It’s no secret to most of my colleagues that I’m a big fan of measurements in papers. Some of this stems from a graduate school education thoroughly steeped in quantitative methods and statistics. Some of it also derives from my nostalgia for the Golden Age of Paleontological Publications, where measurements were published for virtually every bone in the skeleton (at least in some cases). This is all balanced by frustration with papers that list important characters as mere ratios, talk about absolute size without presenting measurements, or only provide femur length and skull length in the description of a complete skeleton. Things are getting better, of course–many authors do provide a detailed set of comparative measurements, and supplemental information can be a handy place to put long tables of lengths and widths.