SV-POW!  ...  All sauropod vertebrae, except when we're talking about Open Access. ISSN 3033-3695

Western University of Health Sciences

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 11: Maps and territories

University College London

Since I started taking photographs of sauropod vertebrae back in 2004, I’ve got much, much better at it, and for the last few months I’ve been meaning to write an article about what I’ve learned along the way.

Tutorial 8: how to photograph big bones

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 12: Stereo and 3D

University of Bristol

In discussion of Samuel Gershman’s rather good piece

 The Exploitative Economics Of Academic Publishing

, I got into this discusson on Twitter with David Mainwaring (who is usually one of the more interesting legacy-publisher representatives on these issues) and Daniel Allingon (who I don’t know at all). I’ll need to give a bit of background before I reach the key part of that discussion, so here goes.

A “nuanced” position isn’t always correct

Lots of researchers post PDFs of their own papers on their own web-sites. It’s always been so, because even though technically it’s in breach of the copyright transfer agreements that we blithely sign, everyone knows it’s right and proper. Preventing people from making their own work available would be insane, and the publisher that did it would be committing a PR gaffe of huge proportions. Enter Elsevier, stage left.

Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu

Are you a lover of sauropod necks? Do you long to demonstrate to your friends and family how much better[1] they are than the necks of other long-necked critters? Are you crazy for the Taylor and Wedel (2013a) paper on

 why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks

, but disappointed that it’s not, until now, been obtainable in T-shirt form?

Get your relative-lengths-of-sauropod-necks T-shirts!

In a comment on the last post, Anonymous wrote:  I am going to answer first for myself, and then invite Mike and Darren and everyone else to share their thoughts. For me, two things. First, I don’t always work on sauropods–I have a human anatomy paper in press, and two different projects on mammal skull osteology struggling toward publication, and a couple of bird things.

On breadth in research interests

The world is full of wonderful animals, both extant and extinct, and they all have names.

The world is full of wonderful animals, both extant and extinct, and they all have names. As a result, it’s fairly common for newly named animals to be given names already in use — as for example with the giant Miocene sperm whale “

 Leviathan

“ (now

 Livyatan

). BUt there are ways to avoid walking into this problem, and in a helpful post on the Dinosaur Mailing Group, Ben Creisler recently posted a summary.

Tutorial 44: how to avoid using a preoccupied name for your new genus

There’s a new paper out, describing the Argentinian titanosaur Mendozasaurus in detail (Gonzalez Riga et al. 2018): 46 pages of multi-view photos, tables of measurement, and careful, detailed description and discussion. But here’s what leapt out at me when I skimmed the paper: Just look at that thing. It’s ridiculous.

There’s a new paper out, describing the Argentinian titanosaur

 Mendozasaurus

in detail (Gonzalez Riga et al. 2018): 46 pages of multi-view photos, tables of measurement, and careful, detailed description and discussion.

How crazy are the cervicals of Mendozasaurus?

The Sunday after SVP, Brian Engh and I visited the museum in Albuquerque. I was quite taken with the mounted T. rex. It’s waaaay more interesting and dynamic than any other T. rex mount I’ve seen.

The Sunday after SVP, Brian Engh and I visited the museum in Albuquerque. I was quite taken with the mounted

 T. rex

. It’s waaaay more interesting and dynamic than any other

 T. rex

mount I’ve seen. It even beats the “Rockette rex” in Denver (which I really like and need to blog about), by virtue of putting the body and head down at eye level where you can study them up close.

T. rex mount at New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science

…that we have somehow managed to not blog about yet. It’s figured by Foster et al. (2018: fig. 18E-F), which is a free download at the link below. Foster et al. referred it and the other Mygatt-Moore apatosaurine material to Apatosaurus louisae, which I’ve always thought was a reasonable move.

…that we have somehow managed to not blog about yet. It’s figured by Foster et al. (2018: fig. 18E-F), which is a free download at the link below. Foster et al. referred it and the other Mygatt-Moore apatosaurine material to

 Apatosaurus louisae

, which I’ve always thought was a reasonable move. More on this and other apatosaurine vertebrae in the future.

