EGU Blogs

Green Tea and Velociraptors

SVP Day 2

November 1, 2013

So again, I missed most of the morning, spending it in the UK Embassy getting an emergency passport. Unfortunately, this means most of the Romer Session, where early-career (thanks Phil for correction) students present for an award, was missed. Obviously, with the lack of Wi-Fi and live-tweeting, the session might as well have been conducted in a black hole.

I managed to catch the last talk though, on the evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) of diplodocoids sauropodomorphs. As these guys are quite an important constituent of Late Jurassic terrestrial ecosystems, figured this would be worth attending, and actually paying attention to.

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SVP Day 1

November 1, 2013

So after definitely not losing my passport, I managed to make it into one of the sessions for the first day at SVP, the Society for Vertebrate Palaeontology’s annual meeting over in Los Angeles.

The session was on the impacts of ontogeny, or growth and development on our understanding of dinosaur relationships and biology.

The only one I managed to catch was on the sauropod dinosaur, Lufengosaurus, where the researcher had taken thin sections through embryonic limb bones to track the change in shape through growth, or allometric variation. The authors were able to show that, due to the variation in the proportion of cavities and bone growth that these dinos grew at extremely fast rates, which is pretty cool, and may explain how these sauropods were able to get so big.

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Crocodiles are so hard, they even eat fruit

October 22, 2013

Seed dispersal by animals is incredibly important for plants to help them occupy new areas of land and reproduce. Usually, this happens using bugs, birds, or intrepid kittens, but probably the last animal on this planet you’d expect to disperse seeds is crocodiles – you know, those big beasties that take down bison for a snack. Well, turns out, they do, and it’s a process known as saurochory.

Not only that, but these king archosaurs, the vintage cousins of dinosaurs, the ones who you never smile at, eat fruit to get at seeds. A new study reviewed the diets of modern crocodiles, and showed that 13 of 18 species ate fruit of some sort (frugivory), along with a wide variety of plants.

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Good news everyone..!

October 16, 2013

Thanks to Ross Mounce for alerting me to this piece of news.

Fossil Record: An International Journal of Geosciences 
We invite you to submit or recommend papers to this ISI-listed, international palaeontological journal of the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin. Fossil Record publishes original research papers covering all areas of palaeontology and provides a platform for a wide array of articles with palaeobiological content, ranging from new descriptions of fossil faunas and floras to phylogenetic studies, palaeobiogeographic analyses and constructional morphology. All taxonomic groups of fossil organisms are considered, including invertebrates, microfossils, plants and vertebrates. Manuscripts submitted to Fossil Record will be peer-reviewed by at least two external referees. For us, the most important aspect is that Fossil Record will in 2014 become an open access journal with our new professional publishing partner Copernicus Publications. With this decision, the Museum fur Naturkunde and the team of editors close the gap between the requirements of many scientists, funders, and libraries for open access to scientific publications. As well as enjoying better visibility, your papers will be much more widely distributed and available for scientific databases. Fossil Record will have to introduce article processing charges (APC) by 2014 because open access publishing requires paying the costs of the review process, typesetting, web publication and long term archiving upon publication. APC are obtained on a page-by-page basis (please find more APC information) but many universities, research institutions and grant agencies provide funds to support authors regarding APC. Please check with your institution. In addition, Copernicus Publications has several agreements in place to settle payments directly between the respective institution and the publisher. Furthermore, Fossil Record has a budget of free pages to be decided by the Editor-in-Chief available to authors from developing countries, or for special publications upon request. We look forwards to receiving your manuscripts which can be uploaded here in the Copernicus Office Editor.

Yours sincerely, The Fossil Record Editors M. Aberhan, D. Korn, F. Witzmann

So as an open access advocate, a supporter of the EGU and Copernicus, and a palaeontologist (in case you hadn’t got that yet), it’s great to see this move from a non-OA domain within Wiley (a partial open access publisher). Also nice to see is the assistance offered to authors from developing countries, and a page-based article processing charge (APC), which may encourage different length manuscripts to be submitted. It is worth noting though that often the review process is handled by volunteer editors and volunteer reviewers, so I’m not sure why this is being included in the APC overview. Anyway, it’s a good move, and happily coincides with the EGU rolling out their altmetrics platform (altmetrics are ways of seeing how an article has been digitally disseminated, along with citation counts etc) – great stuff!
For more on open access and stuff, I wrote a guest post for Matt Shipman on it recently, which you can find here.