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Incentives for efforts expended in peer review remain controversial, as one of us [] reported at the recent APE Meeting in Berlin 2024. Publishers and researchers have different views on if, and how, peer review should and could be rewarded. We surveyed researchers regularly performing peer review for journals as well as editors and journal managers who assign articles in order to look at the use of incentives and how these influence behavior. Incentives for peer review remain relatively rare overall: Results show that more than 80% of editorial board members said they 'did not reward' or 'rewarded in less than 25% of cases', while, at the same time, the same proportion of respondents felt that rewarding peer reviewers would be a good idea. The majority of our respondents felt that giving 'something was better than nothing' and that a token incentive would help. In terms of actual rewards, APC tokens are both wanted (52%) and awarded (42%) while certificates are given far more (43%) than they are actually wanted (12%). Surprisingly, money is given out far less (4%) than wanted (27%); this reward is not actually desired as much as one might expect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On rare occasions, the fossil record reveals examples of exceptional preservation, in which decay-prone tissues, such as skin, are preserved as 'an organic film' (11) with a high degree of [...], Throughout the animal kingdom, adaptive colouration serves critical functions ranging from inconspicuous camouflage to ostentatious sexual display, and can provide important information about the environment and biology of a particular organism (1,2). The most ubiquitous and abundant pigment, melanin, also has a diverse range of non-visual roles, including thermoregulation in ectotherms (3,4). However, little is known about the functional evolution of this important biochrome through deep time, owing to our limited ability to unambiguously identify traces of it in the fossil record (2). Here we present direct chemical evidence of pigmentation in fossilized skin, from three distantly related marine reptiles: a leatherback turtle (5), a mosasaur (6) and an ichthyosaur (7). We demonstrate that dark traces of soft tissue in these fossils are dominated by molecularly preserved eumelanin, in intimate association with fossilized melanosomes. In addition, we suggest that contrary to the counter shading of many pelagic animals (8,9), at least some ichthyosaurs were uniformly dark-coloured in life. Our analyses expand current knowledge of pigmentation in fossil integument beyond that of feathers (2,10), allowing for the reconstruction of colour over much greater ranges of extinct taxa and anatomy. In turn, our results provide evidence of convergent melanism in three disparate lineages of secondarily aquatic tetrapods. Based on extant marine analogues, we propose that the benefits of thermoregulation and/or crypsis are likely to have contributed to this melanisation, with the former having implications for the ability of each group to exploit cold environments.

Theropoda Marsh, 1881 Maniraptora Gauthier, 1986 Paraves Sereno, 1997 Avialae Gauthier, 1986 Aurornis xuigen. et sp. nov. Etymology. Aurora, Latin for daybreak, dawn; Ornis, Greek for bird; xui, in honour [...], The recent discovery of small paravian theropod dinosaurs with well-preserved feathers in the Middle-Late Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation of Liaoning Province (northeastern China) (1-4) has challenged the pivotal position of Archaeopterpx (3, 4), regarded from its discovery to be the most basal bird. Removing Archaeopteryx from the base of Avialae to nest within Deinonychosauria implies that typical bird flight, powered by the forelimbs only, either evolved at least twice, or was subsequently lost or modified in some deinonychosaurians (3, 5). Here we describe the complete skeleton of a new paravian from the Tiaojishan Formation of Liaoning Province, China. Including this new taxon in a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis for basal Paraves does the following: (1) it recovers it as the basal-most avialan; (2) it confirms the avialan status of Archaeopteryx; (3) it places Troodontidae as the sistergroup to Avialae; (4) it supports a single origin of powered flight within Paraves; and (5) it implies that the early diversification of Paraves and Avialae took place in the Middle-Late Jurassic period.