Today was one of the most interesting days of my life. Vanessa and I needed ostrich parts for dissection, so I had gotten in touch with Doug Osborne of OK Corral Ostrich Farms in Oro Grande.

I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education that JSTOR “turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles” every year.  365.25 × 24 × 60 × 60 = 31557600 seconds per year, which means that 4.75 attempts to access papers on JSTOR are refused every second . Every second, five people somewhere around the world try to enrich their understanding of science, and are prevented from doing so.

Amazing, but it seems to be true: based on this statement on their own website, Elsevier has withdrawn its support for the Research Works Act! Could this be evidence that they really are listening?  Two weeks ago I publicly challenged Elsevier to do just this, as a first step towards winning back the support of authors, editors and reviewers who have been deserting them in droves.

Re-posted with permission. Of course, these these days John is better known for this work on the evolution of musculature on the line to birds, tyrannosaur hindlimb mechanics, and elephant anatomy.  But it seems the world lost a promising novelist. [Originally posted on Twitter, by John.] See also: Acaren and the Evil Wizards .

Original Research Article Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, Volume 6, Issue 8, January 2012, Pages 1-7. Michael P. Taylor, Mathew J. Wedel, Darren Naish.

Okay, special dissection post, coming to you live from the Symposium  of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy in Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic coast of England, well past my bedtime. First, check out this comment from Neil and see the linked image of some neck muscles in the anhinga. Here’s a small version I’m swiping.

I’m just back from SVPCA 2010 (the Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy), and what an amazing meeting it was.  I think it was the best I’ve been to.  That’s partly because I understand more of the talks these days — it’s the first time I’ve ever listened to every single talk, even all the mammal-tooth and fish-skull talks — and I learned something interesting and new from almost every one of them.

Update This is an actual page from the late, lamented Weekly World News, from December 14, 1999. I always thought it was pretty darned funny that they had the alien remains discovered in the “belly” of an animal known only from neck vertebrae.