Now Elsevier starts a PLoS ONE clone
Hot on the heels of PLoS ONE-like open-access megajournals such as BMJ Open, Nature’s Scientific Reports, the Royal Society’s Open Biology and SAGE’s SAGE Open, now the king of evil predatory...
View ArticleDIY project: remodel your basement…
Mike gets a shot of a sauropod sacrum in the AMNH basement. …with sauropod bones! Lots of basements have them. Some basements have had them for decades, and other basements have been newly constructed...
View ArticleNeural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 2: why serial position matters
In the previous post in this series I looked at the some of the easily available raw data on neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropods. In this post I’ll explain how serial variation–that is,...
View ArticleNeural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 3: the evidence from ontogenetic...
This is the third post in a series on neural spine bifurcation in sauropods, inspired by Woodruff and Fowler (2012). In the first post, I looked at neural spine bifurcation in Morrison sauropod genera...
View ArticleNeural spine bifurcation in sauropods, Part 5: is Haplocanthosaurus a...
Introduction Last time around, Matt walked through a lot of the detailed cervical morphology of Suuwassea and known diplodocids to show that, contra the suggestion of Woodruff and Fowler (2012),...
View ArticleThe giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus: OMNH 1670
Left: the Queen of England, 163 cm. Middle, the Oklahoma apatosaur dorsal, 135 cm. Right, classic "big Apatosaurus" dorsal, 106 cm. To scale. Something I’ve always intended to do but never gotten...
View ArticleThe giant Oklahoma Apatosaurus: OMNH 1670 redux
In the recent post on OMNH 1670, a dorsal vertebra of a giant Apatosaurus from the Oklahoma panhandle, I half-promised to post the only published figure of this vertebra, from Stovall (1938: fig. 3.3)....
View ArticleHot sauropod news, part 2: A new look for Sauroposeidon
YPM 5449, a posterior dorsal vertebra of Sauroposeidon, from D’Emic and Foreman (2012:fig. 6A and C). Another recent paper (part 1 is here) with big implications for my line of work: D’Emic and Foreman...
View ArticleSpeculative sauropod sketches of SVPCA 2012
Friday evening I was in a pub with Mike, Darren, John Conway, and Emma Lawlor. We were killing time waiting for the Pink Giraffe Chinese restaurant down the street to open. I was chatting with John...
View ArticleMike in love
Matt took this photo in the basement of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, back in 2008 when we were there as part of the field-trip associated with the Bonn sauropod conference. Hopefully all you...
View ArticleThe poor man’s CT machine
Another raw photo from the road. The Morrison fossils from the Oklahoma panhandle were dug up and prepped out by WPA workers in the 1930s, and their preparation toolkit consisted of hammers, chisels,...
View ArticleNight at the Museum: LACM’s Camp Dino
Last night London and I spent the night in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM), as part of the Camp Dino overnight adventure. So we got lots of time to roam the exhibit halls when...
View ArticleSpecimen photos with desaturated backgrounds
Generally when we present specimen photos in papers, we cut out the backgrounds so that only the bone is visible — as in this photo of dorsal vertebrae A and B of NHM R5937 “The Archbishop”, an as-yet...
View ArticlePhotography and illustration talk, Part 2: Taking good photographs
That link in the first slide will take you here, and the rest of the series is here.
View ArticlePhotography and illustration talk, Part 7: Manipulating photographs
The links in the first slide: GIMP Unsharp mask tutorial Fast and easy color balancing Mike’s post on desaturating the background in specimen photos is here, and previous posts in this series are here.
View ArticleRebbachisaurus description incoming!
Sauropod guru Jeff Wilson is on Twitter, as of a couple of weeks ago. In one of his earliest tweets, he showed the world this gorgeous photo of a Rebbachisaurus dorsal: Jeff Wilson (left) and Ronan...
View ArticleWelcome, Cracked readers–here’s some eyeball bait
Although it would be nice to think that our site views have octupled in the last day because of Mike’s fine and funny posts about what search terms bring people to SV-POW!, the real reason is that we...
View ArticlePhotography and illustration talk, Part 10: Figure parts and placement
On that last slide, I also talked about two further elaborations: figures that take up the entire page, with the caption on a separate (usually facing) page, and side title figures, which are wider...
View ArticleMid-Mesozoic Field Conference, Day 2: Fruita area paleo
You know the drill: lotsa pretty pix, not much yap. Our first stop of the day was the Fruita Paleontological Area, which has a fanstastic diversity of Morrison animals, including the mammal...
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