For reasons that I will explain in a later post, I am parting with one of my most treasured possessions: the badger skull that I extracted from my roadkill specimen four years ago.

Since we wrote about the putative tiny bird Oculudentavis (Xing et al. 2020) last time, things have become rather weirder. I want to discuss two things here: how we got to where we are, and what happens to the zoological name Oculudentavis khaungraae. First, how we got here.

Back in March, Nature published “Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar” by Xing et al. (2020), which described and named a tiny putative bird that was preserved in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma). It’s a pretty spectacular find. Today, though, that paper is retracted. That’s a very rare occurrence for a palaeontology paper.

I think we’ve all had enough of the Impact Factor as a way of measuring the quality of journals.

The new monster redescription of Dilophosaurus by Adam Marsh and Tim Rowe came out in the Journal of Paleontology last week. I’m blogging about it now because the OA link just went live yesterday. So you can get this huge, important paper for free, at this link.

Mark Witton says this better than I could: Go and read his post. I endorse it. And remember: the opposite of Black Lives Matter is not All Lives Matter; it’s Black Lives Don’t Matter. Don’t be That Guy.

Here’s one of my most prized possessions: a cannon bone from a giraffe. I got it last fall from Necromance, a cool natural history store in LA. Originally they had a matched pair on display in the front window.

Credit: anonymous tattoo, Grant Harding for the caption. Update. Here is the Instagram post that Grant got this from. Unfortunately it seems to be from an account that specialises in reposting others’ work without attribution, so we don’t know where the tattoo photo originated.

My eldest son Dan went out to visit his girlfriend Beth, shortly before the Coronavirus crisis began, during her university placement in Toulouse. While they were there, they bought me this gift: As you can see, it’s a Lego-like self-assembly kit; but as you can also see from the mug in the background, it’s tiny.

I’ve written four posts about the R2R debate on the proposition “the venue of its publication tells us nothing useful about the quality of a paper”: part 1: opening statement in support part 2: opening statement against the motion part 3: my response for the motion part 4: the video!

In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature, is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the […]