The Curious Engineer

Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

2012–2026

1,415 posts

← 2007–2011

2026 41

October 2026

  1. Worth a try: thank your dog for barking
  2. A truly radical take on scholarly publication and peer review
  3. Trying to categorize SV-POW! posts
  4. No AI comments. None. No exceptions.
  5. Friday’s impromptu tortoise rescue
  6. Easty the box turtle: both osteophagous and coprophagous
  7. BYU’s fossil vending machine
  8. Speculative sauropods
  9. SV-POW! at 19, and trying to see what’s not there

September 2026

  1. (When) will we find apatosaurines outside of North America?

August 2026

  1. The atlas/axis complex of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018 in dorsal and lateral views
  2. Horrible Megalosaurus larva tears its way out of Matt’s stomach
  3. Documenting Skeletal Mounts

July 2026

  1. Current status
  2. A gentle rebuke, well taken
  3. Wildlife on the Planet Furaha by Gert van Dijk
  4. Andy Frazer’s Aquilops, and DinoCon 2026

June 2026

  1. Dogs are experiments in applied genetics
  2. My adventures with Tri-bear-atops
  3. Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis

May 2026

  1. Revisiting Aquilops and Pentaceratops at the Sam Noble Museum
  2. Where did the One of our Dinosaurs is Missing dinosaur come from?
  3. Curiousiday at the Sam Noble Museum: Sauroposeidon, Apatosaurus, Aquilops, and more
  4. The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is incredible
  5. The mystery of the other rearing sauropod of the Egidio Feruglio museum
  6. Looking for CC By photos of these rearing sauropod mounts
  7. An even earlier life restoration of a sauropod (1885)
  8. The Lego Natural History Museum, and the question of scale

April 2026

  1. Upcoming public talks about dinosaurs at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
  2. On the evolution of the atlas-axis complex
  3. In search of rearing mounted sauropod skeletons
  4. The Nazi sauropod — Giraffatitan (= “Brachiosaurus“) brancai in 1937

February 2026

  1. The checklist for new zoological genus and species names is published
  2. Checklist for new zoological genus and species names
  3. What was the first life restoration of a sauropod?

January 2026

  1. Belatedly … here’s DRAFT v4 of the checklist for new zoological genus and species names
  2. Never name a new species of an existing dinosaur genus
  3. Stop it, birds, your necks are stupid
  4. Yet more raptors with their heads on backwards
  5. Three Four quotes about doing good work
  6. Do it yourself.

2025 71

December 2025

  1. More raptors with their heads on backwards
  2. New paper: Hart et al. 2025 on neural canal ridges in crocs
  3. SV-POW! is an AI-free zone
  4. Book Week 2025, Day 8: Jurassic West, 2nd edition, by John Foster
  5. Book Week 2025, Day 7: Three favorites by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen
  6. Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, by John Muir Laws
  7. Book Week 2025, Day 5: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, by Riley Black

November 2025

  1. Book Week 2025, Day 4: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday
  2. Book Week 2025, Day 3: Dungeon delvers delight in Dr Dhrohlin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs
  3. Book Week 2025, Day 2: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte
  4. Book Week 2025, Day 1: Speed Thief Vol 1, by Sean Hennessy
  5. Tutorial 48: my museum collections kit
  6. How — and where — should we measure neural canal diameter?
  7. More on that “Ultrasaurus” scap photo
  8. What LLMs are really saving you from

October 2025

  1. Colour photos of the “Ultrasaurus” quarry
  2. Yet more lying necks: Backwards Birds edition
  3. Video of the 2024 SSP debate: “The open access movement has failed”
  4. If you’d built a “tool” that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?
  5. New paper: pneumatic diverticula and blood vessels in the neural canals of the toothed birds Ichthyornis and Janavis
  6. Necks: the lying liars that just keep lying

September 2025

  1. Get your name into the permanent scientific record!
  2. Midnight in the Museum
  3. Want to help fund the free publication of sauropod science? Now’s your chance!
  4. My first palaeo paper is 20 years old today!
  5. Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops and friends
  6. Yapping about sauropods on Dave Hone’s Terrible Lizards podcast

August 2025

  1. A PDF of Kingham (1962) on Astrodon
  2. Matt’s DinoCon 2025 adventure
  3. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence; it just isn’t proof
  4. WARNING: Science In Progress!
  5. The very first #DinoConUK!
  6. Sauropod dinosaur body plan for DinoCon 2025
  7. “Rights of papers are owned by the publishers hence, there is no consent needed from authors”
  8. Talk slides are not fungible
  9. Andy Farke and Matt Wedel geek out over Jurassic World Rebirth
  10. DinoCon 2025 is next week
  11. Lay research on turtles, and the evolution of scholarly journals
  12. Journal articles are trying to do six things at once — no wonder they’re unreadable

July 2025

  1. Review: Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs, 2025 edition
  2. Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists
  3. Did journal articles survive the last ten years?
  4. This Saturday is Aquilops Day!
  5. I say, I say, I say! How many palaeontologists does it take to write a paper? Twenty-four (if it’s in Nature)!
  6. Nuchal sesamoids in shrews
  7. The Dread Olecranon of Kentrosaurus
  8. Semi-spoileriffic first thoughts on Jurassic World Rebirth
  9. Baffled by diplodocoids? Need a comprehensive introduction? You’re in luck!

June 2025

  1. Tutorial 47: distinguishing white and gray rami communicantes in dissection
  2. Super-brief, content-free Aquilops update
  3. Come hear Matt and Mike at Darren’s DinoCon!
  4. a-QUILL-ops, birthday, Lego sets, etc.

May 2025

  1. Aquilops-ing intensifies
  2. Whatever happened to the Munich Diplodocus?
  3. Everything you always wanted to know about the Carnegie Diplodocus (but were afraid to ask)
  4. Being an anatomist probably made me a better person
  5. From 1 July, no embargoes on NIH-funded publications!

April 2025

  1. Eleanor reacts to the dire wolves
  2. The Royal Society is dead

March 2025

  1. 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress: a bony lesion in an apatosaur femur
  2. 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress: Neural canal ridges in crocs
  3. The Aquilops toy news will continue until morale improves

February 2025

  1. I’m stoked for Aquilops in Jurassic World Rebirth
  2. Burn it all down
  3. If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well
  4. Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk
  5. New paper: review of the supernumerary muscles of the human leg and foot

January 2025

  1. New paper out today: Boisvert et al. (2025) on all the Haplos
  2. A great paper: Scott et al. (2015) on a traumatically amputated timber wolf femur
  3. A unique sauropod mount: Haplocanthosaurus delfsi CMNH 10380
  4. My Constant Reader, and staying close to the work

2024 59

December 2024

  1. About that Saurophaganax paper
  2. Interesting paper alert: Harris (2024) on nuchal ligaments

November 2024

  1. What’s up with your perforated parapophyseal ramus, Apatosaurinae indet. BYU 20178? — Featuring: What have we learned?
  2. Behold! The glory of the Lego Giraffatitan
  3. Move over, All Yesterdays: It’s time for #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt, redux!
  4. Tutorial 46: how to write an abstract
  5. Tutorial 45: how to decide whether to do a higher degree in palaeontology
  6. The fate (so far) of my 50 submitted papers
  7. My favorite piece of paleoart is now for sale

October 2024

  1. To what extent is science a strong-link problem?
  2. The pneumatic rib evolution figure in a more useful format
  3. Five questions from Tom Redd
  4. About that Saurophaganax abstract
  5. More “artificial intelligence” idiocy
  6. Things to Make and Do, part 32: chicken wing claw

September 2024

  1. If I could dissect a sauropod…
  2. I won a thing! From someone I admire!
  3. We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
  4. Neural canal ridges: the director’s cut

August 2024

  1. New paper: Atterholt et al. (2024) on neural canal ridges in dinosaurs
  2. Brian Engh’s free public paleoart lectures next week!
  3. Tutorial 44: how to avoid using a preoccupied name for your new genus
  4. More on PalArch: it’s dead

July 2024

  1. PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has been hijacked
  2. DOIs and an ISSN for SV-POW!
  3. Five million hits!

June 2024

  1. All the SV-POW! videos, and other stuff on the sidebar
  2. New video: did air-filled bones allow dinosaurs to become gigantic?
  3. Fossil Friday grab-bag: bird diverticula, Oklahoma dinos, Tate trip pics, and more
  4. New paper out today on the Dry Mesa Haplocanthosaurus
  5. Fossils of Jimbo the Supersaurus on exhibit
  6. Quick pix of ‘Jimbo’, the Wyoming Supersaurus
  7. The sauropod heresies: my Tate 2024 ‘abstract’ and handout
  8. SSP debate, part 2: Jessica Polka opposing “the open access movement has failed”
  9. Tate 2024 road update
  10. The SSP debate on “the open access movement has failed” — part 1: speech for the motion
  11. National Dinosaur Day, redux
  12. It’s National Dinosaur Day

May 2024

  1. Westin What’s-coming-up Wednesday — Wrangle over Whether OA is a Washout
  2. Tate Teaser Tuesday – Taphonomy of the Titans!
  3. Another day, another catastrophic “AI” failure
  4. New paper: double and triple variants of fibularis tertius in humans
  5. Variation, a cool glass, and my Tate talk
  6. Do bifurcated ribs imply single-segment neck muscles? Sometimes
  7. The Potter Creek Brachiosaurus humerus, in various states of repair
  8. The Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH PR 25107 in the ground

April 2024

  1. Atlantal ribs of the Carnegie Diplodocus, Moscow and Vienna casts
  2. New paper: pneumatic dorsal ribs in Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus

March 2024

  1. Four paths to studying pneumaticity inexpensively, and why you should
  2. Tutorial 43: how to do creative work
  3. On the tragic fate of PeerJ
  4. Jisc should not buy services that it does not want
  5. Why were prehistoric sea creatures so tiny?
  6. Designing book covers in half an hour, redux

February 2024

  1. Nigersaurus in the mist
  2. A bite-marked Apatosaurus pubis, in bone and in bronze
  3. New paper: pneumaticity in a rebbachisaurid caudal vertebra

January 2024

  1. Grab-bag post: Parapropalaehoplophorus, a favorite book, Tate 2024
  2. Opportunism, helpfulness, disappointment, persistence: the genesis of the Brachiosaurus rib paper

2023 49

December 2023

  1. The ribs of Brachiosaurus: stranger than you thought
  2. Neck-muscle size differentials in diplodocids
  3. Brief thoughts on qualitative and quantitative projects
  4. How sauropods increased the size of ventral neck muscles