MWC 5659 is a beautiful Apatosaurus vertebra

[I wrote this in the cafe on the ground floor of the BBC’s Millbank studios, where I spent much of yesterday, just before I headed off for Paddington and the train home.  I have lightly edited it since the original composition.]  It’s been a day spent doing publicity for the new SV-POW! paper on sauropod neck posture.

Sauropod neck posture: the world responds

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 10: Figure parts and placement

A while back, Matt mentioned some of the surprising search-terms that lead people to SV-POW!. For reasons that will shortly become clear, I was checking out what’s being searched for now, and I thought I may as well issue this update.

Update on search-terms leading to SV-POW!

I hate to keep flogging a dead horse, but since this issue won’t go away I guess I can’t, either. 1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles.

How is it possible that Elsevier are still charging for copies of open-access articles?

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 9: Perspective and scale bars

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 8: Multi-view figures

I planned to post this last spring but I never got around to it. I think I have a mental block about discussing the glycogen body.

Bird neural canals are weird, part 3: the glycogen body

Sauropod guru Jeff Wilson is on Twitter, as of a couple of weeks ago.

Rebbachisaurus description incoming!

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Time running out for PeerJ free publication vouchers

Lateral (

 a, b

) and postero-dorsal (

 c

) views of the head and neck region in alcohol-preserved, intact specimens of

 Congosorex verheyeni

(

 a

, SMNS 50411),

 Surdisorex norae

(

 b

, FMNH 190260) and

 Congosorex phillipsorum

(

 c

, FMNH 177721). Posterodorsal view (

 c

) is of the same semi-transverse section, osteology in red, with

Nuchal sesamoids in shrews

Last time we talked about the evident hijacking of the PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. No-one seemed to know what had happened or how. I managed to track down Andre J. Veldmeijer, who was involved with the PalArch journals a while back.

Last time we talked about the evident hijacking of the PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. No-one seemed to know what had happened or how. I managed to track down Andre J. Veldmeijer, who was involved with the PalArch journals a while back. Based on my Facebook Messenger discussions with him, here’s what we now know:  Andre is not involved any more with these journals.

More on PalArch: it’s dead

BYU 11505, a caudal vertebra of a diplodocid from Dry Mesa, in posteroventral view. Note the paired pneumatic foramina on the ventral surface of the centrum. If you want to find the paleontology and anatomy videos that Mike and I have done (plus one video about open access), they have their own sidebar page now, for your convenience and for our own. It’s, uh, just to the right of where your eyes are pointing right now.

All the SV-POW! videos, and other stuff on the sidebar

As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote on the misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him?

As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote on the misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him? We did start making tentative plans for a Wyoming Sauropocalypse centered on the Tate conference, but we couldn’t find a way to make it work for various reasons.

Westin What’s-coming-up Wednesday —&nbsp;Wrangle over Whether OA is a Washout

MWC 861 in bone (left) and in bronze (right).  Here’s a cool comparo.

A bite-marked Apatosaurus pubis, in bone and in bronze

I said last time that Jisc’s feeble transition-to-open-access report was the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements that week. The second was of course the announcement that PeerJ has been acquired by Taylor and Francis.

I said last time that Jisc’s feeble transition-to-open-access report was the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements that week. The second was of course the announcement that PeerJ has been acquired by Taylor and Francis. Matt and I have both been big fans of PeerJ since before it launched, and we were delighted to have our 2013 neck-anatomy paper in the first batch of articles published there.

On the tragic fate of PeerJ

Utahraptor

is a “giant” dromaeosaurid from

 Utah

, described by Kirkland et al. (1993). Famously, its existence was part of the reason that the people making

 Jurassic Park

felt at liberty to make their “

 Velociraptor

” individuals not only much bigger than the turkey-sized

 Velociraptor

proper, but also than than sheep-sized

 Deinonychus

. Here’s a mounted skeleton, right in the state of Utah —

What’s up with your crazy-ass hands, Utahraptor?

