What I did on my holidays
September 25, 2009
I made brachiosaur sand-sculptures.
Brachiosaurid in hypothetical sleep posture, left anteroventrolateral view. Juvenile Homo sapiens (Daniel Taylor) for scale.
(And yes, it’s that Daniel Taylor, the author of Taylor 2005 — a copy of which apparently hangs on the wall of the Padian Lab.)
But wait! Is the brachiosaur truly asleep, as it seems, or is it actually the victim of a mighty hunter?
Brachiosaurid in hypothetical death pose, left posteroventrolateral view. Mighty hunter (Michael P. Taylor) for scale. Note bemused bystander in middle distance.
No, it turns out it was just asleep after all; and I joined it.
Brachiosaurid in hypothetical sleep pose after all, left posteroventrolateral view. Brachiosaur's new best friend for scale.
… and finally: your obligatory sauropod-vertebra shot:
Cast of Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis holotype CCG V 20401, in right lateral view. Need I draw your attention to the truly absurd neck? This cast is owned by the Homogea Museum in Trzic, Slovenia, and was on loan in the car-park of the Geological Museum in Copenhagen.
References
I have a much less realised view of the digital future than Matt does, so I won’t be making a lot of predictions here. But I do have some questions to ask, and — predictably — some whining to do.
What counts, what doesn’t, and why?
Assuming you have made some science (e.g. a description of fossil, a palaeobiological hypothesis supported by evidence, a taxonomic revision), there are plenty of different ways you can present it to the world. I may have missed some, but here are the ones I’ve thought of, in roughly descending order of respectability/citability/prestige:
- Peer-reviewed paper/book chapter
- Unreviewed paper/book chapter
- Peer-reviewed electronic-only paper
- Published abstract (e.g. for SVP)
- Conference talk
- Conference poster
- Dissertation
- Online supplementary information
- Blog post
- Blog comment
- Email to the DML (which is archived on the web)
- Personal email
- Chat over a beer
How many of these are Science? Where is the line? Is the line hard or fuzzy? Why is it OK to cite SVP abstracts but not so much SVPCA abstracts? And other such questions. I think a very good case can be made that dissertations — provided they are made available — are better sources than conference talks, posters and abstracts; and a pretty good case can be made that blog posts are (especially when webcitation’ed — see below). Both dissertations and (good) blog posts have the advantage over talks and posters that they have a permanent existence, and over abstracts the simple fact that they are substantial: a 200-word abtract cannot, by its very nature, say anything much.
Zoological nomenclature
Unfortunately, for nomenclatural purposes, the ICZN’s Article 8 currently says that only publications on paper count, period, which counts out dissertations. I say unfortunately because were it not for this rule, then at least part of Aetogate would never have happened: the ramifications of Bill Parker’s case would not have been so awful if the perfectly good description of Heliocanthus in his (2003) dissertation had been allowed priority over Lucas et al.’s (2006) rush-job which attached the name Rioarribasuchus to the same specimen. Happily, the ICZN is as we write this considering an amendment to recognise nomenclatural acts in electronic-only publications. There has already been some published discussion of the pros and cons of this amendment, and the Commission is actively soliciting further comments, so those of you with strong feelings should put them in writing and send them to the Executive Secretary. (I will certainly be doing so.)
Self-scooping
We all know that blog entries are Not Sufficiently Published to be citable, at least in most journals; but are they Too Published to let you re-use the same material? When you submit to most journals, they ask you to formally state “this material has not previously been published” — is that true if we’ve blogged it? I am guessing different editors would answer that differently. For what it’s worth, we’ve been reasonably careful up till now not to blog anything that we’re planning to make into a paper — which is why we were so mysteriously silent on the obviously important topic of sauropod neck posture during the first 19 months of SV-POW!. We’ve not been 100% pure on this: for example, I have a paper on Brachiosaurus in press that mentions in passing the spinoparapophyseal laminae, absence of an infradiapophyseal laminae and perforate anterior centroparapophyseal laminae of the 8th dorsal vertebra of the Brachiosaurus brancai specimen HMN SII — the features that I have blogged here in detail, with illustrations that would certainly never have been given journal-space. Since the relevant passage in my paper accounted for half a manuscript page (of a total of 75 pages), I’m assuming no-one’s bothered about that. In a case like this, I guess the SV-POW! posts are best thought of as pre-emptive and unofficial online supplementary information.
