2012, when Matt and I were at the American Museum of Natural History to work on “ Apatosaurus ” minimus , we also photographed some other sacra for comparative purposes. One of them you’ve already seen — that of the Camarasaurus supremus holotype AMNH 5761.

I have watched several people go through this sequence. DENIAL. PeerJ? What even is this thing? I’ll send my work to a real journal, thanks. THAWING. Huh, so-and-so published in PeerJ, it must not be that bad. GRUDGING SUBMISSION. Oh, okay, I’ll send them this one thing. I still have reservations but I want this out quickly. And I’m tired of getting rejected because some asshat thinks my paper isn’t sexy enough. AWAKENING.

Now that the new Wilson and Allain (2015) paper has redescribed Rebbachisaurus , we can use it to start thinking about some other specimens.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we’re keenly aware that some of our fans are just here for the hardcore sauropod vertebra action. These folks start to shift in their seats when we put up too many posts in a row on open access or rabbits or…okay, mostly just OA and bunnies. If that’s you – or, heck, even if it isn’t – your good day has come. Saddle up. Let’s ride.

I spent much of yesterday morning at the launch meeting of HEFCE’s new report on the use of metrics, The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management.

This just in: Wilson and Allain’s (2015) redescription of Rebbachisaurus garasbae , the type and only true species of Rebbachisaurus ! {.size-full .wp-image-12269 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-12269” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“12269” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2015/07/08/rebbachisaurus-gets-a-proper-description/wilsonallain2015-osteology-of-rebbachisaurus-garasbae-fig3/”

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I wanted to get my initial report on the Joni Mitchell conference out quickly. But since posting it, more thoughts have bubbled up through my mind. I’m thinking here mostly about how a humanities conference varies from a science one.