This is one of those things that has been sitting in my brain, gradually heating up and getting denser, until it achieved criticality, melted down my spinal cord, and rocketed out my fingers and through the keyboard. Stand by for caffeine-fueled testifyin’ mode.

I was struck by a Mastodon post where classic game developer Ron Gilbert quoted film critic Roger Ebert as follows: And Gilbert commented: In a reply, Gretchen Anderson said her favourite version of this is: I couldn’t find the original source for this, but as I was trying to track it down I ran into this, attributed to Pablo Picasso: When I mentioned these observations to Matt, he sent me a longer-form exposition of the same phenomenon,

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.

In the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements last week, Jisc announced its report on progress towards open access in the UK. The key finding is: But that’s not the part that disappoints me. Here’s the part that disappoints me: Sometimes I think people don’t know what “transitional” means.

My friend Toby Lowther wrote to me back in December to ask this question: It’s strange, isn’t it? The last I knew, Shonisaurus was the largest ichthyosaur, at about 20 m and 50 tonnes, and this is considerably bigger than any plesiosaur or mosasaur I know of. It’s up the sperm-whale size category, but not even close to the bigger baleen whales. Why not?

Long-time readers may remember that back in 2013, Matt and I played a game where we each designed a cover, in half an hour, for a book whose name was randomly generated. Here’s what I came up with for The Name of the Names : I really enjoyed that process and even toyed with the idea of offering it as a service for hire, for people creating self-published books.

The best thing about collaborations is that I get to work with amazing colleagues from around the world.

Here’s a cool comparo.

I have a new paper out in Acta Paleontologica Polonica, with Guillermo Windholz, Juan Porfiri, Domenica Dos Santos, and Flavio Bellardini, on the first CT scan of a pneumatic caudal vertebra of a rebbachisaurid: Windholz, G.J., Porfiri, J.D., Dos Santos, D., Bellardini, F., and Wedel, M.J. 2024.

Eoneophron, Parapropalaehoplophorus, Ia io, and friends The other day Mike wrote to me about the new Hell Creek oviraptorosaur Eoneophron (Atkins-Weltman et al. 2024), commenting that he liked the ‘eoneo’ — old new — part of the name. That sent me down a little etymological rabbit hole.

Just a quick post about the genesis of the Brachiosaurus rib paper (Taylor and Wedel 2023) that I wrote about at the very end of last year. Although this is in some respects a minor paper, I’m fond of it because it fell into place so quickly and easily. Taylor and Wedel 2023:Figure.