http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dCVMeYNDlU

The cost of publishing in PLoS varies. The ideal model is that you write the cost into grants and thus it is covered up front. At the opposite extreme would be an independent scholar who had no such funds. That person would have a different price.

I’d also like to add that publishing in “non OpenAccess” journals is not necessarily free. It could cost, say, 1,200 bucks to put a paper with a few graphics in PNAS.

And while it would not surprise me if the regular readers of a blog enthusiastically supported the sort of free access provided by PLoS journals, I’m a little surprised that the _author_ of the blog does. Imagine if your provider charged you $2,500 for every blog entry. Check out the cost of publishing with these guys sometime. It’s quite something.

Doubtful. Apes have small head, no necks. Probably just humans, as you say.

It is highly unlikely that this whale “died in childbirth” … death in “childbirth” is very rare except in humans and many domestic critters. Most likely something else went wrong, and there are many possibilities that are not scavengers. Marine mammals die en mass fairly frequently.

In humans large fetal head size and a narrow birth canal mean that if the body comes out first the neck extends rather than flexes when going through the birth canal. If it flexes the largest cross-section is aprrox forehead to occiput, when extended it is chin to ociput – much larger – this means the head can get stuck.

With that in mind, I offer a few concerns about the interpretation of this fossil. If the fossil were an example of a proto-whale giving birth with cephalic presentation, it would be an important find, for all the reasons given above -but is the fossil really evidence of this?

Obviously the animal did not give birth to the fetus, which means we should be asking the question: rather than assuming the fetus’ orientation was normal for the animal, is is possible the fetus’ orientation may have actually contributed to the animal’s death?

Imagine that the Maiacetus inuus sought out calm waters with few local predators for birthing; this would explain why the carcass has been well preserved, highly intact. Had the animal died within range of the kinds of predators which would normally threaten newborn calves, the carcass would have certainly been dismantled due to scavenging by reasonably large carnivores. We can therefore rule out cause of death by predation.

There are of course many possible causes of death, but the cause of death may have been precisely because of the fetus’ cephalic orientation – possibly the inverse of a breach birth trauma for this animal. In any case, we must also consider that the fetus was not preserved in its birthing position, but may have moved during term, or perhaps even after the mother Maiacetus inuus had died.

There are so many unambiguous transitional forms, we don’t need to provide grist to anyone’s mill by throwing wild interpretations at a clearly inconclusive fossil.