November 2023

  1. Single-segment neck muscles in diplodocids?
  2. What dorsal processes on cervical ribs tell us about neck muscles and their functions
  3. A simple, old-school paper about bifurcated cervical ribs
  4. Two thoughts on blogging: thought archives, and bullets dodged
  5. New paper: theropod bite marks on Morrison sauropod bones

October 2023

  1. Facial hair of the Mesozoic: Bob Nicholls edition, part 2 (only ten years late)
  2. Morphological convergence in tendaguriid dorsal vertebrae and cephalopods
  3. What’s up with your crazy-ass hands, Utahraptor?
  4. A good scan of Riggs’s (1904) Brachiosaurus monograph

September 2023

  1. A close encounter with an opossum
  2. The untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus
  3. Giant titanosaurs were just ridiculous
  4. Neck ontogeny in Tyrannosaurus rex, redux
  5. Surprisingly decent retail anatomy
  6. Just chillin’ with my homie FMNH PR 25107
  7. Brachiosaurus altithorax, mounted inside the Field Museum, redux

August 2023

  1. When evolution just gives up, part 5
  2. Why do you have to be this way, Camptosaurus?
  3. How many animals have bifurcated cervical ribs?
  4. Did dinosaurs become more or less colourful through their lives?
  5. Concrete Diplodocus exhibition at the Price Prehistoric Museum

July 2023

  1. MWC 5659 is a beautiful Apatosaurus vertebra

June 2023

  1. “Seamless access”
  2. New paper: Curtice et al. (2023) on the first Haplocanthosaurus from Dry Mesa
  3. New paper: Wedel and Atterholt (2023) on expanded neurocentral joints in sauropods
  4. Three presentations today at MTE14, and the papers that go with them

May 2023

  1. Do you storyboard your visuals?
  2. Two nice pneumatic Allosaurus vertebrae

April 2023

  1. More on the disturbing plausibility of ChatGPT

March 2023

  1. New paper out today: Aureliano et al. (2023) on pneumaticity in the early dinosaur Macrocollum
  2. Would we know about flow-through lungs if birds were extinct?
  3. We were probably wrong about caudal pneumaticity in Ca13 of the Brontosaurus excelsus holotype YPM 1980
  4. The equine interspinal ligaments of Ray Wilhite
  5. An arresting image of an apatosaur vertebra

February 2023

  1. We interrupt your regularly scheduled Concrete Diplodocus update to bring you important Sauropods Stomping On Theropods news
  2. How the Concrete Diplodocus paper came to be
  3. Exciting news for people who like history, the state of Utah, or sauropods
  4. No-one knows whether or not a neutral-tasting nutrient-sludge diet leads to enormous weight loss
  5. The ludicrous sizes of world-record individuals
  6. Scholarly Stockholm Syndrome in full gallop

January 2023

  1. DIY dinosaurs: more dinosaur bone standees
  2. DIY dinosaurs: building a life-size Brachiosaurus humerus standee
  3. I am about a great work
  4. These new “artificial intelligence” programs don’t know what they’re talking about
  5. Get yourselves over to Sauropoda Central!

2022 58

December 2022

  1. New paper out today: Aureliano et al. (2022) on vertebral internal structure in the earliest saurischians
  2. Apatosaurus cervical ribs and the tyranny of 2D images
  3. The cylindrical zygapophyses of Trionyx spinifera
  4. Here’s that ventral-view apatosaur cervical anaglyph you ordered
  5. How did baby Utahraptor caudals articulate? The answer will sicken and disgust you

November 2022

  1. Here’s that ornithopod-skeleton anaglyph you ordered
  2. Putative atlantal ribs of Diplodocus
  3. What’s wrong with this picture? No, really: what’s wrong?
  4. Shark week 4: megalodon tooth colonized by boring clams
  5. Who is who in this 1903 Carnegie Museum photo?
  6. Shark week 3: free stuff for the shark-obsessed
  7. Shark week 2: great white teeth redux
  8. Matt’s first megalodon tooth

October 2022

  1. Obscure vertebral anatomy term of the day: bouton
  2. I’m not 100% sure what this is, but it exists
  3. Old tricks in new wineskins
  4. New paper out today: defining ‘cranial’ and ‘caudal’ for vertebrae
  5. Happy 15th birthday to SV-POW!

September 2022

  1. New article: max growth of nerve cells in big mammals and dinos
  2. 3D printing is especially useful for sauropod workers
  3. Learn to be sceptical by seeing how the sausage is made
  4. The Vicki Wedel Memorial Scholarship is nearly fully funded!

August 2022

  1. Help SV-POW!: what happened to the original Carnegie Diplodocus molds?

July 2022

  1. A close, fast encounter with a pronghorn
  2. Help SV-POW! find the reference for this paper by Untermann and Untermann

June 2022

  1. Dino dig birthday cake

May 2022

  1. Tyrannosaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus and 1950s kids
  2. Apatosaurus louisae from below
  3. Tutorial 42: how to get a paper written

April 2022

  1. Apatosaurus louisae: shooting from the hip
  2. New article in the Journal of Data and Information Science: I don’t peer-review for non-open journals, and neither should you
  3. New documentary film streaming now: Science Friction
  4. Why are elephants so small?
  5. How physics stops animals getting really really big in 285 words
  6. On the poignancy and intimacy of history
  7. My talk on Oklahoma Morrison dinosaurs is now on YouTube

March 2022

  1. New book chapter: challenges of studying dental cementum in deciduous teeth
  2. New special issue out today: “Boots and burlap: papers in honor of Richard L. Cifelli”
  3. New paper: pneumatic diverticula in the neural canals of birds
  4. What my life is like right now
  5. Here’s that juvenile Barosaurus pectoral vertebra sequence anaglyph you ordered
  6. Things to Make and Do, part 31: redneck CT-scan

February 2022

  1. What’s up with your insanely thick intervertebral discs, Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus?
  2. What is the origin of these Barosaurus photos?
  3. Seriously, though, what are we going to do about privately held specimens?
  4. So this just happened
  5. Fossae/foramina in the articular surfaces of turkey vertebrae
  6. Sauro-throat, Part 4: the osteological paradox
  7. Sauro-throat, Part 3: what does Dolly’s disease tell us about sauropods?
  8. Turkey skeleton audit
  9. Sauro-throat, Part 2: Dolly in 3D
  10. New paper: Dolly, the dinosaur with a sauro-throat
  11. Skull audit: Wedel responds
  12. Partial audit of mammal skulls
  13. How papers are published, in 343 words
  14. How birds breathe, in 184 words

January 2022

  1. Case study: the conception, slooow gestation, and birth of the incomplete-necks paper
  2. A six-year quest is finally complete! Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted

2021 57

December 2021

  1. Here’s a video on the new saltasaur pneumaticity paper by Aureliano et al. (2021)
  2. New paper out today: Aureliano et al. (2021) on exquisite pneumaticity in a tiny titanosaur
  3. Human anatomy: advice on studying for practical exams
  4. Pneumatization sites: how does air get into vertebrae?

November 2021

  1. £160 for a copy of a dissertation
  2. “Scaled beasts” Giraffatitan skull
  3. The femur of Argyrosaurus, maybe

October 2021

  1. Starlings are amazing
  2. Tutorial 41: distinguishing nerves and arteries in dissection
  3. My Brachiosaurus talk for Dinosaur Journey is now on YouTube
  4. The Wiren Apatosaurus femur is on exhibit in the Moab Museum
  5. Why the price of scholarly publishing is so much higher than the cost
  6. The cost, value and price of scientific publication
  7. Matt Wedel will be yapping about Brachiosaurus. Again.

September 2021

  1. Here’s that hen respiratory system segmentation you ordered

August 2021

  1. No-one better tell ME giraffes aren’t all about the high browsing

June 2021

  1. What’s the difference between a cervical and dorsal vertebra?
  2. How big was the Archbishop?

May 2021

  1. A third pneumatic hiatus in a specimen of Barosaurus
  2. I misconstrued the review history of the paper discussed in the last post: my apologies
  3. When peer-review goes bad … really bad.
  4. Haplocanthosaurus neural canals are weird, part 2: getting comparative specimens from the grocery store
  5. Haplocanthosaurus neural canals are weird, part 1: in which we tell the world
  6. Help me, stats people!

April 2021

  1. My collection of sauropod-themed mugs, 2021 edition
  2. The box turtles clean up nicely
  3. Your daily moment of d’awww: baby box turtle edition

March 2021

  1. Imaging bone cells in 420-million-year-old jawless fish
  2. Analysing the distribution of complete sauropod necks
  3. The catalogue of complete sauropods necks nears completion
  4. Amazing things are out there waiting to be noticed
  5. Tutorial 39: how not to conclude a talk or paper
  6. Cross-sectional asymmetry of sauropod vertebrae
  7. Good experiences of peer-review at Qeios
  8. Burpee PaleoFest 2020: my last conference
  9. Elsevier charge $37.95 for access to an unformatted manuscript with intrusive watermarking and the illustrations removed

February 2021

  1. A sauropod on Mars
  2. Equatorial Minnesota on Alamosaurus
  3. How can we get post-publication peer-review to happen?
  4. How stupid was the neck of Camarasaurus?
  5. Happy Valentine’s Day from Apatosaurinae
  6. Valentine’s day (one day early)
  7. Can we distinguish taphonomic distortion and (paleo)pathology from normal biological variation?
  8. Early origin of artiodactyls in South America
  9. A funny thing happened on the way to the Shiny Digital Future
  10. What a cervical vertebra of an 800m sauropod would look like
  11. My favorite t-shirt

January 2021

  1. What a dream I had!
  2. Xinjiangtitan has the longest preserved neck of any lifeform to date
  3. Towards a catalogue of complete sauropods necks
  4. Haplocanthosaurus MWC 8028, with Bernie for scale
  5. Please review our new paper on pneumatic variation in sauropod vertebrae!
  6. Parker (1874) on the structure and development of the pig skull
  7. Things to Make and Do, Part 29b: Matt’s pig skull – finished
  8. Hey, look, sauropod vertebrae!
  9. Tutorial 38: little projects as footsteps toward understanding
  10. Herons don’t just lie, they cheat (or at least their tracheas do)

2020 57

December 2020

  1. Things to Make and Do, Part 29a: Matt’s pig skull – the prep
  2. Happy Christmas! Here’s why giraffes have short necks!
  3. My Oddbins corkscrew resembles a titanosaur femur
  4. The TetZooMCon palaeoart workshop
  5. Thoughts (three different ones) on Nature‘s €9,500 article-processing charge

November 2020

  1. Cool URIs don’t change
  2. Spinal cord blank diagrams, and the Field Museum Patagotitan

October 2020

  1. James Herrmann’s mammal sculptures for the Cincinnati Museum Center
  2. I support #OpenAccess because …
  3. The pararecurrent nerve in dogs, and sometimes people too
  4. Three skulls in three dimensions
  5. My new badger skull (work in progress)
  6. Accidental anaglyphs
  7. Hey, Mike! Why haven’t you been blogging much lately?
  8. Nonstandard scale bars for photographing turtles: an international collaboration

September 2020

  1. Name the journal. Shame the publisher.

August 2020

  1. You! Shall not! Pass!
  2. Saltapotamus, meet Obesethocoelicaudia
  3. Investigating sauropod vertebral pneumaticity the old-fashioned way
  4. Help! Running phylogenetic analyses in TNT
  5. John Conway’s BRONTOSMASH!

