I only became aware of the term Academic Spring the other day but I instantly loved it. The OA wars have heated up significantly in the past few weeks, and Academic Spring crystallizes a lot of what is going on. Although we always welcome new readers, and no-one who cares about science can afford to be ignorant about access to scholarly publications, we do sometimes feel that at SV-POW! we are mostly preaching to the converted.

I’m very aware that I’ve been whining incessantly on this blog recently: RWA this, Elsevier that, moan whine complain.  So I’m delighted to be able to bring some good news.  Mike Keesey’s site PhyloPic.org is back up, in new and improved form, and providing free silhouettes of organisms extincts and extant.

Wedel lab group photo, December 12, 2011. Vanessa Graff and Mathew Wedel, with Diplodocus carnegii , Giraffatitan brancai , Dicraeosaurus hansemanni and assorted stinkin’ theropods and ornithischians for scale.

Preparing a talk is a time-consuming process, and there’s no question that getting the slides ready is where the bulk of that time goes.  But unless you understand exactly what it is that you’re going to talk about, even the best slides won’t rescue your talk from mediocrity, so before you fire up PowerPoint, go and read part 1 of this tutorial, on finding the narrative.  Seriously.

Last month, over at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs , David Orr wrote about the dinosaur conflicts he’d like to see, in place of the ubiquitous T . rex -vs.- Triceratops .  Among the fights he wanted to see was: 2. Four strategically placed Incisivosaurus vs. Giraffatitan : Two words: beaver style.

Every now and then, you come across a sauropod skull so beautiful, it’s almost enough to distract you from the vertebrae that it was attached to.  One such is the Giraffatitan brancai skull HMN T1, which you’ve seen here before if you’ve been around for a while.

In a new comment on an oldish post, Peter Adlam asked: I recently happened upon a picture of the late Jim Jenson standing beside the huge front leg of “Ultrasauros”, which leads me to ask a few questions. Did he really find a complete forelimb? Was the leg from Brachiosaurus altithorax?

In our recent paper on how the long necks of sauropods did not evolve primarily due to sexual selection (Taylor et al. 2011), one of the ideas we discussed is that sexual dimorphism between the necks of male and female sauropods would be an indicator of sexual selection.  And, rather despairingly, we wrote (page 4): But I wonder if we realise just how true this is, and how blind we are flying?

People who’ve been paying especially close attention may have noted than on four separate occasions in the last eighteen months, I’ve casually referred to our old buddy HMN SII as the paralectotype specimen of Giraffatitan brancai .

Sorry for the very short post. We have some longer stuff planned, but we’ve been too busy to kick it out this week, and I wanted to leave you with something cool to ponder over the weekend. Here’s the ilium of Giraffatitan overlaid on that of Brontomerus , scaled to the same acetabulum diameter ( Giraffatitan is HMN J1, left ilium, modified from Janensch 1961: pl. E, fig.