The longest cell in Andy Farke is one of the primary afferent (sensory) neurons responsible for sensing vibration or fine touch, which runs from the tip of his big toe to his brainstem.

I was contacted recently by David Goldenberg (dgoldenberg@gmail.com), a journalist who’s putting together a piece on the biggest dinosaurs. He asked me a few questions, and since I’d taken the time to write answers I thought I may as well post them here.

We as a community often ask ourselves how much it should cost to publish an open-access paper. (We know how much it does cost, roughly: typically $3000 with a legacy publisher, or an average of $900 with a born-open publisher, or nothing at all for many journals.) We know that peer-review is essentially free to publishers, being donated free by scholars. We know that most handling editors also work for free or for peanuts.

Re-reading an email that Matt sent me back in January, I see this: (For anyone not familiar with the the “wiper”, it refers to a short paper of only one or two pages. The etymology is left as an exercise to the reader.) It’s just amazing how we keep on and on falling for this delusion that we can get a paper out quickly, even when we know perfectly well , going into the project, that it’s not going to work out that way.

In my blog-post announcing Haestasaurus as the new generic name for the misassigned species “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii , I briefly surveyed the three phylogenetic analyses in the paper.

I found myself needing a checklist so that I could make sure I’d updated all the various web-pages that needed tweaking after the Haestasaurus paper came out. Then I thought others might find it useful for when they have new papers. So here it is. Update my online publications list. Update my University of Bristol IR page. (Note to self: start here.) Create a new page about paper in the SV-POW! sidebar.

Well, who knew? There I was posting images of “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesi ’s humerus, radius and ulna, and skin impression. There I was saying that this beast is due a proper description, and warrants its own generic name. And what should come out today but a new paper by Paul Upchurch, Phil Mannion and, oh yes, me, which does exactly that.

We’ve seen the humerus of the Wealden-supergroup putative titanosaur “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesi . We’ve seen the bones of the forearm, the radius and ulna. That’s it for bony remains: no other bones have been found.

Yesterday, we looked at (mostly) the humerus of the Wealden sauropod “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii , which you will recall is known from humerus, radius, ulna and a skin impression, and — whatever it might be — is certainly not a species of Pelorosaurus . Now let’s look at the radius and ulna.

It’s an oddity that in eight years of SV-POW!, we’ve never written about one of the best of all the Wealden-formation sauropod specimens: the forelimb and associated skin impression NHMUK R1870 that is known as “ Pelorosaurus ” becklesii . Let’s fix that.

[I am using the term “megajournal” here to mean “journal that practices PLOS ONE -style peer-review for correctness only, ignoring guesses at possible impact”. It’s not a great term for this class of journals, but it seems to be becoming established as the default.] Bo-Christer Björk​’s (2015) new paper in PeerJ asks the question “Have the “mega-journals” reached the limits to growth?”, and suggests that the answer may be yes.