July 2020

  1. Herons lie, part 2
  2. Oculudentavis: three more things
  3. Here’s that badger-skull multiview you ordered
  4. Oculudentavis: the plot thickens
  5. What’s going on with Oculudentavis?
  6. Introducing a new journal metric: the Objective Quality Factor (OQF)
  7. The Dilophosaurus redescription by Marsh and Rowe is now freely available

June 2020

  1. Black Lives Matter

May 2020

  1. Giraffe and human metacarpals compared
  2. Stevens & Parrish 1999 vs. Taylor et al. 2009
  3. The Nanoblock Brachiosaurus
  4. The R2R debate, part 5: what I actually think

April 2020

  1. Why do people publish in Scientific Reports?
  2. Scientific Reports is an objectively bad journal
  3. What can sauropod sacra tell us about neck posture?
  4. The R2R debate, part 4: the video!

March 2020

  1. Apatosaurine cervicals of the ancient Maya civilisation
  2. Tutorial 37: how to record your talk (audio and slides) on a Mac
  3. Storm Giant

February 2020

  1. The R2R debate, part 3: my response for the motion
  2. The R2R debate, part 2: opening statement against the motion
  3. The R2R debate, part 1: opening statement in support
  4. I’ve been an idiot for three years; or, goodbye Brexit, hello Open Access!
  5. Matt Wedel will be yapping about Brachiosaurus at the Burpee Museum PaleoFest this year
  6. The SV-POW! Patreon adds a tier
  7. Matt’s Brachiosaurus in the wild
  8. Make a scale model Brachiosaurus humerus from chicken bones
  9. Brian Engh and Matt Wedel talk Brach-straction on the I Know Dino podcast

January 2020

  1. At last it can be told: we found a big Brachiosaurus in the Salt Wash
  2. A Haplocanthosaurus in the Salt Wash
  3. Nature’s CT machine, part 2: an apatosaurine in the Salt Wash
  4. Nature’s CT machine
  5. Shoebills lie tell the truth (and it’s disgusting)
  6. Welcome…to Jurassic Reimagined
  7. Off-topic: your gonads are innervated by your cranial nerves
  8. The keys to success: fear, arrogance, and laziness

2019 88

December 2019

  1. Christmas came late — in the form of a dead otter
  2. Merry Christmas, have some memes
  3. Something big is coming
  4. Arm lizard
  5. Tutorial 36b: the sauropod axis in detail, illustrated by Camarasaurus

November 2019

  1. Why do some domestic pigs have foreheads?
  2. Here’s that pig-skull multiview you ordered
  3. Prepping big skulls? Get a $1 brain extractor
  4. Werner Janensch, Wannabe, Lovefool
  5. The Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus project is now a museum exhibit
  6. The other side of the other side of that one cool specimen
  7. Dystylosaurus reminds you to beware of taking measurements from casts
  8. Worn and unworn Camarasaurus teeth in the collections at Dinosaur National Monument

October 2019

  1. Brachiosaurus and human metacarpals compared
  2. Tutorial 35: Finding work experience relevant to palaeontology
  3. The Day of the Dinosaur, and the legend of the regrown sauropod tail
  4. Tutorial 19g: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 7: why your open-access journal should use the CC By licence
  5. A nice pneumatic Allosaurus cervical dorsal
  6. Parasaurolophus sculpture by Brian Engh

September 2019

  1. Our vertebral orientation paper is up as a preprint
  2. Checking out Isle of Wight rebbachisaurid vertebrae at SVPCA 2019
  3. Things I loved about SVPCA 2019
  4. The Atterholt & Wedel and plain-old-Wedel talks from SVPCA 2019 are now PeerJ Preprints
  5. Print your manuscripts before submitting them
  6. The Past, Present and Future of Jensen’s “Big Three” sauropods
  7. Matt bought an Iguanodon pelvis … OR DID HE???!
  8. Cut and polished ichthyosaur vertebrae from the Isle of Wight
  9. …including the Atterholt and Wedel (2018) talk on paramedullary diverticula in birds
  10. The whole of the SVPCA 2018 conference is on YouTube

August 2019

  1. The stupidest head
  2. Pro tip: turn your talks into photo books
  3. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 12: how big are the giant diplodocid bones in the Dry Mesa Quarry?
  4. Steve White’s impressionist BRONTOSMASH!
  5. Giant salamanders have evil teeth
  6. Would you like to give SV-POW! your money? Seriously? Well, OK then.
  7. On the philosophy of what research is for
  8. There are more and more options for non-exploitative publishers

July 2019

  1. When sensory nerves from the thigh end up in the feet
  2. Supersaurus timeline
  3. Don’t touch the casts! Touch the bones!
  4. Lovelace et al.’s 2005 poster about the WDC Supersaurus
  5. Table of old and new BYU specimen numbers
  6. Bonus post: Supersaurus before Ultrasaurus!
  7. Cabinet of curiosities: Jessie Atterholt’s office
  8. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 8: we finally get to Ultrasauros!
  9. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 7: at last, Dystylosaurus has its day!
  10. James Herrmann’s dinosaur sculptures for the Cincinnati Museum Center
  11. Baby birds in the summer-house
  12. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 6: what happens to Supersaurus now?

June 2019

  1. It’s a miracle!
  2. More on varying colours of bones
  3. Here’s what I mean about bone colour in photos being misleading
  4. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 5: what actually is Supersaurus?
  5. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 4: what is the holotype of Supersaurus?
  6. James Herrmann’s Aquilops bust
  7. Diplodocus skull and first three cervicals in 3D
  8. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 3: the material of Supersaurus
  9. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 2b: the size of the BYU 9024 animal
  10. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 2: what we found in Utah
  11. Supersaurus, Ultrasaurus and Dystylosaurus in 2019, part 1: what we know now
  12. My sauroponderous birthday card from Brian Engh

May 2019

  1. Zdeněk Burian at decent resolution

April 2019

  1. Dear eLife: please give us eLife ONE
  2. Looking down on the mounted skeletons of Diplodocus and Apatosaurus at the Carnegie Museum

March 2019

  1. Hello, ladies!
  2. Walking around the mounted skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae
  3. How our week at the Carnegie Museum went
  4. Walking around the mounted skeleton of Diplodocus carnegii
  5. Everything’s better with cervical ribs
  6. Neck ontogeny in Tyrannosaurus rex
  7. Mounted sauropods in dorsal view!
  8. Four huge beasts
  9. Derrrrr
  10. Behold! The glory that is CM 555
  11. Proof that penguins evolved from bears
  12. Two navel-gazey announcements: book signing in Pittsburgh this Sunday, and Medlife Crisis video
  13. Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen
  14. We’re going to the Carnegie Museum!

February 2019

  1. BRONTOSMASH! in a kids’ book
  2. The time my turtle munched on a rat skull
  3. Bone cancer in a Triassic stem turtle
  4. TODAY at 7pm! I’m on an Academic-Led Publishing panel
  5. Xenoposeidon‘s world-domination plan continues!

January 2019

  1. Birds have balance organs in their butts. Why is no-one talking about this?!
  2. Did dinosaurs have a second brain to run their back ends?
  3. Bird neural canals are weird, part 3: the glycogen body
  4. Here’s that hemisected hen you ordered
  5. Things to Make and Do, Part 25b: what to do with your bird vertebrae

2018 106

December 2018

  1. 2018 at SV-POW!
  2. The skeletal artistry of the paddlefish skull
  3. Things to Make and Do, Part 25: cleaning bird vertebrae
  4. The vertebral orientation presentation from the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now a PeerJ Preprint
  5. Turkeys lie
  6. The Haplocanthosaurus presentation from the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress is now a PeerJ Preprint
  7. Writing the vertebral-orientation paper in the open
  8. Museum of Osteology, June 2018 visit
  9. Aquilops skull, take 3
  10. Our presentations are up at the 1st Palaeo Virtual Congress
  11. What half a pig head looks like

November 2018

  1. Apatosaurus is — still — Just Plain Wrong
  2. Academic-Led Publishing: an interview in which I am somehow represented as an expert
  3. Pelican cervico-dorsal transition, backlit
  4. Lydekker’s (1893) illustration of Xenoposeidon
  5. My new dinosaur book for kids is out
  6. Please welcome Mirarce eatoni
  7. We may never know how flexible sauropod necks were
  8. T. rex mount at New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science
  9. Diverticulum, diverticula

October 2018

  1. Coproliteposting time!
  2. Some noodling about pneumaticity and body size
  3. What if Amphicoelias fragillimus was a rebbachisaurid?
  4. Maybe pneumaticity is variable because it’s built on a shaky foundation
  5. Mike Taylor interview by Szymon Górnicki
  6. Timely: come see Matt talk, or come talk to Matt
  7. Sacral pneumatization in sauropods was complex
  8. #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt at TetZooCon 2018
  9. Fiona’s talk on documentary music at TetZooCon 2018
  10. Vertebral orientation, part 3: Matt weighs in
  11. You have been BEATEN!! Announcing the SummonENGH 2018 Paleoart Contest winner!
  12. You have been summoned! Announcing the SummonENGH 2018 Paleoart Contest

September 2018

  1. Vertebral orientation: Varanus komodoensis would like a word
  2. Plus ça change, Tomistoma edition
  3. The 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress: new abstract deadline, and registration payment methods
  4. The Atterholt and Wedel (2018) SVPCA abstract and talk are now available on PeerJ Preprints
  5. Imposter syndrome revisited
  6. The proximal caudals of Brachiosaurus altithorax, FMNH P25107
  7. Xenoposeidon comes to California

