Pleasing Post

I am always happy when I can say something like this: the description paper of Acheroraptor is available online. However, today it comes with the caveat that it cannot be obtained unless you have a way to get articles from Naturwissenschaften or are willing to pay Springer's prices. These prices are typical for scholarly articles of course, but the bad news is that they are typical for scholarly articles. The first two pages are free to read. That is always good since there is always an abstract that summarizes things. New dinosaurs deserve the whole paper though so that you can fully understand it and/or ask the right questions to clear up what you do not understand. A little background and the systematics are nice, but even nicer is the fact that the 31 pages of supplementary information is online and free. This is the nitty gritty of the paper and, while it does not tell the story as nicely as the paper, it does present us with some nice images including radiographs, trees, graphs, and matrices. As an aside, it is kind of interesting how many question marks can fit on a page (not that I have not had my share of that in the past). The recommendation for the day is to try to find the descriptive paper. Barring that, at least check out the supplementary information, because that is pretty neat as well. It is highly informative of course and anyone looking to make a career in the field ought to practice reading and interpreting that sort of information at some level.