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Michael P Taylor
Summary
I am a computer programmer by vocation, but started to study palaeontology in my spare time in 2000. I got my Ph.D from the University of Portsmouth in 2009, and I'm now an honorary research associate at the University of Bristol.
I work on the palaeobiology of sauropods -- the biggest and best of the dinosaurs -- with occasional forays into taxonomy and phylogenetic nomenclature.
I am an advocate of open access, and more generally of transforming our archaic academic publishing practices.
Animal Behavior Biodiversity Evolutionary Studies Paleontology Taxonomy
Institution affiliations
Work details
Articles published in PeerJ
Why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks
Preprints
The neck of Barosaurus: longer, wider and weirder than those of Diplodocus and other diplodocines
Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted
Were the necks of Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus adapted for combat?
A survey of dinosaur diversity by clade, age, place of discovery and year of description
Provided feedback on
This will be tremendously more useful for most purposes if the BioNames pages link to their Wikipedia equivalents. (Yes, that's a comment on the project more than on the paper that...
Journal title abbreviations should be eliminated in the digital age
Absolutely, definitively, unquestionably correct. It's hard to imagine a more pointless waste of researcher time than searching the numerous incompatible list of journal title abbr...
Note to self: see what light Zammit et al. 2008, on plesiosaur neck flexibility, shines on sauropods. My thanks to Adam Stuart Smith for his blog-post http://plesiosauria.com/news/...
Understanding text-based persuasion and support tactics of concerned significant others
This is a bit of a hobby-horse of mine, but ... Can you please revise the abstract so that it says what you discovered? "Results indicate that there was a significant relationsh...
Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted
In [a comment on SV-POW!](http://svpow.com/2015/10/06/my-most-depressing-paper/#comment-131464), Oliver Demuth rightly reminds me that the neck of the diplodocine _Kaatedocus_ (Tsc...
Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted
In a private email (which I have permission to quote), Matt Lamanna very helpfully reminds me of several other complete or near-complete necks. Read on ... -- **Date:** 7 Oct...