Show your love!

As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote on the misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him? We did start making tentative plans for a Wyoming Sauropocalypse centered on the Tate conference, but we couldn’t find a way to make it work for various reasons.

Here’s something I’m going to be yapping about in my keynote talk, “The sauropod heresies: evolutionary ratchets, the taphonomic event horizon, and all the evidence we cannot see”, at the 2024 Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference (link): how the fossil record of sauropods is probably wildly at variance with standing populations in life, at least in terms of sizes and maturity of the individuals that got fossilized.

I know this is hardly news any more, but here is a particularly spectacular example of a Large Language model (“artificial intelligence”) making mistake after mistake. My question: Who described Xenoposeidon, when and where?

I have a new paper out: Bas, A., Kay, K., Labovitz, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2024. New double and multiple variants of fibularis tertius. Extremitas 11: 111-118. This is a straight human anatomy paper, with a dual origin. But first let me tell you a little about the fibularis tertius muscle.

1. VARIATION An anatomical variant that shows up in 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 humans is by medical standards pretty common; in a metro area the size of London or Los Angeles you’d expect to find 10,000 or 20,000 people with that variation.

Here at SV-POW!, we love bifurcated cervical ribs. Those of Turiasaurus are one of the autapomorphies proposed by Royo-Torres et al. (2006:figure 1K). Their diagnosis of the new genus included “accessory process projecting caudodorsally from the dorsal margin of the shafts of proximal cervical ribs”. Here is the best example of such a rib in Turiasaurus , attached to its vertebra.

As iconic as Brachiosaurus altithorax is, it’s known from surprisingly little material.

Funder metadata is becoming more important as the global research infrastructure is engaged as a tool for quantifying impact of funders on research results and as interest in open science increases. Using acronyms in funder names makes it difficult to find identifiers and make the connections that are needed to realize benefits.

Metadata Game Changers and the INFORMATE Project had the opportunity to present some of our recent work during the recent culminating conference to showcase the outcomes, coalition-building efforts, and ongoing work stemming from the 2023 Year of Open Science (YOS). Some highlights are described here and a recording of the talk is also available.