August 2018

  1. When is a vertebra “horizontal”, part 2
  2. What does it mean for a vertebra to be “horizontal”?
  3. Down in flames
  4. Diplodocus goes digital
  5. CT scanning a caudal vertebra of Diplodocus
  6. How long would it take to buy Elsevier instead of APCs or subscriptions?
  7. Caelestiventus hanseni, the new Triassic pterosaur from Utah
  8. Caudal vertebrae of Haplocanthosaurus delfsi
  9. The Haplo project enjoys a brief interlude in realspace
  10. First caudal vertebrae of the various Haplocanthosaurus specimens

July 2018

  1. Another Utah trip, and Aquilops on display at Dinosaur Journey
  2. The camarasaur that was more than it seeemed
  3. Proximal caudals of Haplocanthosaurus, from Hatcher (1903)
  4. Forelimb homology display at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
  5. The 2018 World Cup logo is based on the dorsal view of the Xenoposeidon holotype NHMUK PV R2095
  6. New paper out today: Xenoposeidon is indeed the oldest rebbachisaur
  7. Haplocanthosaurus goes digital
  8. Afield in Oklahoma, part 3

June 2018

  1. Afield in Oklahoma, part 2
  2. Afield in Oklahoma
  3. Did apatosaurs have unusually large neural spines, too?
  4. Cabinet of curiosities: a visit to Peter Dodson’s office
  5. Death and life in the woodshed
  6. Exploded turtles of the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

May 2018

  1. Back in business
  2. Work on the Archbishop begins!
  3. How much poop did Argentinosaurus produce in a day?
  4. Sauropod neural canals are weird, part 1c: unfused Giraffatitan dorsal
  5. In quest of monsters – last week’s Utah adventure
  6. Bird neural canals are weird, part 2: the lumbosacral expansion
  7. An abstract should be a surrogate for a paper, not an advertisement for it
  8. Bird neural canals are weird, part 1: intro and supramedullary diverticula
  9. Necks lie: solitaire weka edition
  10. Cool things happening elsewhere: three links

April 2018

  1. Exploded turtles of the Academy of Natural Sciences
  2. What it’s like to watch a Hugo-winning artist draw your dinosaur
  3. It pays to stay humble before nature
  4. Keep your dumb ole T. rex
  5. I’m talking about asteroids vs dinosaurs at the Alf Museum tomorrow
  6. Ask SV-POW!: Could you wield a club made from a dinosaur femur?
  7. Hemisected skulls of a marten (Martes) and an opossum (Didelphis)
  8. The mounted skeleton of Patagotitan at the AMNH

March 2018

  1. The top 10 most popular SV-POW! posts
  2. Awarding grants by throwing dice
  3. Martin Grötschel’s opening address to the APE 2018 conference (Academic Publishing in Europe)
  4. The flaming T. rex and other new paleo memes
  5. Thinking about sauropod skin
  6. Cervical vertebrae of Suuwassea on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia
  7. Aepyornis femora of the Oxford Museum of Natural History
  8. Bisected pelican arm bones of the Oxford Museum of Natural History
  9. The mounted Mamenchisaurus at Wollaton Hall
  10. BIBE 45854, the giant Alamosaurus cervical series from Big Bend, Texas
  11. The pneumatic tail of the Field Museum apatosaurine, FMNH P25112

February 2018

  1. Off-topic: what will happen to my tungsten cube?
  2. Distinguishing cervicals of apatosaurines and Camarasaurus
  3. Green open-access does NOT mean delayed or non-commercial
  4. Brontosmash: The Field Trip (the teaser)
  5. Sauroposeidon, the early years: my first drawing
  6. How crazy are the cervicals of Mendozasaurus?

January 2018

  1. OMNH 1330, another big apatosaurine caudal
  2. Sauropod neural canals are weird, part 1b: more offset neural arch joints
  3. The New Dinosaur Dictionary, Mark Hallett, and the best Christmas present ever
  4. Paul Graham on blogging as a way to generate papers
  5. What allowed sauropods to get big, and what kept them from getting any bigger?
  6. Brachiosaurus cervical BYU 12866 multi-view photos
  7. Chalk, salamanders, and sauropods at The Last Bookstore
  8. OMNH 1811, a Camarasaurus dorsal from Black Mesa

2017 63

December 2017

  1. The giant brachiosaur cervical of Arches National Park
  2. Tutorial 17: preparing illustrations. Part 4: go big
  3. Listen to Mark Hallett and Matt Wedel on the I Know Dino podcast
  4. It’s that time of year…
  5. OMNH 1670, a fat shark, the past, and the future

November 2017

  1. Promo pandemonium: Prehistoric Times, Mark Hallett calendar, public talks, and Norwescon 41
  2. Photogrammetry: index to Heinrich Mallison’s tutorials
  3. An online browsable 3D model of the Xenoposeidon vertebra
  4. Xenoposeidon: the crucial importance of 3D models
  5. Xenoposeidon is ten years old today! And it’s the oldest rebbachisaur!

October 2017

  1. Is everything we know about sauropod phylogeny nonsense?
  2. More thoughts on SVPCA 2017
  3. Poll: sauropod vertebra picture of the decade
  4. Ten years of sauropod vertebrae!

September 2017

  1. The “Growth series of one” poster is published
  2. Giving talks: some more positive thoughts
  3. Giving talks: what to leave out
  4. Revising a poster
  5. Posterior cervical vertebra of a juvenile Diplodocus
  6. The “Biconcavoposeidon” poster is published
  7. Apatosaurus louisae Brontosaurus parvus CM 555, centra of C2-C6

August 2017

  1. Unpaid reviewing, community, and choice
  2. “Biconcavoposeidon”
  3. Some further thoughts on Patagotitan
  4. Don’t believe the hype: Patagotitan was not bigger than Argentinosaurus
  5. Nomenclature is for naming
  6. Valley of the Mastodons is coming at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California

July 2017

  1. Flipping subscription journals to OA: Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics
  2. Tutorial 33: Checklist for a book signing

June 2017

  1. Why publishers cannot be around the table when the scholarly community discusses its communication options
  2. Stop the presses: Klingon foreheads were based on dinosaur vertebrae!
  3. Old drawings (of heads)
  4. Who owns the copyright in your research?
  5. A database of all dinosaur specimens in the world
  6. Sauropods stomping turtles: a much neglected theme in palaeo art
  7. Hot new stuff in APP: rebbachisaur pneumaticity, big croc, Allosaurus butts
  8. My collection of sauropod-themed mugs (or at least five sixths of it)

May 2017

  1. Sauropod neural canals are weird, part 1: when the neural arch, um, isn’t one
  2. Who owns your favourite journal?
  3. Tutorial 32: How to ensure that no-one will ever use your PhyloPic silhouettes
  4. Listen to Matt spout nonsense on Fist Full of Podcasts
  5. OMNH 2162, probable dorsal 2 of the big apatosaur
  6. Owl legs lie
  7. “But Elsevier bought Mendeley and SSRN, and they’re OK, aren’t they?”
  8. What exactly is the problem with Elsevier and co?
  9. Two new sauropods in PeerJ today: Galeamopus pabsti (sp. nov) and Vouivria damparisensis (gen. et sp. nov.)
  10. Guest Post: A color-coded model of the AMNH “Brontosaurus” mount, by Tom Johnson

April 2017

  1. Smile: fun things to look for in your dental x-rays
  2. Declining a review request for a non-open journal
  3. There has been an Aquilopsing – have you felt it?
  4. Upcoming book signings
  5. Matt’s best tetrapod photos of 2016
  6. We cannot rely on for-profit corporations to build open scholarly infrastructure
  7. Towards the long-overdue open graph of citations

March 2017

  1. My contribution to Evolution: The Whole Story: sauropods
  2. Why do we manage academia so badly?
  3. Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
  4. It’s all just too awful

February 2017

  1. DinoFest 2017 talks are free online!

January 2017

  1. Help me find this notebook
  2. What should we do now Beall’s List has gone?
  3. My talk on copyright, from the University of Manchester’s “Open Knowledge in Higher Education” course
  4. Beware over-interpreting photos of fossils

2016 99

December 2016

  1. A quick stop at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
  2. Walking with sauropods at Copper Ridge (video)
  3. Where are BZN issues? What is happening with the Diplodocus petition? Is anyone home at the ICZN?

November 2016

  1. Should universities accept Elsevier’s negotiation with Jisc? Who knows? It’s secret.
  2. Yes, sauropod neck vertebrae got longer as the animals grew up
  3. I choose Haplocanthosaurus
  4. Lookback time – my new article in Sky & Telescope

October 2016

  1. One more SVP book signing
  2. #OpenAccessWeek: DELETED SCENES from my Jisc interview
  3. Sauropod book signing at SVP, and #Brontosmash animation
  4. #OpenAccessWeek: a bibliography on the impact of open access outside academia
  5. #OpenAccessWeek: my Jisc interview about designer labels
  6. Is it time to rethink the private/public distinctions for museums?

September 2016

  1. Rabbit skulls strike back: Kraatz and Sherratt (2016)
  2. Should we still give taxonomic authorities?
  3. How horrifying was the neck of Barosaurus?
  4. Our Barosaurus preprint has risen from the grave!
  5. What is the nature and purpose of a type specimen?
  6. My comment in support of the Diplodocus carnegii ICZN petition
  7. The Hallett and Wedel sauropod book is out now

August 2016

  1. Another day, another Elsevier power-grab
  2. Path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in frogs, giraffes, and elasmosaurs
  3. I hold the copyright in my 2010 article on the history of sauropod research

July 2016

  1. Elsevier has started destroying SSRN
  2. Tutorial 31: ways to start a new open-access journal

June 2016

  1. Our short paper on moral dimensions of open
  2. “We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope.
  3. UK national negotiations with Elsevier: it seems we’re not messing around.
  4. Europe: “Let’s make everything better!” / STM Publishers: “No, let’s not.”
  5. Legacy publishers are not our friends. Can’t we just admit it?