Counts for what purpose?
We’ve already mentioned that dissertations, blog entries and suchlike don’t count for nomenclatural purposes. Whether they count in the sense of being citable in published works is up for debate right now (and again, see below on webcitation). It seems pretty clear that these forms of “grey publication” do count in establishing people’s reputations among their peers — dissertations are obviously important in this regard, and Darren’s ridiculously broad knowledge of tetrapods extant and extinct is near-universally recognised largely because of his blogging efforts (although you could argue — and Matt and I often have argued — that he might have been able to enhance his reputation even more if he’d taken some of that blogging time and invested it in formal publications). Conversely, it’s clear that blogs, however rigorous and scientific, count for squat when it comes to committees. The world of dinosaur palaeontology is probably just as aware of Matt’s series of Aerosteon response articles here on SV-POW! as it would be if he’d put those together into a paper that was published in PLoS ONE; but when his tenure committee comes to count up the impact factors of the journals he’s published in, those articles will count for nothing. One day that might change, but not while impact factors still exert their baleful influence.
Deciding what to blog and what to write up as a “proper paper”
Matt posted his response to the Aerosteon paper as a sequence of three blog entries even though he knew that what he had to say was substantial enough to make a paper. Why throw away a potential publication that would look good on the CV? Because he wanted to get it out there ASAP, and didn’t want to wait until all the media dust had settled. So he fought people off when they pestered him to publish it as a paper. He doesn’t really need to do it now, and he doesn’t really have time (especially since I keep badgering him about all the papers we’re supposed to be collaborating on). If we were starving for publications, we could turn a lot of SV-POW! posts into LPUs — but we’re not starving.
Let me explain this by taking a digression though the economics of file-sharing and the way labels persistently — maybe deliberately — misunderstand them. Let’s imagine for the sake of an example that a while back, I sent Matt the MP3s that make up Blue Oyster Cult’s awesome Fire Of Unknown Origin album. Now anyone with their brain switched on can see that the net effect of this on his music-buying pattern would be positive: if he really liked Fire, there is a fair chance that he would then have gone and bought a BOC album or two, or three — just as I’ve been buying Dar Williams albums like crazy since someone slipped me MP3s of Mortal City. The labels’ perception, however, is that instead I would have denied them a sale: that if I’d not sent the Fire of Unknown Origin MP3s, Matt would of course have bought his own legitimate copy, and so I’ve stiffed them out of $6.99 less whatever tiny slice they pass on to the artist. The misunderstanding here is that they think — or would like to think, who knows if they really believe this themselves? — that people’s music consumption is limited by the time we have available to listen to music, and that one way or another we will obtain enough music to fulfil that need: for free if possible, but by paying for it if necessary. But the truth is completely different: there would be zero chance of Matt’s ever buying any BOC album, since he’d never even heard of them (beyond Don’t Fear The Reaper, I guess) whereas in the hypothetical universe where I sent him the Fire MP3s, there is a non-zero chance. And the labels’ failure to understand that is because of a wholly incorrect model of what factor limits music listening.
