Dinosaurs come with Creative Commons licenses too

At Scifoo, I got a chance to see a fossil which few had before. The fossils had been brought along by Paul Sereno and Gabrielle Lyon and were on display through Scifoo. We weren’t allowed to talk about it at the time, but the paper has now been published, so I can now gleefully tell everyone that I have seen the bones of a unique dinosaur. Coincidentally while driving to work this morning, NPR was talking to Paul about his discovery

Nigersaurus taqueti is one cool looking dinosaur with a big head, even bigger jaws, and the coolest teeth. You can take a visual tour of the dino at Project Exploration (an organization that works to bring science to the public).

Since there is so much about Nigersaurus out on the web, I won’t necessarily dwell on the dino, but on the fact that this is quite the coup for PLoS One. I have a feeling that Bora specifically had something to do with Paul’s decision to publish the paper there, instead of the more traditional Science/Nature route, but I’d like to think that the atmosphere of open science that pervaded Scifoo was a big part of the reason. I hope that a paper of this magnitude makes PLoS One more of a mainstream journal. It’s a little different from what people are used to, so it might need publications of this magnitude to make people sit up and notice.

Further reading:
Blog around the clock – Has Scifoo pictures as well

Photo by T. Keillor

Technorati Tags: Nigersaurus, Paul Sereno, Gabrielle Lyon, Paleontology, Fossils, Scifoo