May 2016

  1. That comment that was censored from the Scholarly Kitchen
  2. An SV-POW! challenge: what is this vertebra?
  3. The unquiet corpse of Ingelfinger is still shambling around, smashing up science
  4. Elsevier’s increasing control over scholarly infrastructure, and how funders should fix this
  5. I did my research. Yes, I think academic publishers are greedy. (With notes on publishers’ rhetoric and creationism)
  6. Thank you to all our Sauropocalypse hosts!
  7. What’s up with your irregular ventral ridges, diplodocines?
  8. When evolution just gives up, part 4
  9. When evolution just gives up, part 3
  10. When evolution just gives up, part 2
  11. When evolution just gives up
  12. Fun and games at the BYU museum
  13. Mike’s adventures on the Wall at Dinosaur National Monument
  14. Matt’s adventures in the Camarasaurus pit
  15. SV-POW! endorses Triceratops
  16. Gone
  17. Tutorial 30: how to identify Morrison sauropod cervicals
  18. My new sauropod book with Mark Hallett will be out soon

April 2016

  1. SV-POW! on the road – Sauropocalypse 2016
  2. Dödös get a mönögraph
  3. Enter Sarmientosaurus
  4. Moral dimensions of Open, part 5: whose responsibility is this?
  5. A fox, a badger, a pheasant and a monitor lizard walk into a bar …
  6. There is no such thing as self-plagiarism
  7. Moral dimensions of Open, part 4: “on the shoulders of giants”
  8. Projects that happen, projects that don’t
  9. Moral dimensions of Open, part 3: “legacy publishers make huge profits”
  10. The unique artistic talents of Darren Naish: sauropods as agile, cursorial bipeds
  11. Moral dimensions of Open, part 2: “the public paid for it, so the public should have access”
  12. The unique artistic talents of Darren Naish: the whiplash tail of flagellicaudatan sauropods
  13. Those sixteen issues of the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology found a good home!
  14. Moral dimensions of Open, part 1: “marginal cost is zero, so price should be zero”
  15. Badgers are better than cats
  16. What would a Gold-OA world look like? Three issues briefly considered

March 2016

  1. Moral dimensions of Open, part 0: why this matters
  2. Mind you, it’s not all dead badgers in my kitchen
  3. Defleshing a badger head: a pictorial guide
  4. Happy Easter! I celebrated by decapitating a fox and a badger
  5. The pheasant comes apart
  6. Free to a good home: sixteen issues of the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology
  7. Help me! How can I deflesh a tortoise?
  8. Populating the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform
  9. Wild Proboscidea in Oklahoma
  10. Copying content is not the same as theft
  11. SV-POW! on the road – Matt’s public lecture at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
  12. Thought-experiment #2: what will happen if Sci-Hub fails?
  13. Thought-experiment #1: what will happen if Sci-Hub succeeds?
  14. Making science and food out of a pheasant
  15. Access to research: Nobody in the history of the world has ever liked raisins. NOBODY!!
  16. Stop writing “scientists believe”
  17. Sci-Hub is a scholarly litmus test
  18. Play with VertFigure online

February 2016

  1. Amazing free comparative anatomy resource. Also, sharks (also for free).
  2. What is Alexandra Elbakyan’s motivation for creating and running Sci-Hub?
  3. Giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus mount, from above
  4. What’s in Mike’s freezer?
  5. Does Sci-Hub phish for credentials?
  6. What should we think about Sci-Hub?
  7. Scholarly copyright: grotesque, pointless impediment, or fatuous waste of time and effort?
  8. That paper that says women are better coders than men but are judged on their gender? It doesn’t say that at all
  9. Dinosaur life histories are plicomcated
  10. Barbra Streisand, Elsevier, and Sci-Hub

January 2016

  1. Simple metrics in a complex world: Matt’s pessimistic take on the LWM
  2. Choosing parameters for the Less Wrong Metric (LWM)
  3. Yes, folks, birds and crocs can pee
  4. The Less Wrong Metric (LWM): towards a not wholly inadequate way of quantifying the value of research
  5. All right then, how should we evaluate research and researchers?
  6. Notocolossus is a beast
  7. No, David Attenborough, you can’t tell how heavy a dinosaur was from the circumference of its femur

2015 110

December 2015

  1. In praise of Jack McIntosh

November 2015

  1. #OpenCon 2015: absolutely, indisputably, the best conference ever
  2. MYDD! #OpenCon edition
  3. The central irony of life in academia
  4. “The editor had requested a price of 400 euros, an APC that is not sustainable”
  5. Things to Make and Do, part 18: jar of wasps

October 2015

  1. My cat’s neck skeleton (first five cervicals)
  2. Fighting apatosaur art #7: the world speaks!
  3. Which was the biggest dinosaur? (Answer: it’s complicated)
  4. How light could a giant azhdarchid be?
  5. Richard Butler: seeking volunteers for the SVPCA committee
  6. Copyright: promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts by preventing access to 105-year-old quarry maps
  7. Why do we have so few complete, undistorted sauropod necks?
  8. The 14 beautiful cervicals of Kaatedocus
  9. My most depressing paper
  10. Four different reasons to post preprints
  11. Does anyone have a good scan of Hatcher 1901: plate VI?
  12. Richard Butler: offer to host SVPCA 2017, and a plan for the future

September 2015

  1. Fighting apatosaur art #6: the ones that got away
  2. Fighting apatosaur art #5: Mark Witton
  3. Fighting apatosaur art #4: #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt
  4. Fighting apatosaur art #3: Bob Nicholls
  5. What is my mystery baby bird?
  6. Here’s that cat-skull multiview you ordered
  7. Fighting apatosaur art #2: Brian Engh again
  8. Fighting apatosaur art #1: Brian Engh
  9. The University of Bristol’s new #OpenAccess policy
  10. The Internet is for cat photos. Here are mine.
  11. It was ten years ago today: my first published paper
  12. So what were apatosaurs doing with their crazy necks?
  13. Things to Make and Do, Part 16: cat skull
  14. A “special issue” for SVPCA 2015 proceedings
  15. Sauropods were toblerones, not smarties tubes
  16. I got almost everything wrong in my last post: I’m sorry.
  17. Unhappy thoughts on student projects at SVPCA 2015
  18. Just write the Archbishop description already!

August 2015

  1. The world’s best Tenontosaurus skull
  2. Diplodocid sacra of the AMNH (and indeed the Carnegie Museum)

July 2015

  1. The 5 stages of PeerJ
  2. Is Xenoposeidon a rebbachisaur?
  3. Early Cretaceous titanosauriform cervical UMNH 21054, or, “Hello again, beautiful”
  4. How can next REF more strongly emphasise the unimportance of Impact Factor?
  5. Rebbachisaurus gets a proper description
  6. Natural History Museum of Utah: wall of ceratopsians
  7. More thoughts on the Joni Mitchell conference
  8. My adventure in the world of Humanities
  9. Natural History Museum of Utah: Barosaurus

June 2015

  1. Introducing The One Repo
  2. Arrogance, elitism, paternalism
  3. Brontosaurus cervical 8 … it just gets weirder
  4. Vertebrates and invertebrates of Nova Scotia
  5. New information on the integumentary ornamentation of Aquilops americanus (that I have on my shoulder)
  6. The longest cell in Andy Farke
  7. Will we ever find the biggest dinosaur?
  8. How much does “typesetting” cost?
  9. “A profound and possibly psychotic break with reality”
  10. Correction: there is no support for Haestasaurus as a derived titanosaur
  11. Tutorial 40: things to do when a paper comes out — a checklist
  12. Looks like “Pelorosaurus” becklesii is actually Haestasaurus becklesii!
  13. The skin impression of “Pelorosaurus” becklesii
  14. What about the forearm of “Pelorosaurus” becklesii?
  15. Whatever happened to “Pelorosaurus” becklesii?

May 2015

  1. Have we reached Peak Megajournal?
  2. Green and Gold: the possible futures of Open Access
  3. The Felch Quarry brachiosaur skull
  4. Public access to results of NSF-funded research
  5. Two short observations on AAAS and open access
  6. Two important new palaeobiological hypotheses regarding diplodocids
  7. The scale model of the AMNH apatosaurine skeleton, AMNH 460
  8. A followup on Elsevier’s defence of scholarly copyright
  9. What should we tell people about the AMNH apatosaurine?
  10. Copyright from the lens of reality
  11. The Medical Journal of Australia vs Elsevier
  12. Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication: Part 2, day 2
  13. Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication, part 2

April 2015

  1. My name is Giraffatitan, king of kings
  2. Richard Poynder on the need for transparency in publishing
  3. Roadside dinos of Yermo, California
  4. What are we going to call PLOS ONE-style peer-review?
  5. Why Mike is interested in Royal Society Open Science, and why Matt isn’t
  6. Measure the thing you’re interested in
  7. Live-blog: the Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication
  8. Tutorial 4b: Saurischian vertebral laminae and fossae redux, by Adam Marsh
  9. How conveniently can you package your results?
  10. Welcome back, Brontosaurus! And other first thoughts on Tschopp et al. (2015)
  11. Heaven protect us from a “UK National Licence”
  12. Pay Scientific Reports extra to bypass peer-review altogether

March 2015

  1. “PeerJ can’t possibly last because the numbers don’t add up.”
  2. Baby box turtles, and the ghost of editors past
  3. You can predict how rabbits run by looking at their skulls (using this one weird trick!)
  4. Zallinger’s “Age of Reptiles” mural at the Yale Peabody Museum
  5. Here comes VAMP, a new open-access journal of vertebrate palaeontology
  6. Help us assemble all of the museum abbreviations
  7. How big was ‘Huanghetitan’ ruyangensis? I mean, really?

