Dinopedia, baryonychines and other news (Patreon)

Hello noble patrons, apologies once again for a delay -- workload is once again meaning that I'm not succeeding in producing content of the sort I aim to share here. As you might have heard, myself and colleagues succeeded in publishing our study on new baryonychine spinosaurs from the Isle of Wight (Barker, C. T., Hone, D. W. E., Naish, D., Cau, A., Lockwood, J. A. F., Forster, B., Clarkin, C. E., Schneider, P. & Gostling, N. J. 2021. New spinosaurs from the Wessex Formation (Early Cretaceous, UK) and the European origins of Spinosauridae. Scientific Reports 11: 19340). A Tetrapod Zoology article on the paper is here: Two New Spinosaurid Dinosaurs From the English Cretaceous.

I'm also pleased to report that Dinopedia is now out... so far, I've only seen two reviews but I expect more to appear. I hope that the book is reviewed by people actually interested in things like diversity, phylogeny and the history of ideas on evolutionary relationships, since a reviewer not interested in those things (as some of them apparently aren't) is unlikely to say especially nice things about it! Here's one of the many illustrations from the book...

The Eotyrannus monograph was submitted weeks ago, but it immediately came back from the journal with a long 'to-do' list, none of which I have time to deal with. All of which means another delay of weeks or months. I hate this project with a burning passion - more specifically, I hate everything about the academic publishing process relevant to the project - and so wish I was done with it.

Nothing new whatsoever has happened on the textbook - how I wish I had time for that - but I have at least managed to do a bit more on the marine reptiles book I'm publishing with the Natural History Museum (London); I recently finished the mesosaur section and am soon to have completed the thalattosuchian section. This is my main 'spare time' project at the moment. It has to be finished before the end of the year, yikes!

That about sums things up for now. This year has been nuts; I've achieved a few things but still don't have closure on project I so wish I could spend more time on.

Thanks as always for support! I still owe some of you books in exchange for your support. I'm so sorry, I just haven't been able to find time to buy them, get to the post office and get them mailed off... but I promise I will.