Here’s Mike with the cast dorsal vertebra of Argentinosaurus that’s on display at the LACM. I tried to get myself equidistant from both Mike and the vert when I took the photo, but even I couldn’t quite believe it when I looked at it on my laptop.

Here’s Mike with the cast dorsal vertebra of

 Argentinosaurus

that’s on display at the LACM. I tried to get myself equidistant from both Mike and the vert when I took the photo, but even I couldn’t quite believe it when I looked at it on my laptop.

Giant titanosaurs were just ridiculous

I popped into my local Michaels arts-n-crafts store today to see what Halloween goodies they had. One trend I can definitely get behind is the rise of anatomical oddities and cabinets of curiosities as Halloween decor.

I popped into my local Michaels arts-n-crafts store today to see what Halloween goodies they had. One trend I can definitely get behind is the rise of anatomical oddities and cabinets of curiosities as Halloween decor. A lot of what gets marketed in this space is not my thing, like decorative skulls with snakes or butterflies or whatever. I don’t hate these;

Surprisingly decent retail anatomy

On the excellent and convivial social network Mastodon, someone going by the handle “gay ornithopod” asked what turned out to be a fascinating question: What are your thoughts on how the coloration of sauropods would change as they matured? What would you expect to see for example on this guy in comparison with an adult?

On the excellent and convivial social network Mastodon, someone going by the handle “gay ornithopod” asked what turned out to be a fascinating question:  My first response was that we can only say it’s not unusual for extant animals to change colour through ontogeny, so the null hypothesis would have to be that at least some sauropods (and other dinosaurs) did the same. But I don’t think we have any information on the specific coloration.

Did dinosaurs become more or less colourful through their lives?

Figure 1 from our 2021 paper on the Snowmass

 Haplocanthosaurus

as I sketched it in my notebook (left) and as it got submitted (right). We shifted part F into a separate figure during the proof stage for complicated production reasons. This is one of those things I’ve always done, that I’ve never thought to ask if others did.

Do you storyboard your visuals?

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Sauroposeidon and friends

The largest dinosaurs had individual cells more than 30 meters long. How did such things develop? Read on! Illustration from Wedel (2012: fig. 2).  Here’s something that’s been in the works for a while: a popular article in Scientific American on stretch growth of axons in large, fast-growing animals: Smith, Douglas H., Rodgers, Jeffrey M., Dollé, Jean-Pierre, and Wedel, Mathew J. 2022.

New article: max growth of nerve cells in big mammals and dinos

Long-time readers may recall that back in 2009, I was quote-mined in the television documentary series Clash of the Dinosaurs (1, 2, 3). Turns out, such misrepresentations are not that uncommon, and now there’s a whole feature-length documentary about the problem, titled Science Friction. The trailer is above, and the film’s homepage is here.

Long-time readers may recall that back in 2009, I was quote-mined in the television documentary series

 Clash of the Dinosaurs

(1, 2, 3). Turns out, such misrepresentations are not that uncommon, and now there’s a whole feature-length documentary about the problem, titled

 Science Friction

. The trailer is above, and the film’s homepage is here. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime Video and on Tubi (maaaybe for free?

New documentary film streaming now: Science Friction

Left to right:

alligator, beaver, black bear, armadillo, cat, ostrich. I know, the archosaurs aren’t mammals, and the alligator isn’t even a skull. But if you can’t have a lounge lizard crash your mammal skull party, what are you even doing with your life?

 Not pictured:

about four rabbit skulls I forgot I had boxed up, plus a couple of turtles (yeah, yeah) sitting on a friend’s desk, in their locked office.

Skull audit: Wedel responds

Back in May, Amy Schwartz posted a photo of a starling that shethat had ringed that morning: Impressed by the subtlety of the coloration, I wondered what would happen if I increased the colour saturation.

