What’s wrong with this picture? No, really: what’s wrong?
November 21, 2022
Last Saturday I was at a wedding at Holy Trinity Brompton, a London church that is conveniently located a ten-minute stroll from the Natural History Museum. As I am currently working on a history paper concerning the Carnegie Diplodocus, I persuaded my wife, my eldest son and his fiancée to join me for a quick scoot around the “Dippy Returns” exhibition.
Here is a photo that I took:
Something is wrong here — and I don’t just mean the NHM exhibition’s stygian lighting.
Who can tell me what it is? $100 in SV-POW! Dollars(*) awaits the first person to get it right in the comments.
(*) Cash value: $0.00.
What a cervical vertebra of an 800m sauropod would look like
February 1, 2021
Gilmore (1936:243) says of the mounted skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae CM 3018 in the Carnegie Museum that “with the skull in position the specimen has a total length between perpendiculars of about 71 feet and six inches. If the missing eighteen terminal caudal vertebrae were added to the tip of the tail, in order to make it conform to known evidence, the skeleton will reach an estimated length of 76 feet, 6 inches.” That’s 23.3 meters.
But what if it was 800 meters long instead? That would be 34.3 times as big in linear dimension (and so would mass 34.3^3 = 40387 time as much, perhaps a million tonnes — but that’s not my point).
What would a cervical vertebra of an 800m sauropod look like?
Gilmore (1936:196) gives the centrum length of CM 3018’s C10 as 530 mm. In our 34.3 times as long Apatosaurus, it would be 18.17 meters long. So here is what that would look like compared with two London Routemaster buses (each 8.38 meters long).
Cervical vertebra 10 of a hypothetical 800 meter long Apatosaurus louisae, with London Routemaster buses for scale. Vertebra image from Gilmore 1936:plate XXIV; bus image by Graham Todman, from Illustrations for t-shirts.
What is the research significance of this? None at all, of course. Still I think further study is warranted. Some look at sauropods that once were, and ask “why?”; but I go further; I look at sauropods that never were, and ask “why not?”
Long before Matt and others were CT-scanning sauropod vertebrae to understand their internal structure, Werner Janensch was doing it the old-fashioned way. I’ve been going through old photos that I took at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin back in 2005, and I stumbled across this dorsal centrum:
Dorsal vertebra centum of ?Giraffatitan in ventral view, with anterior to top.
You can see a transverse crack running across it, and sure enough the front and back are actually broken apart. Here there are:
The same dorsal vertebral centrum of ?Giraffatitan, bisected transversely in two halves. Left: anterior half in posterior view; right: posterior half in anterior view. I had to balance the anterior half on my shoe to keep it oriented corrrectly for the photo.
This does a beautiful job of showing the large lateral foramina penetrating into the body of the centrum and ramifying further into the bone, leaving only a thin midline septum.
But students of the classics will recognise this bone immediately as the one that Janensch (1947:abb. 2) illustrated the posterior half of in his big pneumaticity paper:
It’s a very strange feeling, when browsing in a collection, to come across a vertebra that you know from the literature. As I’ve remarked to Matt, it’s a bit like running into, say, Cameron Diaz in the corner shop.
Reference
- Janensch, W. 1947. Pneumatizitat bei Wirbeln von Sauropoden
und anderen Saurischien. Palaeontographica, supplement
7:1-25.
I think we’ve all had enough of the Impact Factor as a way of measuring the quality of journals. From Ginny Barbour’s forensic account of negotiating PLoS Medicine’s IF back in 2006, via Stephen Curry’s measured rant back in 2012 (“if you use impact factors you are statistically illiterate”) and Björn Brembs’ survey of how very widespread IF negotations are in 2016, to all the recent negotiations with Clarivate about which journals should even have IFs, it’s become increasingly obvious that the Impact Factor is not a metric, it’s a negotiation.
And of course this means that the reason any journal has the particular IF it has is competely opaque.
The world needs a much more transparent metric of journal quality, and I am here to offer it! The Objective Quality Factor (QOF) is assigned in a wholly straightforward way that anyone can understand:
Your journal obtains an OQF of x by paying me x pounds.
That’s it. As soon as I acknowledge your payment, you have the right to display your OQF on the journal home page and in marketing materials.
If another journal in your field obtains a higher OQF than yours, and you need to regain your journal’s position at the top of the totem pole, all you need do is send me more money.
Payments via PayPal to ebay@miketaylor.org.uk please!
Stevens & Parrish 1999 vs. Taylor et al. 2009
May 23, 2020
Credit: anonymous tattoo, Grant Harding for the caption.
Update. Here is the Instagram post that Grant got this from. Unfortunately it seems to be from an account that specialises in reposting others’ work without attribution, so we don’t know where the tattoo photo originated.
Diplodocus skull and first three cervicals in 3D
June 20, 2019
Here’s a bit of light relief, in the middle of all those looong posts about Supersaurus and its buddies. When Matt and I were at NAMAL on the last day of the 2016 Sauropocalypse, we took a bunch of tourist shots. Two of them were of a skull and first three cervical vertebrae from what I take to be Diplodocus or something close, and happened to be from sufficiently close angles that they make a pretty good anaglyph. Here it is!
(If you don’t have the 3D glasses that you need to see this, get some. Seriously, how many times do I have to tell you?)
If anyone out there is familiar with NAMAL (on indeed with diplodocid skulls) and can confirm or contradict my identification, I’d appreciate it. Best of all would be a photo of the signage associated with this specimen, such as I should have taken.
By the way, if you’re not used to the ways of sauropods, you might be thinking “Mike, you dummy, there are only two vertebrae there”. But in saropods, the atlas (1st cervical) is a tiny, inconsequential element that frequently fuses to the axis (2nd cervical). So what looks like the first cervical here is really 1+2. If you look closely, you can see the blades of the atlas projecting backwards and upwards, across the surface of the axis.
There is no such thing as self-plagiarism
April 13, 2016
I keep reading pieces about self-plagiarism.
the whole idea is idiotic.
Plagiarism is “presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own“. So self-plagiarism is presenting your own work or ideas as your own. Which is nonsense.
Can we please abandon this unhelpful and misleading phrase?
Note added subsequently, in response to Snarky Mᶜ̵Snarkface’s tweet: my real point is that discussion of the practice is actively confused by the use of this misleading term for it.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 