Actually we had the Jurassic talks today, but I can’t show you any of the slides*, so instead you’re getting some brief, sauropod-centric highlighs from the museum. * I had originally written that the technical content of the talks is embargoed, but that’s not true–as ReBecca Hunt-Foster pointed out in a comment, the conference guidebook with all of the abstracts is freely available online here.

You know the drill: lotsa pretty pix, not much yap.

I need to be sleeping, not blogging, so here are just the highlights, with no touch-ups and minimal commentary.

Eminent British mathematician Tim Gowers has written an epic post on his attempts to get universities to disclose how much they pay for their Elsevier subscriptions. There is a lot of fascinating anecdote in there, and a shedload of important data — it’s very well worth a read. But here is the part that staggered me most.

Order up! {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10163 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10163” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/04/24/one-articulated-sauroposeidon-to-go-hold-the-perspective-distortion-with-a-side-of-stinkin-mammal/sauroposeidon-omnh-53062-articulated-right-lateral-composite-with-giraffe/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/sauroposeidon-omnh-53062-articulated-right-lateral-composite-with-giraffe.jpg”

We all remember Upchurch and Martin’s (2002) description of the Rutland Cetiosaurus , which remains by some distance the best British sauropod specimen in the literature; and the same authors’ (2003) survey of the genus Cetiosaurus . They concluded that nearly all of its many named species are either nomen dubia or misassigned, and that only C . oxoniensis is a valid, diagnosable species.

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How can it be? {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-10065 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“10065” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2014/04/15/horrible-sauropod-skulls-of-the-yale-peabody-museum-part-2-brontosaurus-and-no-i-do-not-mean-apatosaurus/img_0517/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/img_0517.jpg” orig-size=“2000,1332” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"4","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

Five days ago, I released a program for drawing comparative figures of vertebral columns, such as this one from our neural-spine bifurcation paper. With my idiot computer-scientist hat on, I gave that program the startlingly unmemorable name vcd2svg — the reasoning being that it takes Vertebral Column Descriptions and translates them into Scalable Vector Graphics.

I think it’s fair to say that this “bifurcation heat-map”, from Wedel and Taylor (2013a: figure 9), has been one of the best-received illustrations that we’ve prepared: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-8009 attachment-id=“8009” permalink=“http://svpow.com/papers-by-sv-powsketeers/wedel-and-taylor-2013-on-sauropod-neural-spine-bifurcation/wedel-and-taylor-2013-bifurcation-figure-9-bifurcatogram/”