February 2015

  1. Tutorial 29, Appendix B: good, bad, and ugly titles of Matt’s papers
  2. Dinosaur National Monument quarry map
  3. Defensive use of the tail in monitors – and also sauropods?
  4. A permanent home for the SVP’s Aetogate documents
  5. The Titanic was sunk by an Apatosaurus cervical
  6. The planned vandalism of the Natural History Museum: a modest proposal
  7. Can it be? Even more non-dinosaurian epipophyses? Yes, and this time they’re non-ornithodiran!
  8. What’s that you say? No epipophyses in titanosaurs? Oh really?
  9. The equivocal epipophyses of Cf. Quetzalcoatlus
  10. Further exciting developments in the field of non-sauropod epipophyses
  11. Epipophyses, the forgotten apophyses: not just for sauropods!
  12. The epipophyses of Qijianglong and other sauropods

January 2015

  1. The “finger-like” parapostzygapophyseal processes of Qijianglong
  2. Sideshow Apatosaurus sans background
  3. What have you done with Aquilops!?
  4. Our thoughts on Elsevier’s newly announced, as-yet-untitled, PLOS ONE clone

2014 158

December 2014

  1. Aquilops wants to play
  2. My neck-cartilage angle paper is out!
  3. My early Christmas present: a dead corn snake
  4. My new paper on Haplocanthosaurus is out
  5. Why I feel horrible about Nature‘s article-sharing initiative
  6. Aquilops in today’s LA Times
  7. How bigsmall was Aquilops?
  8. Reconstructing the skull of Aquilops
  9. Please welcome Aquilops americanus
  10. On ReadCube, and Nature‘s give-away
  11. Why no PDF of the Smith and Benson Rhomaleosaurus monograph? An open letter to the Palaeontographical Society
  12. Crocomodiles vs. Allimogators

November 2014

  1. Open-access megajournals reduce the peer-review burden
  2. Is publishing “just a button”?
  3. The most important essay on scholarly publication this week
  4. The freakily consistent colour palette of Wedel and Taylor (2013) on caudal pneumaticity
  5. Crocodiles vs. elephants
  6. Have De Gruyters enclosed previously open-access Bepress journals?
  7. How did the horrible Yale “Brontosaurus” skull come to be?
  8. We need clear policy on tweeting from academic conferences
  9. Is my new sauropod-neck cartilage paper “published”?
  10. Sauropods’ neutral neck postures were really weird
  11. Necks Lie: the complete story

October 2014

  1. CC-By documents cannot be re-enclosed if their publisher is acquired
  2. Publishers, where is the added value?
  3. Interview with Open Access Nigeria
  4. Tutorial 29, Appendix A: good, bad and ugly titles of Mike’s papers
  5. Tutorial 29: how to choose a title for your paper
  6. tiny brontosauruses
  7. Here’s that wallaby-skull multiview you ordered
  8. Here’s that sheep-skull multiview you ordered
  9. I am now a “famous palaeontologist” … thanks to my antlers

September 2014

  1. Things to Make and Do, Part 14: sheep skull
  2. Does anyone want a project? How can we understand sauropod neck cartilage better?
  3. Tutorial 28: how to remember the branches of the internal iliac artery
  4. Wheelbarrow handles for vertebrae? The cervical rib bundles of Sauroposeidon and other sauropods
  5. Move over, All Yesterdays: It’s time for #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt!
  6. The CC By licence does not let people distort and misrepresent your work
  7. Gender balance at SVPCA
  8. Guest post: the genesis of Davide Bonadonna’s Spinosaurus painting
  9. Spinosaurus fishiness, part n
  10. How long was the torso of Dreadnoughtus?
  11. How massive was Dreadnoughtus?
  12. Give a talk that holds attention!
  13. Please welcome Rukwatitan (over on Mark Witton’s blog)
  14. Brief thoughts on Dreadnoughtus
  15. Come on, AAAS. You can do better than this.

August 2014

  1. Thinking about spinal cords
  2. SO close
  3. Open Letter to the AAAS about Science Advances
  4. The bizarre caudal neural spines of Tambatitanis amicitiae
  5. Researchers: do your damned job
  6. How untrue “facts” propagate in the scientific literature

July 2014

  1. Fumbling towards transparency: the Royal Society’s “reject & resubmit” and submitted/published dates
  2. How should I cite my old/new diversity preprint?
  3. My scientific media diet, the arborization of science, and the Red Queen
  4. Mike Taylor’s ESOF2014 talk: should science always be open?
  5. Pelican vertebrae are mostly air
  6. SV-POW! showdown: Supersaurus vs Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus
  7. New (but very old) preprint: A survey of dinosaur diversity by clade, age, place of discovery and year of description
  8. Free papers you should read: Martin and Palmer (2014) on ASPs of pterosaur wing bones
  9. LAST CHANCE to book your place for TetZooCon
  10. The revolution will be comic-booked

June 2014

  1. Xenoposeidon in glorious 3D
  2. The Journal of Zoology special issue on paleobehavior is free for the next 30 days
  3. Cambrian trilobites from the Marble Mountains, southern California
  4. A beautiful Lego Diplodocus skeleton
  5. Brian Engh is unleashing monsters
  6. Mounted skeleton of Emeus crassus
  7. I’m speaking at ESOF2014 on “Should science always be open?”
  8. How heavy was Giraffatitan brancai? I mean, really?
  9. Dry Mesa Brachiosaurus cervical in dorsal view
  10. How much is our intuition about sauropod mass worth?
  11. The Field Museum’s photo-archives tumblr, featuring: airbrushing dorsals
  12. Brachiosaurus altithorax, fossils in the field
  13. How big was Brachiosaurus altithorax? I mean, really?

May 2014

  1. Brachiosaurus altithorax, mounted inside the Field Museum
  2. Gilles Danis of P.A.S.T on the Chicago Brachiosaurus mount
  3. How slender were the humeri of Giraffatitan?
  4. The humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax, part 3: the airport mount
  5. The humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax, part 2: the museum mount
  6. The humerus of Brachiosaurus altithorax, part 1: the fossil
  7. The new Argentine titanosaur was about the same size as the biggest Argentinosaurus
  8. The holotype dorsal vertebra of Dystylosaurus
  9. Local author book signing at the San Bernardino County Museum this Sunday
  10. Science paywalls as tragedy
  11. Poetry for paleontologists: In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto 123, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  12. Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 7: Price and the San Rafael Swell
  13. Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 6: Sauroposeidon and kin
  14. Now it’s NPG’s turn to send takedown notices
  15. Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 5: Hanksville area
  16. Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 4: Into the Lower Cretaceous
  17. Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 3: Dinosaur Journey Museum
  18. Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 2: Fruita area paleo

April 2014

  1. Mid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 1: Dinosaur National Monument field trip
  2. How to negotiate with Elsevier
  3. One articulated Sauroposeidon to go, hold the perspective distortion, with a side of stinkin’ mammal
  4. Cetiosaurus oxoniensis is — finally! — the type species of Cetiosaurus
  5. Five conversations
  6. Sauroposeidon in 3D
  7. Horrible sauropod skulls of the Yale Peabody Museum, part 2: Brontosaurus; and no, I do not mean Apatosaurus
  8. Introducing VertFigure, a better name for vcd2svg
  9. Introducing vcd2svg: how we made the vertebral-bifurcation heat-map figure
  10. Photography and illustration talk, Part 14: Summary figures, and the talk files
  11. Photography and illustration talk, Part 13: Intro figures

March 2014

  1. HEFCE’s new open-access policy for post-2014 outputs
  2. Frederik Spindler’s wooly brachiosaur
  3. Rearing titanosaurs of the Egidio Feruglio museum
  4. We need different types of citation: Replicates, Falsifies, DependsOn, Acknowledges …
  5. Photography and illustration talk, Part 12: Stereo and 3D
  6. Behold, the SV-POW! mole!
  7. Photography and illustration talk, Part 11: Maps and territories
  8. A “nuanced” position isn’t always correct
  9. Greatest. Video. Ever. Starring sauropod-on-theropod violence!
  10. Get your relative-lengths-of-sauropod-necks T-shirts!
  11. On breadth in research interests
  12. Photography and illustration talk, Part 10: Figure parts and placement
  13. How is it possible that Elsevier are still charging for copies of open-access articles?
  14. Welcome, Cracked readers–here’s some eyeball bait
  15. Accidental mailbag #1
  16. Update on search-terms leading to SV-POW!
  17. Photography and illustration talk, Part 9: Perspective and scale bars
  18. Photography and illustration talk, Part 8: Multi-view figures
  19. The case of the bandy-legged Diplodocus

February 2014

  1. Rebbachisaurus description incoming!
  2. Time running out for PeerJ free publication vouchers
  3. Sauroposeidon and friends
  4. Photography and illustration talk, Part 7: Manipulating photographs
  5. Photography and illustration talk, Part 6: Taking notes
  6. Photography and illustration talk, Part 5: Use color
  7. Photography and illustration talk, Part 4: Scale bars
  8. The full story on Morosaurus lentus
  9. Horrible sauropod skulls of the Yale Peabody Museum, part 1: Morosaurus lentus, the world’s most foolish sauropod
  10. Can PeerJ really be only a year old?
  11. Photography and illustration talk, Part 3: Backdrops and lighting
  12. Giraffatitan skull photos
  13. Stop what you’re doing and go read Cameron Neylon’s blog
  14. Photography and illustration talk, Part 2: Taking good photographs
  15. The Top 5 Things to Look for in a Used T. rex: You Tell Us!
  16. Photography and illustration talk, Part 1: Intro and Stromer
  17. If Harry Potter was an academic work
  18. SV-POW! featured on the Lost in the Stacks podcast

January 2014

  1. Pathological mammal skulls of the California Academy of Sciences
  2. Guest Post: Jan Velterop on open-access licences
  3. Playing with Sauroposeidon photos
  4. Sauroposeidon in perspective–too much perspective
  5. The Paleontological Society’s new open access options
  6. Caudal pneumaticity in sauropods: in praise of actually looking at fossils
  7. Things to Make and Do, Part 12: London’s mummified mouse
  8. Tutorial 27: how to publish an open-access paper in a paywalled journal
  9. Why peer-review may be worth persisting with, despite everything
  10. How to become good at peer-review: three points of disagreement
  11. Great news on open access in the USA … and a long, long way to go
  12. Roadside reptiles of Gila Bend, Arizona
  13. Estimating sauropod intervertebral cartilage thickness from CT scans
  14. Will Elsevier have a Snowden Event?
  15. Bird vertebra diagrams
  16. Can The Scholarly Kitchen save itself?

