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.
“But wait, Matt”, I hear you thinking. “Every news agency in the world is tripping over themselves declaring Patagotitan the biggest dinosaur of all time. Why are you going in the other direction?” Because I’ve been through this a few times now.
Matt just sent me an email entitled Are there “basal” sauropodomorphs? , in which he pointed me to Mario Bronzati’s (2017) opinion piece in Palaeontologia Electronica , “Should the terms ‘basal taxon’ and ‘transitional taxon’ be extinguished from cladistic studies with extinct organisms?” Here’s the reply I sent Matt, which at his suggestion I am posting here essentially unedited.
Quick hit here: all this week there are mastodon-themed events going on at the Western Science Center in Hemet, including talks from paleontologists and an opening reception this Friday evening, August 4, before the exhibit formally opens to the public on Saturday.
Excellent news this morning in a press-release from the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics : The part that I like most here is the sense that it’s part of an inevitable and historic shift away from legacy publishers and their subscription paywalls.
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Publishers provide certain services (peer-review management, typesetting, brand badges, sometimes proof-reading or copy-editing, archiving, indexing) to the scholarly community. Those services are of greater and lesser value, provided at higher and lower levels of quality, and cost greater and lesser amounts. Of course, we in the scholarly community want high-value, high-quality low-cost services.
Promoting this to a post of its own, because dang, it deserves it. Frequent commenter Warren just brought to our attention this video, in which legendary* make-up artist Michael Westmore reveals that he based the design of the Klingon foreheads in Star Trek: The Next Generation on dinosaur vertebrae. Lots of discussion on this point between 3:40 and about 5:40 in the video.
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This week, psychologists are the newest group of scholars to learn that their “publishers” are dedicated to preventing their work from being made public. The American Psychological Association launched a pilot to monitor and seek removal of unauthorized online postings of APA journal articles.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a database of all dinosaur specimens? Well, there is — or at least, it’s on its way. Gunnar Bivens, who we know from SV-POW!