Back in May, Amy Schwartz posted a photo of a starling that shethat had ringed that morning:  Impressed by the subtlety of the coloration, I wondered what would happen if I increased the colour saturation.

Starlings are amazing

Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of Diplodocus?

Today finally sees the publication of a paper (Taylor 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of

 Diplodocus

? in May 2011, but it was submitted as a preprint in 2015.

A six-year quest is finally complete! Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted

I hesitate to inflict these images on SV-POW! readers, but I have to post them somewhere if only so I can point my family to them; and who knows, maybe some of the rest of you will enjoy the amusing hat. Last Friday (17th July), I drove down to Portsmouth, with my wife Fiona, to graduate — the consummation of my Ph.D programme.

Off-topic: Graduation Day!

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 7: Manipulating photographs

With our baby’s appearance in

 National Geographic

this week, she’s now been in four mainstream magazines: That’s

 National Geographic

at top left,

 Macleans

next to it;

 The Scientist

at bottom left, and

 National Geographic Kids

next to that.

Brontomerus in magazines: preparing for the media

No, not his new Brachiosaurus humerus — his photograph of the Chicago Brachiosaurus mount, which he cut out and cleaned up seven years ago: This image has been on quite a journey.

No, not his new

 Brachiosaurus

humerus — his photograph of the Chicago

 Brachiosaurus

mount, which he cut out and cleaned up seven years ago: This image has been on quite a journey.

Matt’s Brachiosaurus in the wild

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 6: Taking notes

If you’re thinking that it’s about time to look at some sauropod vertebrae from the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation, well, you’re gol-durned right, pardner. Let’s ride. Here’s a vertebra sticking out of the rock. For once it’s not in cross-section.

If you’re thinking that it’s about time to look at some sauropod vertebrae from the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation, well, you’re gol-durned right, pardner. Let’s ride. Here’s a vertebra sticking out of the rock. For once it’s not in cross-section. We’re simply looking at the posterior surface of a dorsal vertebra and bits of its associated ribs.

A Haplocanthosaurus in the Salt Wash

In the last post, we looked at some sauropod vertebrae exposed in cross-section at our field sites in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation. This time, we’re going to do it again! Let’s look at another of my faves from the field, with Thuat Tran’s hand for scale.

In the last post, we looked at some sauropod vertebrae exposed in cross-section at our field sites in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation. This time, we’re going to do it again! Let’s look at another of my faves from the field, with Thuat Tran’s hand for scale. And, er, a scale bar for scale:    And let’s pull the interesting bits out of the background:    Now, confession time.

Nature’s CT machine, part 2: an apatosaurine in the Salt Wash

Amazing diagram of the path of the vagus nerve and its branches in the neck, thorax, and abdomen, from Wilson-Pauwels et al. (1988). The gonads aren’t drawn here, but they do receive vagal innervation.

Off-topic: your gonads are innervated by your cranial nerves

Unworn: Worn: Spent some time last week just admiring these things. They’re pretty cool. EDIT: in answer to Mike’s question in the first comment below, here’s a photo of some more worn teeth, showing that the level of wear in the one shown above is not unusual.

Unworn:    Worn:    Spent some time last week just admiring these things. They’re pretty cool. EDIT: in answer to Mike’s question in the first comment below, here’s a photo of some more worn teeth, showing that the level of wear in the one shown above is not unusual.

Worn and unworn Camarasaurus teeth in the collections at Dinosaur National Monument

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 5: Use color

To my shock, I find that we seem never to have posted Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch Hello, ladies!

To my shock, I find that we seem never to have posted Bob Nicholls’ beautiful sketch

 Hello, ladies!

on SV-POW!. His recent tweet reminded me about this piece, so here it is! Like so many classic sauropod sketches, this was executed during a mammal-tooth talk at SVPCA: this one back in 2013, the year of our first

 Barosarus

talk. (Our second was in 2016.) Bob’s sketch shows speculative sexual display behaviour.

