On the one hand, I think Paul is absolutely right to want to get paid for his work. I remember seeing a supposed skeletal reconstruction of Krzyzanowskisaurus that was just Paul's Lesothosaurus, and it was even copyrighted to the paper's author!
Yeah. Frankly, I think this case should be considered part of Aëtogate. I wonder how it got through... peer... oh. NMMNHS Bulletin.
<sigh>
On the other hand, I think Paul goes too far in his expectations/demands. In particular, this applies to his apparent desire to exclusively use the "classic left foot pushing off in a high velocity posture" which he popularized in PDW and other works.
This strikes me as a case like Sony wanting to copyright the term "walkman" which had originally been a brand name but has long been used for any such device regardless of who produced it. Sony lost; the verdict said they should have foreseen this and come up with a term for this kind of apparatus before "walkman" spread.
Yet there are aspects to Paul's reconstruction style which I don't like. He [...] adds cartilaginous sterna and such
Not just sterna. You know the intersternum of *Iguanodon*, that irregularly shaped small bone that sometimes appeared in the diamond-shaped hole between the sterna and the coracoids (and indicates that these five bones lay in a continuous cartilaginous plate)? That's what he extrapolates to all dinosaurs, as a huge triangular cartilage plate -- after ripping their coracoids apart and hanging the furcula in the empty space between them. This increases his estimates of trunk volume and thus of mass; makes quite a difference for *Tyrannosaurus* for instance.