Amazingly (to me, anyway), SV-POW! is ten years old today. It was on 1st October 2007 that we published Hello world! , our first post, featuring a picture of what may still be our favourite single sauropod vertebra: the ?8th cervical of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181.

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After my short post on what to leave out of a conference talk, here are few more positive thoughts on what to include , based on some of the SVPCA talks that really stayed with me. First, Graeme Lloyd’s talk in the macroevolution symposium did a great job of explaining very complex concepts well (different ways of mapping morphospace onto phylogeny). It was a necessarily difficult talk to follow, and I did get lost a few times.

I deliberately left a lot of things out of the poster I presented at SVPCA: an abstract (who needs repetition?), institutional logos (who cares?), references (no-one’s going to follow them up that couldn’t find what they need in other ways), headings (all the text was in figure captions) and generally as much text as I could omit without compromising clarity.

Yesterday, Matt and I showed our posters in a two-hour session at SVPCA, as two of about thirty.

We’ve not done many picture-of-the-week posts here recently. Let’s change that! Here’s a lovely little specimen that we saw in BYU on the 2016 Sauropocalypse trip.

If you don’t get to give a talk at a meeting, you get bumped down to a poster. That’s what’s happened to Matt, Darren and me at this year’s SVPCA, which is coming up next week.

Lots of discussion online lately about unpaid peer reviews and whether this indicates a “degraded sense of community” in academia, improper commoditization of the unwritten responsibilities of academics, or a sign that we should rethink incentives in academia.

Here is a fascinating sequence of five consecutive posterior dorsal vertebra — AMNH FARB 291 from the“Big Bone Room“ at the AMNH: {.wp-image-14329 .size-full aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-14329” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“14329” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2017/08/15/biconcavoposeidon/figure-d-lateral-view-dscn6126/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/figure-d-lateral-view-dscn6126.jpeg”

A bunch of stuff, loosely organized by theme. Media First up, I need to thank Brian Switek, who invited me to comment on Patagotitan for his piece at Smithsonian. I think he did a great job on that, arguably the best of any of the first-day major media outlet pieces.