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 price-gouging publishers-whose-business-model-is-to-prevent-papers-being-read Elsevier are — you won’t believe this — launching their own PLoS ONE clone, FEBS Open Bio . So please join me in giving a

This week the SV-POW!sketeers are off to Bonn, Germany, for the Second International Workshop on Sauropod Biology and Gigantism. All three of us will be there, plus SV-POW! guest blogger Heinrich Mallison, plus Wedel Lab grad student Vanessa Graff, plus about 50 other awesome scientists from around the world. So we’ll have a ton of fun, but we probably won’t get much posted.

This is the fourth in a series of posts in which I review the Apatosaurus maquette from Sideshow Collectibles. Other posts in the series are: Part 1: intro Part 2: the head Part 3: the neck Part 5: posture Part 6: texture and color Part 7: verdict A long-running theme here at SV-POW!

Back when Darren and I did the Xenoposeidon description, we were young and foolish, and only illustrated the holotype vertebra NHM R2095 in four aspects: left and right lateral, anterior and posterior.  No dorsal or ventral views.

A few months ago, prosauropod supremo Adam Yates blogged about the Aardonyx cake that the BPI honours class baked in his honour.

As we all know, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is a large and intimidating document.  As a result, zoologists naming new animals often do not read it in its entirety (I know I haven’t).  It’s probably because of this that many of the more avoidable nomenclatural mistakes occur.

I recently stumbled across this rather good photograph of the holotype vertebra of our old buddy “ Ultrasauros “, thanks to Wikipedia contributor Ninjatacoshell, and thought you’d like to see it: This is a rather legendary vertebra, but until recently there were no good photographs of it on the web (I know because I tried to find one for my talk at the Dinosaurs: A Historical Perspective conference in 2008). See It’s

SV-POW! is, as I’m sure you know, devoted to sauropod vertebrae. But occasionally we look at other stuff… and you might have noticed that, in recent months, we’ve been looking at, well, an awful lot of other stuff. I’m going to continue that theme here and talk about salamanders. Yeah: not sauropods, not sauropodomorphs, not saurischians, and not even dinosaurs or archosaurs. But salamanders. Don’t worry, all will become clear.

Here at SV-POW! Towers, we have often lamented that so much dinosaur research is locked up behind the paywalls of big for-profit commercial publishers, and that even work that’s been funded by public money is often not available to the public.