Last time, I showed you a photo of the head and neck of the London Diplodocus and asked what was wrong. Quite a few of you got it right (including Matt when we were chatting, but I asked him not to give it away by posting a comment). The 100 SV-POW! dollars, with their cash value of $0.00, go to Orribec, who was the first to reply that the atlas (cervical 1) is upside-down.

Last Saturday I was at a wedding at Holy Trinity Brompton, a London church that is conveniently located a ten-minute stroll from the Natural History Museum. As I am currently working on a history paper concerning the Carnegie Diplodocus , I persuaded my wife, my eldest son and his fiancée to join me for a quick scoot around the “Dippy Returns” exhibition.

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In a paper that I’m just finishing up now, we want to include this 1903 photo of Carnegie Museum personnel: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20437 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20437” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/11/08/who-is-who-in-this-1903-carnegie-museum-photo/hatcher-et-al-in-lab-1903/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/hatcher-et-al-in-lab-1903.jpg” orig-size=“2817,2285” comments-opened=“1”

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Something cool came in the mail today: a fossil tooth of a great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias. The root is a bit eroded, but the enamel-covered crown is in great shape, and it’s almost exactly the same size as my cast tooth from a modern great white. I got this for a couple of reasons.

Long-time readers will recall that I’m fascinated by neurocentral joints, and not merely that they exist (although they are pretty cool), but that in some vertebrae they migrate dorsally or ventrally from their typical position (see this and this). {.size-large .wp-image-20346 .aligncenter loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20346”

Darren, the silent partner at SV-POW!, pointed me to this tweet by Duc de Vinney, displaying a tableau of “A bunch of Boners (people who study bones) Not just paleontologists, some naturalists and cryptozoologists too”, apparently commissioned by @EDGEinthewild: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-20314 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“20314” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2022/10/08/im-not-100-sure-what-this-is-but-it-exists/twenty-one-naturalists/”

It’s been a while since we checked in on our old friends Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley — collectively, the big legacy publishers who still dominate scholarly publishing. Like every publisher, they have realised which way the wind is blowing, and flipped their rhetoric to pro-open access — a far cry from the days when they were hiring PR “pit bulls” to smear open access. These days, it’s clear that open access is winning.