[Note: this post is by Mike. Matt hasn’t seen it, may not agree with it, and would probably have advised me not to post it if I’d asked him.] The magic is going out of my love-affair with peer-review.

In a comment on the previous post, Steve P. asked whether “ Apatosaurus ” minimus might not be a Apatosaurus specimen after all — particularly, an Apatosaurus ajax individual resembling NSMT-PV 20375, the one in the National Science Museum, Tokyo, that Upchurch et al. (2005) so lavishly monographed.

Thanks to the wonder of Osborn and Mook (1921), we have already seen multiview illustrations of the pubis and ischium of Camarasaurus . Now we bring you their Camarasaurus sacrum.

A couple of weeks ago we tried to work out what it costs the global academic community when you publish a paper behind an Elsevier paywall instead of making it open access. The tentative conclusion was that it’s somewhere between £3112 and £6224 (or about $4846-9692), which is about 3.6-7.2 times the cost of publishing in PLoS ONE.

Mathematician David Roberts has pointed me to a useful new five-part series by Martin Paul Eve, entitled Starting an Open Access Journal . It’s well worth a look, for how it engages with so many practicalities and how tractable he makes it all seem. Part 1 — planning and social issues.

Incredible. We knew the tide was turning, but who saw it turning this swiftly?

This is the Brontosaurus that I grew up with: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-6588 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6588” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/07/16/how-fat-was-brontosaurus-well-not-this-fat-anyway/shannon1960-how-and-why-wonder-brontosaurus/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/shannon1960-how-and-why-wonder-brontosaurus.jpeg” orig-size=“2152,3001” comments-opened=“1”

More goodness from Osborn and Mook’s (1921) gargantuan Camarasaurus monograph, again prepared largely for comparison with “ Apatosaurus “ minimus . Last time, I showed you one of O&M’s pubis illustrations.

(First of all, for anyone who’s not familiar with the plural of “pubis”, it’s spelled “pubes” but pronounced “pyoo-bees”. Stop sniggering at the back.) As Matt and I struggle to figure out the partial pubis that is one of the elements of the “ Apatosaurus ” minimus specimen AMNH 675, one of the most helpful references is Osborn and Mook’s (1921) epic monograph on Camarasaurus . It’s not that 675 particularly resembles

More of my thoughts on the Finch Report; you may wish to read part 1 first.

My awesome employers Index Data flew us all out to Boston a few weeks ago, for six days of food, drink, work (yes, work!) and goofy tyrannosaurs.