This crisp and dynamic illustration of a Protoceratops is one of the featured dinosaurs from the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs (ISMD), established by palaeontologist Bolortsetseg Minjin (who has been instrumental in repatriating fossils stolen from the Gobi Desert for auction in the USA).

Two weeks ago, a group of scientists started chatting on Twitter about carnivores and their prey, and started sharing gory pictures of carcasses. Things got a little (lightheartedly) competitive, and after Julien Fattebert shared a photo of a leopard cub killed by lions, and added the hashtag #bestcarcass, a Twitter battle was born.

Since then, Twitter users have shared fascinating, strange, and sometimes disturbing images of decaying animals from all over the world in weird and wonderful poses.

Listed below are my top 10 picks (in no particular order) for some of the most taphonomically interesting #bestcarcass contenders. And, unsurprisingly, some people may find the follow images disturbing: click 'read more' at your own peril...

I submitted my PhD thesis in September 2016, and got word back a few weeks before Christmas that it had been accepted by the university for the award of my degree! Barring a few changes, of course. Technically, my thesis has been 'accepted with changes'.

For those who don't know how the process works:

1. 1. You submit your thesis to the university graduate school, along with a list of people who you think are expert enough to read and peer review it.
2. 2. The university sends the thesis to two of these experts.
3. 3. The experts read the thesis, note down edits they would like you to make, and then send it back to the graduate school along with a recommendation to 'accept with changes', 'accept with changes and review', 'revise and resubmit', or 'no changes required'.
4. 4. The university then sends their recommendation and edits (if required) to you.
5. 5. In my case, which is 'accept with changes', you have 3 months to make these edits and upload the revised thesis for the graduate school to examine.
6. 6. Then, if the graduate school is happy with the revisions, you upload a THIRD and final version of the thesis.
7. 7. Now you can breathe!

It would have been lovely to recieve it back with 'no changes required', but hey, it would be wonderful to submit perfectly written papers for peer review and not need changes to them too, but we aren't all perfect! 

I'll add one more reason to the list: because there's a photoshoot and you can't convince the photographer that science does indeed happen in the absence of labcoats.

I use Mendeley as my reference manager, and will sing its praises to anyone I meet asking what citation software they should use for writing research manuscripts. It's super easy to import article PDFs into your virtual library, ask it to 'watch folders' for new PDFs you've downloaded, has a pretty good stab at labelling articles in your library by looking at the metadata, and cites-while-you-write with its MS Word plug-in.

​You can even highlight passages and jot down notes within each PDF in the form of floating sticky notes, called 'annotations'.

​​But I wish that those annotations were more accessible in their own right.

You might, for example, read a paper in Mendeley about the taphonomy of mammal carcasses. There's an interesting line about teeth: that while they are more resistant to weathering than bones, they can still crack and split in hot and dry environments. You highlight this sentence and add an annotation with your thoughts. 

But how do you find that annotation at a later date? Until you read that paper again, you might not remember that it even exists.

Mendeley does not allow you to view all annotations you've ever created, or even indicate which PDFs either do or don't have annotations. If you remember reading something interesting and writing something about it, you better hope that you remember what you wrote, as you can find annotations by searching for key words within them. And if you're like me and just want to review your past notes, good luck trying to remember all the papers you've added annotations to over the last 6 months.

​There are, of course, work-arounds for this: you could tag all papers you add annotations to with a key word such as 'Annotations' or mark each paper with the 'favourite' star symbol, but this relies on you never forgetting to include this step.

You could copy the contents of each annotation in to an Excel spreadsheet or mind map, and group them by theme. That way you can review your database or mindmap and find your way back to the original paper. But this feels like double handling - why not just write the annotation in the mind map in the first place? What I would LOVE is a mind-mapping tool within Mendeley, where you could click and drag annotations on to nodes/branches, but I realise this could be nightmarish to code and implement.

I can't say I've come up with a solid solution for this problem yet. Has anyone else figured out a better annotation workflow for Mendeley, or do you use other software and reference manager combinations to keep track of your research notes?