I’ve been thinking about Barosaurus lately. <homer>Mmmm … Barosaurus …</homer> The best (and only, really) good recent treatment of Barosaurus is in John McIntosh’s chapter of the 2005 IUP Thunder Lizards volume.

Item 1 : With his new piece at the Guardian,  “Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing”, Mike continues to be a thorn in the side of exploitative commercial publishers, who just can’t seem to keep their facts straight.

Last time, we saw why Haplocanthosaurus couldn’t be a juvenile of Apatosaurus or Diplodocus , based on osteology alone.  But there’s more: Ontogenetic status of Haplocanthosaurus Here is where is gets really surreal.

Introduction Last time around, Matt walked through a lot of the detailed cervical morphology of Suuwassea and known diplodocids to show that, contra the suggestion of Woodruff and Fowler (2012), Suuwassea is distinct and can’t be explained away as an ontogenomorph of a previously known genus. Although Suuwassea is singled out for special treatment in this paper, other genera do not escape unscathed.

As everyone now knows, last week the respected and trusted Today programme on BBC Radio 4 ran an absurd nonscience piece on Brian Ford’s wild, ignorant, uninformed speculation that all dinosaurs lived in shallow lakes because that was the only way they could support their weight.

I don’t intend to write a comprehensive treatise on the morphology and phylogeny of Suuwassea . Jerry Harris has already done that, several times over (Harris 2006a, b, c, 2007, Whitlock and Harris 2010). Rather, I want to address the contention of Woodruff and Fowler (2012) that Suuwassea is a juvenile of a known diplodocid, building on the information presented in the first three posts in this series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

I wrote yesterday that Open Access had been the front-page story in the Guardian .

These have been a crazy few days for open access.

This is the third post in a series on neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, inspired by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). In the first post, I looked at neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropod genera based on the classic monographic descriptions. In the second post, I showed that size is an unreliable criterion for assessing age and that serial variation can mimic ontogenetic change in sauropod cervicals.

In the previous post in this series I looked at the some of the easily available raw data on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods. In this post I’ll explain how serial variation–that is, variation along the vertebral column in one individual–is relevant to the inferences made in the new paper by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). But first, a digression, the relevance of which will quickly become clear.

Folks — important news on Research Councils UK’s new draft open access policy.  A while back I wrote to RCUK asking when the deadline for submissions is, and I did eventually hear back from Jane Wakefield, Press and Communications Manager. The deadline is Tuesday 10th April — not today, as I’d originally thought thanks to a game of Chinese whispers.