Long-time SV-POW! readers will remember that three years ago, full of enthusiasm after speaking about Barosaurus at the Edinburgh SVPCA, Matt and I got that talk written up in double-quick time and had it published as a PeerJ Preprint in less than three weeks. Very quickly, the preprint attracted substantive, helpful reviews: three within the first 24 hours, and several more in the next few days.

This was great: it gave us the opportunity to handle those review comments and get the manuscript turned around into an already-reviewed formal journal submission in less then a month from the original talk.

So of course what we did instead was: nothing. For three years.

I can’t excuse that. I can’t even explain it. It’s not as though we’ve spent those three years churning out a torrent of other awesome papers. We’ve both just been … a bit lame.

Anyway, here’s a story that will be hauntingly familiar. A month ago, full of enthusiasm after speaking about Barosaurus at the Liverpool SVPCA, Matt and I found ourselves keen to write up that talk in double-quick time. It’s an exciting tale of new specimens, reinterpretation of an important old specimen, and a neck eight times as long as that 0f a world-record giraffe.

But it would be crazy to write the new Barosaurus paper without first having dealt with the old Barosaurus paper. So now, finally, three years on, we’ve done that. Version 2 of the preprint is now available (Taylor and Wedel 2016), incorporating all the fine suggestions of the people who reviewed the first version — and with a slightly spiffed-up title. What’s more, the new version has also been submitted for formal peer-review. (In retrospect, I can’t think why we didn’t do that when we put the first preprint up.)

Taylor and Wedel 2016: Figure 3. Barosaurus lentus holotype YPM 429, vertebra R, C?15. Top row: dorsal view; middle row: posterior, right lateral and anterior views; bottom row: ventral view, from Lull (1919: plate II). Note the apparently very low, undivided neural spine at the intersection of the SPRLs and SPOLs, forward-shifted neural arch, broad prezygapophyses, broad, wing-like prezygadiapophyseal laminae, and great width across the diapophyses and across the parapophyses. Abbreviations: dia, diapophysis; para, parapophysis; prz, prezygapophysis; prdl, prezygadiapophyseal lamina; spol, spinopostzygapophyseal lamina; sprl, spinoprezygapophyseal lamina. Scale bar = 500 mm.

A big part of the purpose of this post is to thank Emanuel Tschopp, Mark Robinson, Andy Farke, John Foster and Mickey Mortimer for their reviews back in 2013. I know it’s overdue, but they are at least all acknowledged in the new version of the manuscript.

Now we cross our fingers, and hope that the formally solicited reviews for the new version of the manuscript are as helpful and constructive as the reviews in that first round. Once those reviews are in, we should be able to move quickly and painlessly to a formally published version of this paper. (I know, I know — I shouldn’t offer such a hostage to fortune.)

Meanwhile, I will finally be working on handling the reviews of this other PeerJ submission, which I received back in October last year. Yes, I have been lax; but I am back in the saddle now.

References

• Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2016. The neck of Barosaurus: longer, wider and weirder than those of Diplodocus and other diplodocines. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e67v2 doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.67v2