2013 196

December 2013

  1. Elsevier’s David Tempest explains subscription-contract confidentiality clauses
  2. Tutorial 17: preparing illustrations. Part 3: adding shading to röck döts
  3. Vicki’s book, Broken Bones, is out!
  4. Elsevier steps up its War On Access
  5. Bare bear bone: beautiful
  6. Correlation of impact factor and citations: a personal case-study
  7. Unidirectional airflow in the lungs of birds, crocs…and now monitor lizards!?
  8. Carnivore Skull Challenge: the reveal
  9. Know your mammal skulls? Take the Carnivore Skull Challenge!
  10. Elsevier is taking down papers from Academia.edu

November 2013

  1. Walk-in access? Seriously?
  2. Want to publish for free in PeerJ?
  3. Mike’s talks at the Berlin 11 conference
  4. Generations unite! Open Access can’t fail
  5. Awesome animals at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
  6. Mike will be speaking at the Berlin 11 conference next week
  7. Dödös need röck döts
  8. SV-POW! fan-art? Yes, that’s a thing now
  9. Did sauropod necks have intervertebral discs?
  10. How thick is the cartilage in necks of extant animals?
  11. The importance of cartilage in neck reconstructions

October 2013

  1. Caudal pneumaticity paper in Huffington Post –and– get your PLOS Collection USB drives
  2. Two SV-POW! papers in the new PLOS Collection!
  3. The world’s most open-access dinosaur
  4. My hobby:
  5. Tutorial 26: How to spread messages on the internet
  6. Tutorial 19: Open Access definitions and clarifications (in seven parts)
  7. Mike’s 2¢ on Scientific American‘s silencing of DNLee
  8. Friday follies: flamingoes are funny
  9. Looking for a project? Analyse open-access involvement by career-stage
  10. Anti-tutorial: how to design and execute a really bad study
  11. Rocky the Rock’s guide to the rock cycle
  12. John Bohannon’s peer-review sting against Science

September 2013

  1. Dear publishers: please get out of the way
  2. Get yourselves over to Tyrannosauroidea Central
  3. Tutorial 25: How to Study for Gross Anatomy (and Just About Everything Else)
  4. Sauropods stomping theropods: Bryan Riolo’s Chaos Gigantes
  5. Reviews for our Barosaurus preprint
  6. Our new Barosaurus paper is up as a preprint at PeerJ
  7. Plagiarism is nothing to do with copyright
  8. Measuring the elongation of vertebrae
  9. “Phat air meets wide gauge” meets color
  10. Brian Engh: Stomp time!
  11. All right, then, this is the first ever adequately illustrated vertebra of Giraffatitan
  12. The first ever adequately illustrated vertebra of Giraffatitan
  13. Who owns journals?
  14. The Finch Group needs to grasp the nettle
  15. Beards of the Mesozoic: Bob Nicholls edition
  16. Dear journals: communicate with your authors
  17. Dear publishers: this is how to fix a bug in your platform
  18. Tutorial 36: the atlas-axis complex in sauropods
  19. Vomiting dinosaurs of SVPCA 2013
  20. Now this is a man who truly loves his sauropod vertebrae
  21. Hey! They stole my book cover!
  22. Plateosaurus is comical
  23. What is an ad-hominem attack?
  24. Multiview of a cervical vertebra of the Apatosaurus ajax holotype YPM 1860
  25. How can I make a video of my SVPCA talk?
  26. Here are those dorsal-view images of Apatosaurus cervicals you ordered

August 2013

  1. Looking for dorsal-view images of Diplodocus cervicals
  2. Here’s that Brachiosaurus altithorax skeleton you ordered
  3. The SV-POW! journal finder
  4. Citing artwork in academic papers
  5. Go read this: Marugán-Lobón et al. 2013 on semicircular canal orientation and head posture in saurischian dinosaurs

July 2013

  1. My attempt at a fully Engh-ed out brachiosaur
  2. The Royal Society has taken some steps to improving reporting of submit/resubmit/accept times
  3. Tutorial 15c: The bones of the ornithischian skeleton
  4. Tataouinea hannibalis and its crazy pneumatic pelvis
  5. Pacific Rim, a large-animal anatomist’s dream come true
  6. Tutorial 16: giving good talks (in four parts)
  7. Why Robin Osborne makes no sense
  8. Museum of Osteology: pathological rodent teeth. Also, Cthulhu.
  9. A loophole in PLOS’s use of the CC By licence
  10. Museum of Osteology: Tegu skull
  11. MAKE MONEY FAST!!!

June 2013

  1. Museum of Osteology, June 2013 visit
  2. Do you really need a scan of my passport?
  3. Why a NISO effort to standardise AltMetrics?
  4. Funders have all the power in OA negotiations. So why aren’t they using it?
  5. Why did RCUK betray us to barrier-based publishers?
  6. Some problems with hybrid open access
  7. Publishing is a button: what Clay Shirky didn’t say
  8. PeerJ is a year old tomorrow!
  9. Why open access is not socialism
  10. All joined with a single voice to praise CHORUS, thus: “meh.”
  11. Tutorial 24: variables for tubular bones, ASP, MSP, and bone density
  12. Dear legitimate open-access publishers: stop spamming!
  13. How dense are birds? Some new (old) data. Also, hummingbirds and ketchup.

May 2013

  1. How fat is an elephant?
  2. Well, I guess that’s that
  3. Dear PLOS ONE: time to sort out your multiple review tracks
  4. Who owns a peer-reviewed, revised, accepted manuscript? YOU DO!
  5. The SV-POW! open-access decision tree
  6. Biology and palaeontology papers in arXiv
  7. Of course the serials crisis is not over, what the heck are you talking about?
  8. Of divorce lawyers and scholarly publishers
  9. Oblivious sauropods being eaten, part 2: Bakker’s snoozing brontosaur
  10. The opportunity cost of paywalled research
  11. Peer review does not mean we can trust a published paper
  12. What specimen is this — the reveal!
  13. What specimen is this?

April 2013

  1. Predatory publishers: a real problem
  2. DIY Dinosaurs, Part 2: sculpting dino claws
  3. DIY Dinosaurs, Part 1: papier mache
  4. Specimen photos with desaturated backgrounds
  5. Vole incisors: putting squirrels to shame
  6. Check your calculations. Submit your data. Replicate.
  7. Friday phalanges: Megaraptor vs. Saurophaganax
  8. How to overcome Imposter Syndrome
  9. Long and short-necked sloths of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology
  10. Arguments from personal incredulity versus inductive arguments from sampling
  11. When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing
  12. What an articulated giraffe neck looks like
  13. Seriously, Mendeley people, what did you expect?
  14. The evolution-or-revolution debate at the Oxford Union
  15. My opening statement at the Evolution Or Revolution debate
  16. When Mike Taylors collide
  17. Idiot things that we we do in our papers out of sheer habit
  18. Crazy pneumatic ostrich caudal
  19. Tutorial 23: How to avoid giving your work to a “predatory open access publisher”
  20. A few words on Elsevier’s acquisition of Mendeley
  21. Wann Langston, Jr. 1921-2013
  22. Night at the Museum: LACM’s Camp Dino
  23. Tutorial 22: how to get a “nearly finished” paper over the finishing line
  24. Getting to grips with a reference-manager: two problems
  25. If you are remotely interested in archosaurian breathing, you need to read this right now
  26. Banned from commenting at Nature AGAIN.
  27. A pox on your numbered references, redux
  28. Camel necks: condyles don’t reach the cotyles
  29. A short thought on Edwin Mellen Press

March 2013

  1. “I don’t think it’s appropriate”
  2. Banned from commenting at Nature
  3. Nature on choosing to publish in open-access journals
  4. So, this happened today
  5. The poor man’s CT machine
  6. OMNH 1331 is my new hero
  7. Titanosaurs have stupid cervicals
  8. Going to see the big mounted Alamosaurus next week
  9. The only winning move is not to play
  10. Neural spine paper: new file available
  11. Our neural spine bifurcation paper is out
  12. All Green-OA embargoes are iniquitous
  13. This is why you never just hit the Accept All Changes button
  14. Giraffes’ necks are lamentable
  15. Tutorial 21: how to measure the length of a centrum
  16. The Diamantinasaurus in the cave: definitely unfamiliar this time
  17. G. K. Chesterton on preparing slides for a talk
  18. Matt and I have got to stop chatting
  19. The sauropod neck mass project: an experiment in open science
  20. The Recapture Creek sauropod: the reveal
  21. Can repositories solve the access problem?

February 2013

  1. How big was the Recapture Creek sauropod?
  2. Publishers do not manage peer-review, either. We do.
  3. Get down, get fuzzy, speculative juvenile Apatosaurus!
  4. Using tooth histology to help identify a murder victim in a 37-year-old cold case
  5. Opisthocoelicaudia is Just Plain Wrong
  6. What an amazing day for open access
  7. The progressive erosion of the RCUK open access policy
  8. The House of Lords’ terribly disappointing report on Open Access
  9. How disruptive is PeerJ?
  10. Quick hits: theses on arXiv, teaching with PeerJ, Wedel talks this week
  11. Personal milestones: publishing the Ph.D
  12. Terrifying actual cervical vertebrae of the Morrison Formation
  13. Publishers versus libraries
  14. Support this: the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR)
  15. Open peer-review at PeerJ
  16. Terrifying hypothetical cervical vertebrae of the Morrison Formation
  17. PeerJ launches today! (and we’re in it!)
  18. What is a viral licence?
  19. My submission to the House of Commons inquiry on Open Access
  20. Diplodocus carnegii cervicals, from Hatcher (1901)
  21. What half a horse head looks like
  22. The dark side of Sauroposeidon
  23. Open access books

January 2013

  1. Rapetosaurus is Just Plain Wrong
  2. John Trotter’s Brontomerus cartoon
  3. What if an open-access publisher goes bankrupt?
  4. 3rd try: the choice of where to publish has a moral component
  5. Book Review: Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish, and Other Weird Animals, by Becky Crew
  6. Is it immoral to hide your research behind a paywall?
  7. Things to Make and Do, Part 11: what half a gator looks like
  8. …and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you code Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan separately
  9. Squirrel incisors are insanely huge
  10. CONFIRMED: the Umbaran Starfighter is an Apatosaurus cervical
  11. More sketches from Brian Engh
  12. Designing book covers in half an hour
  13. Giving it both barrels at the Guardian
  14. Plateosaurus is pathetic
  15. Work on what you love
  16. Mike in love
  17. Oblivious sauropods being eaten
  18. Why did the UK government fund manure instead of apple trees?
  19. My submission to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee
  20. Tutorial 20: how to measure necks using Duplo
  21. This is awesome
  22. Umbaran Starfighter update

2012 203

December 2012

  1. Ending on a high note
  2. What would happen if I publicly posted the reviews I receive?
  3. Welcome Kaatedocus: this is how to illustrate a sauropod
  4. What has higher energy output than a hummingbird?
  5. Umbaran Starfighter vs. Apatosaurus cervical, round 3
  6. Heck, yes, the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars was inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra
  7. One argument in favour of CC BY
  8. Was the Umbaran Starfighter from Clone Wars inspired by an Apatosaurus vertebra?
  9. What would happen if I placed my manuscripts in the Public Domain?
  10. Where do formatted references come from?
  11. An Apatosaurus worthy of All Yesterdays
  12. What does it cost to publish a Gold Open Access article?
  13. The best part of science (and the second best part)
  14. Crowdsourcing a database of “predatory OA journals”

