As everyone now knows, last week the respected and trusted Today programme on BBC Radio 4 ran an absurd nonscience piece on Brian Ford’s wild, ignorant, uninformed speculation that all dinosaurs lived in shallow lakes because that was the only way they could support their weight.

I don’t intend to write a comprehensive treatise on the morphology and phylogeny of Suuwassea . Jerry Harris has already done that, several times over (Harris 2006a, b, c, 2007, Whitlock and Harris 2010). Rather, I want to address the contention of Woodruff and Fowler (2012) that Suuwassea is a juvenile of a known diplodocid, building on the information presented in the first three posts in this series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

I wrote yesterday that Open Access had been the front-page story in the Guardian .

These have been a crazy few days for open access.

This is the third post in a series on neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, inspired by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). In the first post, I looked at neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropod genera based on the classic monographic descriptions. In the second post, I showed that size is an unreliable criterion for assessing age and that serial variation can mimic ontogenetic change in sauropod cervicals.

In the previous post in this series I looked at the some of the easily available raw data on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods. In this post I’ll explain how serial variation–that is, variation along the vertebral column in one individual–is relevant to the inferences made in the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). But first, a digression, the relevance of which will quickly become clear.

Folks — important news on Research Councils UK’s new draft open access policy.  A while back I wrote to RCUK asking when the deadline for submissions is, and I did eventually hear back from Jane Wakefield, Press and Communications Manager. The deadline is Tuesday 10th April — not today, as I’d originally thought thanks to a game of Chinese whispers.

The discussion over the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012)–see this post and the unusually energetic comment thread that follows–made me want to go back to the literature and see what was known or could be inferred about neural spine bifurcation in the Morrison sauropods before the recent paper was published.

No.  No, they did not. Despite what this clown had to say on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. (That’s occasional SV-POW! reader/commenter Paul Barrett in the back half of that audio clip, being amazingly restrained.) Turns out that the published work this interview is based on is this one in Laboratory News .

The story so far … Nature Precedings is, or was, a preprint server, somewhat in the spirit of an arXiv for biology.  It describes, or described, itself as “a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings”. This is a very useful thing.

Tonight, I sent my submission to Research Councils UK in response to their call for comments on the recently issued docment RCUK Proposed Policy on Access to Research Outputs .  I am now posting my comments publicly.