Hello, ladies!

Cool new paper out today by Yara Haridy and colleagues, describing the oldest known osteosarcoma in the vertebrate fossil record. The growth in question is on the proximal femur of the Triassic stem turtle Pappochelys.

Cool new paper out today by Yara Haridy and colleagues, describing the oldest known osteosarcoma in the vertebrate fossil record. The growth in question is on the proximal femur of the Triassic stem turtle

 Pappochelys

. Brian Engh did his usual amazing job illustrating this pervert turtle with no shell and a weird growth on its butt. I don’t have a ton more to say about the paper, it’s short and sweet.

Bone cancer in a Triassic stem turtle

What it says on the tin. This is a specimen from the UCMP comparative collection. I was just going to post this photo with zero commentary, but I can’t help myself.

What it says on the tin. This is a specimen from the UCMP comparative collection. I was just going to post this photo with zero commentary, but I can’t help myself. Note that on the two vertebrae in the middle, the

 crista transverso-obliqua

(what in non-avian dinos would be the spinopostzygapophyseal lamina or SPOL) rises higher than either the neural spine apex or the epipophyses. That’s crazy.

Pelican cervico-dorsal transition, backlit

Left lateral view Have we ever posted decent photos of the

 Brachiosaurus altithorax

caudals? Has anyone? I can’t remember either thing ever happening. When I need images of brachiosaur bits, including caudals, I usually go to Taylor (2009). Taylor (2009: fig.

The proximal caudals of Brachiosaurus altithorax, FMNH P25107

Juvenile Tomistoma schlegelii, LACM Herpetology 166483, with me for scale. It wasn’t until I picked up the skull that I realized it was the same specimen I had looked at back when. I was looking at its neck in 2011, and its tail today, for reasons that will be revealed at the dramatically appropriate moment.

Juvenile

 Tomistoma schlegelii

, LACM Herpetology 166483, with me for scale. It wasn’t until I picked up the skull that I realized it was the same specimen I had looked at back when. I was looking at its neck in 2011, and its tail today, for reasons that will be revealed at the dramatically appropriate moment. I was only playing with the skull because it’s cute, an intricate little marvel of natural selection.

Plus ça change, Tomistoma edition

Click to titanosaurize. Trust me. I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to work with Liguo Li, of

 Yongjinglong

fame, and I took a day to run up to New York for a quick day’s work at the American Museum of Natural History.

The mounted skeleton of Patagotitan at the AMNH

I noticed a spike recently in people tweeting about the post Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse, and it made me wonder how it ranks among the most-viewed posts on this blog. Turns out it’s by far the most viewed.

I noticed a spike recently in people tweeting about the post Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse, and it made me wonder how it ranks among the most-viewed posts on this blog. Turns out it’s

 by far

the most viewed.

The top 10 most popular SV-POW! posts

Hey sports fans, as the year winds down I bring you another podcast appearance. This time out I’m rolling with Mark Hallett, and we’re talking about sauropods through the lens of our still-plausibly-somewhat-newish book, The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants, on the I Know Dino podcast.

Hey sports fans, as the year winds down I bring you another podcast appearance. This time out I’m rolling with Mark Hallett, and we’re talking about sauropods through the lens of our still-plausibly-somewhat-newish book,

 The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants

, on the I Know Dino podcast. Many thanks to Sabrina and Garret for having us on the show.

Listen to Mark Hallett and Matt Wedel on the I Know Dino podcast

Amazingly (to me, anyway), SV-POW! is ten years old today. It was on 1st October 2007 that we published Hello world!, our first post, featuring a picture of what may still be our favourite single sauropod vertebra: the ?8th cervical of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181.

Amazingly (to me, anyway), SV-POW! is ten years old today. It was on 1st October 2007 that we published

 Hello world!

, our first post, featuring a picture of what may still be our favourite single sauropod vertebra: the ?8th cervical of the

 Giraffatitan brancai

paralectotype MB.R.2181.