November 2012

  1. Review: All Yesterdays (Conway, Kosemen and Naish)
  2. Dispatches: All Yesterdays, Zombie Tits, etc.
  3. The single greatest thing that’s ever been said in author instructions
  4. Tutorial 19f: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 6: open access that comes and goes
  5. Well, that about wraps it up for peer-review
  6. Tutorial 19e: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 5: copyright
  7. Elsevier’s new “open access” terms: so near, yet so far
  8. Tutorial 19d: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 4: licences
  9. Tutorial 19c: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 3: a brief note on Platinum/Diamond
  10. Questions concerning Open Access research
  11. Tutorial 19b: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 2: Gold and Green
  12. Tutorial 19a: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 1: what actually is Open Access?
  13. Un sauropode aux jambes musclées
  14. Science is formalised humility
  15. Your sphenoid is disturbingly bat-like

October 2012

  1. What we at SV-POW! are doing for Open Access Week
  2. Four Short Pieces: forging onward into the Shiny Digital Future
  3. Wiley has switched to Creative Commons licensing for its open-access journals
  4. Do not moderate comments on your blog
  5. 2000 AD’s flagrantly plagiarised Brontosaurus
  6. Publish means “make public”. Paywalls are the opposite of publishing
  7. What is the difference between a paper and a blog post?
  8. Discussing Biology Letters with the Royal Society
  9. Counting beans
  10. Lying about submission times at other journals?
  11. Biology Letters does trumpet its submission-to-acceptance time
  12. We will no longer provide peer reviews for Royal Society journals until they adopt honest editorial policies
  13. Dear Royal Society, please stop lying to us about publication times
  14. 2000 AD’s bizarre fin-handed Compsognathus
  15. Elsevier allows free access to all articles over four years old in “primary math journals”

September 2012

  1. Mammals have short necks because of local maxima
  2. Posting palaeo papers on arXiv
  3. Why giraffes have short necks
  4. Hyperossified megafrogs of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
  5. Herons lie (and so do shoebills)
  6. Hoatzins lie (and so do parrots)
  7. Speculative sauropod sketches of SVPCA 2012
  8. On the problem of “predatory open-access publishers”
  9. Greatest. Palaeoart. Ever.
  10. AMNH mounted Apatosaurus with Taylor for scale
  11. Hot sauropod news, part 2: A new look for Sauroposeidon
  12. The ICZN now recognises electronic publication!

August 2012

  1. PeerJ: sorted
  2. Haplocanthosaurus sacral 4 remix
  3. Plateosaurus sacra of the AMNH
  4. What is this peer-review process anyway?
  5. Some more of peer-review’s greatest mistakes
  6. Where peer-review went wrong

July 2012

  1. Apatosaurus sacra of the National Science Museum, Tokyo
  2. Camarasaurus sacra of the AMNH
  3. What does it cost to publish a paywalled paper with anyone?
  4. How to start a new open-access journal: practicalities
  5. Front page of today’s Guardian: Free access to British scientific research within two years
  6. How fat was Brontosaurus? Well, not this fat, anyway!
  7. Camarasaurus ischia of the AMNH
  8. Camarasaurus pubes of the AMNH
  9. Thoughts on the Finch Report, part 2
  10. Horrible tyrannosaurs of the Boston Museum of Science
  11. What does it cost to publish a paper with Elsevier?
  12. What should society journals do about open access?
  13. “Apatosaurus” minimus left ischium
  14. Dear Wiley: please use Creative Commons Attribution for your open-access activities
  15. Positive signs from Wiley on open access
  16. “Apatosaurus” minimus sacrum/ilia: illustration from forthcoming description

June 2012

  1. Belated thoughts on the Finch Report on achieving Open Access
  2. “But researchers have the access they need”, redux
  3. Hot sauropod news, part 1: rampant pneumaticity in saltasaurines
  4. “Apatosaurus” minimus sacrum/ilia, right lateral view
  5. The Mathew J. Wedel Memorial Tripod
  6. Infernal specimens of the AMNH
  7. Trend Micro thinks SV-POW! is malicious
  8. Turtle laminae of the Yale Peabody Museum
  9. Eyelashes of the Harvard Museum of Natural History
  10. Sperm whales of the Harvard Museum of Natural History
  11. Saturday Night in New York City
  12. A completely pointless mini-rant on journal guidelines
  13. Bird eggs of the Harvard Museum of Natural History
  14. Monotremes of the Harvard Museum of Natural History
  15. My comments to Times Higher Education about the White House petition
  16. Measuring brachiosaur mass using minimal convex hulls
  17. Springer are digging themselves deeper into a hole
  18. Springer has work to do to keep its open-access leadership
  19. Great news! 44% of libraries will save money from Green OA!

May 2012

  1. Freeing digitised journal archives
  2. My submission for the SSP annual meeting’s panel discussion
  3. Scopus is useless
  4. The “Open Access Bio and Paleo” page is no longer maintained
  5. The Publishers Association is hallucinating
  6. I would like an explanation for why it costs $585 to email an open-access article
  7. Open access gathers pace — and you can make a difference
  8. Help the USA into the 21st century (even if you’re not American)
  9. Publishers versus everyone
  10. See, this is why publishers irritate me so much
  11. Academics on archosaurs: Tom Holtz
  12. Serial changes in the vertebral laminae of Plateosaurus
  13. The sacrum of Brachiosaurus
  14. Filter-then-publish vs. publish-then-filter
  15. Don’t write “exhibit” when you mean “have”
  16. Dimensions of the mounted Rapetosaurus skeleton
  17. They said it would never happen — but it just has
  18. UK Government on open access: better than I could have hoped
  19. MOLD-A-RAMA
  20. How Elsevier can save itself, part 3: Hard
  21. Sauropod hands: the manus of “Morosaurus” sp.

April 2012

  1. The giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus: OMNH 1670 redux
  2. Inconsistent fusion in Haplocanthosaurus sacra
  3. SV-POW! is now (finally!) open access
  4. How Elsevier can save itself, part 2: Medium
  5. JVP’s new open access fee
  6. The giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus: OMNH 1670
  7. Harvard’s library can’t afford journal subscriptions
  8. How Elsevier can save itself, part 1: Easy
  9. How Elsevier can save itself, part 0: Introduction
  10. Barosaurus lentus AMNH 6341 dorsal sequence
  11. Two new dispatches from the Shiny Digital Future
  12. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 6: more reasons why Haplocanthosaurus is not a juvenile of a known diplodocid
  13. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 5: is Haplocanthosaurus a juvenile of a known diplodocid?
  14. BBC Radio 4 fail in their duty of care to their listeners
  15. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 4: is Suuwassea a juvenile of a known diplodocid?
  16. Open access in the public eye
  17. The tide is turning on Open Access
  18. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 3: the evidence from ontogenetic series
  19. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 2: why serial position matters
  20. The call for comments on RCUK’s draft open-access policy is open till Tuesday 10th April
  21. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 1: what we knew a month ago
  22. Did sauropods support their weight by living in vast shallow lakes?
  23. A farewell to Nature Precedings

March 2012

  1. My RCUK submission
  2. Call for comments on RCUK’s new Open Access policy
  3. P.S.I.O.N podcast on open access and metrics
  4. Changes through growth in sauropods and ornithopods
  5. Following up on Biology Open journal’s not-quite-open CC-BY-NC-SA licence
  6. Elsevier are not evil
  7. Tutorial 18: how to have fruitful discussions in your blog’s comments
  8. DIY project: remodel your basement…
  9. Pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles
  10. French fries and academic publishing
  11. Understanding Elsevier’s open-access licence, part 4: who owns copyright?
  12. Things to Make and Do, part 10b: more fun with ostrich necks
  13. It’s not all doom and gloom in academia: at least Elsevier are increasing their profits!
  14. Things to Make and Do, part 10: ostrich cervical diverticula
  15. New at Times Higher Education: “Open, moral and pragmatic”
  16. It came from my desk
  17. Building Insights. Breaking Links.
  18. My new favourite blog
  19. Winkling licence information out of Elsevier, bit by bit
  20. Tutorial 17: preparing illustrations. Part 1: use colour
  21. Ratites at the OK Corral

February 2012

  1. Five people every second are denied access to JSTOR
  2. Sign the White House’s public access petition!
  3. A sauropod for you: Gilmore’s baby Cam
  4. Can Elsevier save itself?
  5. This just in: the Research Works Act is dead!
  6. Holy poop! They did it! Elsevier withdraws support for the Research Works Act
  7. Today is Copyright Transfer Agreement Day!
  8. What have we learned about Elsevier’s open-access licence?
  9. Scientific reputations and clashing worldviews
  10. A single, simple, direct question to publishers about the RWA
  11. Walking with Oliphaunts: Bibi et al (2012) on the Mleisa elephant trackways
  12. My new article is up at Discover Magazine‘s guest blog, The Crux
  13. Let’s look at some animals!
  14. A new site: Who needs access? You need access!
  15. AN ALIEN IS COMING!
  16. What if we just post PDFs on the open web?
  17. All right then, so what are the alternatives?
  18. Infographic: contribution and revenue for a typical scholarly paper
  19. A response to one Elsevier employee, and an open letter to the rest
  20. A window of opportunity for Elsevier
  21. Why isn’t anyone publishing open-access articles in Elsevier journals?
  22. D-Day: going on the offensive over public access
  23. Academic Spring and a declaration of independence
  24. Who is publishing how many open-access papers?
  25. Biology Open journal uses not-quite-open CC-BY-NC-SA licence
  26. “But researchers have the access they need”
  27. Blog citations are better than pers. comms.
  28. Want free-to-use silhouettes of organisms? PhyloPic is here!
  29. What actually is Elsevier’s open-access licence?

January 2012

  1. What is a “private-sector research work”?
  2. Publishers invent a whole new form of evil: suing their customers
  3. It’s like rain on your wedding day
  4. Can you identify these five sauropod cervicals?
  5. An astonishing new foolproof way to get funding for any science project
  6. Publishers do not provide peer-review. We do.
  7. Nature and Science both oppose the RWA
  8. New in the Guardian: Academic publishers have become the enemies of science
  9. The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers
  10. Do your bit to oppose the evil Research Works Act
  11. Ask SV-POW! #1: hollow bones and bitten verts
  12. Happy New Year!

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