Just over a year ago, I described Niroot Puttapipat’s “ Giraffatitan just being awesome while wave after wave of Incisivosaurus perish in its glorious presence” as the most awesome piece of art EVER. That may have been true at the time.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-6735 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6735” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/09/08/amnh-mounted-apatosaurus-with-taylor-for-scale/amnh-mounted-apatosaurus-with-taylor-for-scale/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/amnh-mounted-apatosaurus-with-taylor-for-scale.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

{.size-full .wp-image-6712 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-6712” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6712” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/09/05/hot-sauropod-news-part-2-a-new-look-for-sauroposeidon/sauroposeidon-dorsal-ypm-5449-demic-and-foreman-2012-fig-6a-and-c/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/sauroposeidon-dorsal-ypm-5449-demic-and-foreman-2012-fig-6a-and-c.jpg” orig-size=“804,1160” comments-opened=“1”

It’s been a looong time coming, but I just got this email from  Ellinor Michel, Executive Secretary of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature: Fantastic news.

Gah, so much interesting stuff going on and I simply have No. Time. To. Blog. But I’m making an exception for PeerJ, a new OA journal that is coming online later this year.

No time for anything new, so here’s a post built from parts of other, older posts. The fourth sacral centrum of Haplocanthosaurus CM 879, in left and right lateral view. This is part of the original color version of Wedel (2009: figure 8), from this page. (Yes, I know I need to get around to posting the full-color versions of those figures.

{.size-full .wp-image-6684 aria-describedby=“caption-attachment-6684” loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6684” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/08/15/plateosaurus-sacra-of-the-amnh/plateosaurus-trossingensis-amnh-6810-sacrum/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/plateosaurus-trossingensis-amnh-6810-sacrum.jpg” orig-size=“2272,1704” comments-opened=“1”

Let me begin with a digression. (Hey, we may as well start as we mean to go on.) Citations in scientific writing are used for two very different reasons, but because the two cases have the same form we often confuse them.

Last time I argued that traditional pre-publication peer-review isn’t necessarily worth the heavy burden it imposes. I guess no-one who’s been involved in the review process — as an author, editor or reviewer — will deny that it imposes significant costs, both in the time of all the participants, and in the delay in getting new work to press. Where I expected more pushback was in the claim that the benefits are not great.

[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.