Ten years of sauropod vertebrae!

Yesterday, Matt and I showed our posters in a two-hour session at SVPCA, as two of about thirty.

Yesterday, Matt and I showed our posters in a two-hour session at SVPCA, as two of about thirty. It was actually a hugely positive experience, and it’s left me wondering whether to prefer posters to talks at future conferences — one of us will write about it separately My poster (left) and Matt’s (right), in their natural environment. Phil Mannion (

 Mammalia

:

 Primates

:

 Homoninae

) for scale.

Revising a poster

TL;DR: if you know where I can get a notebook just like this one, or from the same manufacturer and made to the same specs, or have one of your own that I could buy off you (provided it’s mostly unused), please let me know in the comments.

TL;DR: if you know where I can get a notebook just like this one, or from the same manufacturer and made to the same specs, or have one of your own that I could buy off you (provided it’s mostly unused), please let me know in the comments. Long version:  This is the best notebook I’ve ever used. The cover is 7.25 x 10 inches, made of some kind of dense and probably recycled paper board.

Help me find this notebook

It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend.

It’s now been widely discussed that Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory and questionable open-access publishers — Beall’s List for short — has suddenly and abruptly gone away. No-one really knows why, but there are rumblings that he has been hit with a legal threat that he doesn’t want to defend. To get this out of the way: it’s

 always

a bad thing when legal threats make information quietly disappear;

What should we do now Beall’s List has gone?

So I came across this tweet from Laurent Gatto, who’s head of the Computational Proteomics Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK: https://twitter.com/lgatt0/status/802189887860592640 My immediate reaction was not to retweet. Why? Because I am not comfortable recommending rejection (or acceptance!) of something I’ve not seen.

So I came across this tweet from Laurent Gatto, who’s head of the Computational Proteomics Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK: https://twitter.com/lgatt0/status/802189887860592640 My immediate reaction was not to

 retweet

. Why? Because I am not comfortable recommending rejection (or acceptance!) of something I’ve not seen.

Should universities accept Elsevier’s negotiation with Jisc? Who knows? It’s secret.

Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic Diplodocus around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich.

Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic

 Diplodocus

around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich. The first nine were all mounted, and most still stand in their original museums. (The London cast has moved around a lot and currently resides in Coventry;

Whatever happened to the Munich Diplododcus?

Matt’s harsh-but-fair “Derp dah durr” / “Ah hurr hurr hurr” captions on his

 Giraffatitan

skull photos reminded me that there is a sauropod with a much, much stupider head than that of

 Giraffatitan

. Step forward YPM 1910, a mounted skeleton that is the holotype of

 Camarasaurus

(= “

 Morosaurus

”)

 lentus

, in the dinosaur hall of the Yale Peabody Museum. Full details on this specimen next time!

Horrible sauropod skulls of the Yale Peabody Museum, part 1: Morosaurus lentus, the world’s most foolish sauropod

Suddenly it’s camel season here at SV-POW! In the last post, Mike was having some doubts about how far back camels could get their heads. That got me curious, so here are the results of 45 minutes worth of Google Image Search.

Maybe all the camels are wrong

I just got off a chat with Matt. Here is the whole thing, all but unedited, for your enjoyment. All you need to know is that my wife, Fiona, built a symphony, which Matt refers to as a boxomophone in tribute to Homer Simpson refering to Lisa’s instrument as a saxomophone.

 Mathew:

Hey, how is Fiona’s boxomophone working out?

 me:

O HAI.

Crocomodiles vs. Allimogators

Today (12th February) is the one-year anniversary of the first PeerJ papers! As Matt put it in an email this morning:  That’s exactly right.

Can PeerJ really be only a year old?

