Yesterday I was at the Berlin 11 satellite conference for students and early-career researchers. It was a privilege to be part of a stellar line-up of speakers, including the likes of SPARC’s Heather Joseph, PLOS’s Cameron Neylon, and eLIFE’s Mark Patterson. But even more than these, there were two people who impressed me so much that I had to give in to my fannish tendencies and have photos taken with them. Here they are.

In lieu of the sauropod neck cartilage post that I will get around to writing someday, here are some photos of animals London and I saw at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum this Sunday morning.

Just a quick post to let you know that I will be presenting two different talks at the Berlin 11 open access conference on Monday and Tuesday next week.

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I just found out — thanks to a tweet from abertonykus — that this exists: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9237 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9237” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/11/10/sv-pow-fan-art-yes-thats-a-thing-now/sauropod_vertebra_picture_adventure__by_classicalguy-d6ssfil/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/sauropod_vertebra_picture_adventure__by_classicalguy-d6ssfil.jpeg” orig-size=“2025,2767”

One aspect of sauropod neck cartilage that’s been overlooked — and this applies to all non-avian dinosaurs, not just sauropods — is the configuration of the cartilage in their necks. It’s not widely appreciated that birds’ necks differ from those of all other animals in this respect, and we don’t yet know whether sauropods resembled birds or mammals.

Last time, we looked at how including intervertebral cartilage changes the neutral pose of a neck — or, more specifically, of the sequence of cervical vertebrae.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Matt and I have a couple of papers in the new PLOS ONE Sauropod Gigantism collection.

A few bits and pieces about the PLOS Collection on sauropod gigantism that launched yesterday.

This is an exciting day: the new PLOS Collection on sauropod gigantism is published to coincide with the start of this year’s SVP meeting! Like all PLOS papers, the contents are free to the world: free to read and to re-use. (What is a Collection?

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to regular readers that PeerJ is Matt’s and my favourite journal. Reasons include its super-fast turnaround, beautiful formatting that doesn’t look like a facsimile of 1980s printed journals, and its responsiveness to authors and readers.