Here’s a cool skeleton of the South American pleurodire Podocnemis in the Yale Peabody Museum.

Secretary bird: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-6405 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6405” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/06/19/eyelashes-of-the-harvard-museum-of-natural-history/secretary/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/secretary.jpeg” orig-size=“1280,960” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"4.5","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

Check this baby out: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-6401 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6401” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/06/17/sperm-whales-of-the-harvard-museum-of-natural-history/img_0313/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/img_0313.jpg” orig-size=“2000,1332” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"2","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

It’s five to ten on Saturday night. Matt and I are in New York City. We could be at the all-you-can-eat sushi buffet a couple of blocks down from our hotel, or watching a film, or doing all sorts of cool stuff. Instead, we’re in our hotel room. Matt is reformatting the bibliography of our neck-elongation manuscript, and I am tweaking the format of the citations. Just sayin’.

I am finalising an article for submission to Palaeontologia Electronica . Regarding the acknowledgements, the Contributor Instructions say: “Initials are used rather than given names.” WHY?! What on earth is gained by forcing authors to thank R. Cifelli instead of Rich Cifelli for access to specimens? And of course this is the tiniest tip of the pointless-reformatting iceberg.

More from my flying visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I found this exhibition of bird eggs very striking. In particular, it was shocking how much bigger the elephant-bird egg is than that of the ostrich.

Picture-of-the-day post: a couple of days ago I had the chance to spend an hour in a very brief visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Needless to say, that was a pathetically inadequate amount of time to look at even one of the public galleries properly.

I am briefly quoted in Times Higher Education ’s new article about the White House public access petition Since my response had to be quite dramatically cut for space, here is the full text of what I sent the writer, Paul Jump: (They managed to cut that down to 69 words!)

I don’t have time to write about this properly, but a few people have asked me about the new Sellers et al. (2012) paper on measuring the masses of extinct animals — in particular, the Berlin Giraffatitan — by having a CAD program generate minimal complex hulls around various body regions.

Oh dear, this is depressing to watch. The Problem Last year (2011-12-01), Peter Murray Rust of Cambridge University published an article in BMC’s Journal of Cheminformatics — which, like all BMC journals, is owned by Springer.

I just sent this letter to Matthew Cockerill, the co-founder of the open-access publisher BioMed Central, which was acquired by Springer a few years ago. It arose from a mistake on Springer’s part that was discussed on Twitter initially. As I wrote this I didn’t particularly intend it to be an open letter.