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Opisthocoelicaudia is Just Plain Wrong
I was cruising the monographs the other night, looking for new ideas, when the humerus of Opisthocoelicaudia stopped me dead in my tracks. I think you’ll agree it is an arresting sight:...
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Check your calculations. Submit your data. Replicate.
It’s well worth reading this story about Thomas Herndon, a graduate student who as part of his training set out to replicate a well-known study in his field. The work he chose, Growth in a Time of...
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Do you really need a scan of my passport?
In the last few weeks, it’s been my pleasure and privilege to give invited talks on open access to both UCL and the University of Ulster. (Both of them went well, thanks for asking.) Now they come to...
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Why Robin Osborne makes no sense
Robin Osborne, professor of ancient history at King’s College, Cambridge, had an article in the Guardian yesterday entitled “Why open access makes no sense“. It was described by Peter Coles as “a...
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What is an ad-hominem attack?
I recently handled the revisions on a paper that hopefully will be in press very soon. One of the review comments was “Be very careful not to make ad hominem attacks”. I was a bit surprised to see that...
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Anti-tutorial: how to design and execute a really bad study
Suppose, hypothetically, that you worked for an organisation whose nominal goal is the advancement of science, but which has mutated into a highly profitable subscription-based publisher. And suppose...
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Mike’s 2¢ on Scientific American‘s silencing of DNLee
In what is by now a much-reported story, @DNLee, who writes the Urban Scientist blog on the Scientific American blog network, was invited by Biology Online to write a guest-post for their blog. On...
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Correlation of impact factor and citations: a personal case-study
It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper. Unfortunately, it’s not yet universally understood among...
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Elsevier’s David Tempest explains subscription-contract confidentiality clauses
As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written...
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The case of the bandy-legged Diplodocus
Christine Argot of the MNHN, Paris, drew our attention to this wonderful old photo (from here, original caption reproduced below): © Paleontological Museum, MoscowIn the beginning of XX century, the...
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Behold, the SV-POW! mole!
When Fiona checked her email this morning, she found this note from our next-door neighbour Jenny: Hi I seem to remember Mike wanting a mole – I do hope so because I’ve left you a body on your patio in...
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How heavy was Giraffatitan brancai? I mean, really?
We’ve touched on this several times in various posts and comment threads, but it’s worth taking a moment to think in detail about the various published mass estimates for the single specimen BM.R.2181...
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Copyright: promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts by preventing...
In my recent preprint on the incompleteness and distortion of sauropod neck specimens, I discuss three well-known sauropod specimens in detail, and show that they are not as well known as we think they...
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How light could a giant azhdarchid be?
I imagine that by now, everyone who reads this blog is familiar with Mark Witton’s painting of a giant azhdarchid pterosaur alongside a big giraffe. Here it is, for those who haven’t seen it: (This is...
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How crazy are the cervicals of Mendozasaurus?
There’s a new paper out, describing the Argentinian titanosaur Mendozasaurus in detail (Gonzalez Riga et al. 2018): 46 pages of multi-view photos, tables of measurement, and careful, detailed...
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Apatosaurus is — still — Just Plain Wrong
We’ve posted a lot here about how crazy the cervical vertebrae of apatosaurines are (for example: 1, 2, 3), and especially the redonkulosity of their cervical ribs. But I think you will agree with me...
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My sauroponderous birthday card from Brian Engh
Okay, so here on the Best Coast it’s not technically my birthday for another 3 hours, but SV-POW! runs on England time, and at the SV-POW! global headquarters bunker it’s already June 3. Oh, and...
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Shoebills lie (and it’s disgusting)
Heinrich Mallison sent me this amazing photo, which he found unattributed on Facebook: Infuriatingly, I’ve not been able to track down an original source for this: searching for the text just finds a...
View ArticleWhy do people publish in Scientific Reports?
In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports, in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature, is an objectively bad journal that removes...
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How stupid was the neck of Camarasaurus?
What if I told you that when Matt was in BYU collections a while ago, he stumbled across a cervical vertebra — one labelled DM/90 CVR 3+4, say — that looked like this in anterior view? I think you...
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