Earlier this evening, while I was editing an SV-POW! article that we plan to release on Wednesday, I (Mike) inadvertently hit the Publish button rather than Save Draft as I’d intended.  I was able to quickly undo the posting, but it’s possible that some of you may have seen Wednesday’s article prematurely, especially if you use an RSS reader that happened to cache that page during the brief period that it was available.

(This is sort of a riff on the recent post, Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on, which you might want to read first if you haven’t already.) Something that has been much on my mind lately is the idea that if you don’t go too far, you don’t know how far you should have gone.

I have just made a series of fairly major edits to the in-progress Checklist for new zoological genera and species, and wanted to explain what’s changed and why. The important change is that the Checklist no longer attempts to encompass the creation of families, nor of all genus-group and species-group names — only genera and species.

Sorry to bump Matt’s awesome Rhea -neck post off the top of the SV-POW! home page, but I have news of the rapidly developing checklist for new zoological names.  As well as many, many minor and not-so-minor edits — and thanks to everyone who’s participated in this process — I have made a major structural change. The list has been broken into two, first enumerating Requirements and then describing Best Practice.

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As we all know, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is a large and intimidating document.  As a result, zoologists naming new animals often do not read it in its entirety (I know I haven’t).  It’s probably because of this that many of the more avoidable nomenclatural mistakes occur.

We’ve been running SV-POW! for three and half years now; in all that time we’ve never featured a guest post, because we think it’s better to keep a blog tight and focussed.  In general, that remains our policy. But today, first the first and maybe only time, we present a guest post.

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Why we do mass estimates Mass estimates are a big deal in paleobiology.

For reasons that will soon become apparent (yes, that’s a teaser), Matt and I wanted to figure out how heavy Camarasaurus was.  This is the story of how I almost completely badgered up part of that problem.  I am publishing it as a cautionary tale because I am very secure and don’t mind everyone knowing that I’m an idiot.

By a curious coincidence, today’s Bob The Angry Flower cartoon is all about the Archbishop description. Enjoy. But, hey, at least I got my confession in early — I was officially the first participant to fail the 2010 Paleo Project Challenge. THIS year, for sure!