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 3: Backdrops and lighting

Sorry to you all for the recent radio-silence here on SV-POW!. Matt and I are hard at work preparing our presentations for SVPCA 2019, which will take place on the Isle of Wight next week. Delightfully, not only will Matt be joining us this year, but so will his wife, forensic anthropologist celebre Vicki;

Sorry to you all for the recent radio-silence here on SV-POW!. Matt and I are hard at work preparing our presentations for SVPCA 2019, which will take place on the Isle of Wight next week. Delightfully, not only will Matt be joining us this year, but so will his wife, forensic anthropologist

 celebre

Vicki; and their son London.

The whole of the SVPCA 2018 conference is on YouTube

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Giraffatitan skull photos

None of these were intended by their creators to be about research; even Marie Curie’s line was about her education. But each of them touched a nerve for me. Also, since they’re not explicitly about research, you may find them applicable to other areas of life as well, whether you’re a researcher or not.

None of these were intended by their creators to be about research; even Marie Curie’s line was about her education. But each of them touched a nerve for me. Also, since they’re not explicitly about research, you may find them applicable to other areas of life as well, whether you’re a researcher or not.

 “One never notices what has been done;

Three Four quotes about doing good work

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Photography and illustration talk, Part 2: Taking good photographs

Next to Charles Knight, the Czech painter Zdeněk Burian was arguably the most influential and important of the early palaeoartists. His dinosaurs tend to have a stately quality that’s very much at odds with our post-Dinosaur Renaissance sensibilities, but which has its own charm.

Zdeněk Burian at decent resolution

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The Top 5 Things to Look for in a Used T. rex: You Tell Us!

My thanks to Steve Wang for pointing out that The Paleontological Society (in the USA, not to be confused the UK’s Palaeontological Association) has a new open access policy. The highlights are: Positives   It’s good to see this real step forwards, and a lot of people are going to be particularly pleased that both Gold and Green are on offer.

The Paleontological Society’s new open access options

Recently I had the opportunity to give a talk on photographing specimens and preparing illustrations in Jim Parham’s phylogenetics course at Cal State Fullerton. Jim is having each student (1) write a description of a specimen, (2) run a phylogenetic analysis, and (3) do some kind of calibration on their tree. I think that’s rad.

Photography and illustration talk, Part 1: Intro and Stromer

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Pathological mammal skulls of the California Academy of Sciences

Here are two photos of what I infer to be C8 of OMNH 53062, the holotype of

 Sauroposeidon

. The top one was taken by Mike during our visit to the OMNH in 2007. If you’re a regular you may recognize it from several older posts: 1, 2, 3. The bottom one was taken by Mike Callaghan, the former museum photographer at the OMNH, sometime in 1999 or 2000.

Sauroposeidon in perspective–too much perspective

So sings Dot in

 Move On

, the climactic number of Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning music

 Sunday in the Park with George

, which on the surface is about the post-impressionist painter Georges Seurat, but turns out to be a study of obsession and creativity.

Caudal pneumaticity in sauropods: in praise of actually looking at fossils

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Things to Make and Do, Part 12: London’s mummified mouse

I got in a conversation recently with a friend who is about to have his first paper published. It’s been through review and is now accepted at a well-respected old-school journal owned by a legacy publisher. It’s not an open-access journal, and he asked my advice on how he could make the paper open access. We had a fruitful discussion, and we agreed that I’d write up the conclusions for this blog.

Tutorial 27: how to publish an open-access paper in a paywalled journal

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Bird vertebra diagrams

I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to Academia.edu represent at best a grotesque PR mis-step, an idiot manoeuvre that I thought Elsevier would immediately regret and certainly avoid repeating.

Elsevier steps up its War On Access

In his post on Vicki’s new book

 Broken Bones

, Matt told us his twelve-step process for producing stippled illustrations like this one of a crushed skull, which became the cover image of the book: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-9460 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“9460” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2013/12/18/vickis-book-broken-bones-is-out/skull-drawing-f1-original-on-white/”

Tutorial 17: preparing illustrations. Part 3: adding shading to röck döts

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Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Mystery sauropod dorsals of the Wealden, part 1: BMNH R2523

The wonder that is MIWG.7306

Tutorial 1: Regions of the vertebral column