Digression ends. Its relevance is this: in the same way, we are used to thinking that our ability to get papers published is limited by the number of publication-worthy ideas we have — so that every paper idea we “waste” on a blog entry is a net loss. In truth, ideas are cheap, and our ability to get papers published is actually limited by our throughput — our ability to find time to actually write those ideas up with sufficient rigour, prepare high-resolution figures, format the manuscripts for journals, wait through the review period, deal with the reviews, revise, resubmit, handle editorial requests, and so on and on. (That is especially true when the journal takes six months to come up with a rejection.) This is why Matt and I, like everyone else I know in palaeo who I’ve discussed this with, have huge stacks of POOP that we’ve not yet found time to convert into papers. So when we spend a paper-worthy idea on a blog entry, we’re not wasting it: we’re putting it out there (in an admittedly inferior format) when otherwise it would never have made it out there at all. The remaining issue is whether the time we spend on blogging an idea would have been better spent on moving a paper further towards publication. Maybe, sometimes. But you have to stop and smell the roses every now and again. So the real cost of SV-POW! for us is not the “waste” of paperable ideas, but the time we spend on writing it. I am guessing that in the time I’ve put into SV-POW! so far, I could have got two more papers out — certainly one. Has it been worth it? I think so, but it’s not a no-brainer. On the other hand, SV-POW! probably acts as a reader-funnel, so that when I do get a paper out, more people read it than otherwise would. How big that effect is, I don’t know, and I can’t think of a way to measure it.
How to cite blog entries: WebCite
One of the great things about writing for SV-POW! is that you can learn some really useful stuff from the comments; and the most useful comment I’ve seen so far is the one in which Cameron Neylon pointed us at WebCite (http://webcitation.org/). This is a superbly straightforward site that makes permanent archive copies of web-pages, and mirrors them around the world. In doing so, it deals with the problems of web pages being vulnerable to disappearance and prone to change. (In off-list emails with Matt, I had suggested that I might build something like this myself, as I am software engineer in my day job; I am delighted that these guys have done it properly instead.) So if you ever want to cite Matt’s second Aerosteon post in a journal, use the archive URL http://webcitation.org/5hPYTmWpW — and if you want to cite any other SV-POW! article, just submit its URL to WebCite yourself, and get back an archive URL which you can use. And tell all your friends about WebCite!
Oh, and by the way …
Here’s that photo of a monitor lizard getting its arse kicked by an elephant that you ordered:
Monitor lizard postcranium, aerial, strongly inclined. Photograph by Hira Punjabi, downloaded from National Geographic
References
- Lucas, S. G., Hunt, A. P. and Spielmann, J. A. 2006. Rioarribasuchus, a new name for an aetosaur from the Upper Triassic of north-central New Mexico. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Bulletin 37: 581-582.
- Parker, W. G. 2003a. Description of a new specimen of Desmatosuchus haplocerus from the Late Triassic of Northern Arizona. Unpublished MS thesis. Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. 315 pp.
First off, thanks to everyone for reading, commenting on, and discussing the previous post. Seeing the diversity of opinions expressed has been interesting and gratifying for us, and we’ve learned a lot from you about how the blogosphere is changing science already. My own thoughts follow, Mike chimes in at the end, and Darren will probably have something to add soon, too.
The Intolerable Problem
Sometimes people push back on posts of mine they don’t like by telling me I’m out of bounds. Somehow, they say, I’ve crossed the boundary of what I’m allowed to write about. They are angry that I’m now writing about something outside my defined area.
I’m usually taken aback by this, because I didn’t realize I’d actually agreed to any boundaries.
Seth Godin, 2009, “Out of Bounds”
Several commenters have brought up what I call the Intolerable Problem, which is that people online can critique papers and present new evidence and arguments in a format that is impermanent and not peer-reviewed. It’s intolerable because on one hand such material is not currently (operative word) citable in most outlets, and on the other hand repeating it sans citation in peer-reviewed literature smacks of plagiarism (to some, but not to all). Although this material is potentially valuable it “doesn’t count” professionally (see exceptions below), which some professionals (not necessarily those who have commented here) regard as a fatal argument against posting it in the first place. But–and this is crucial–it’s only a problem for the tiny fraction of the audience who might want to cite the freely exchanged material. If you’re in that fraction, we value your attention and comments, but don’t assume we’re writing only for you, or to further our professional standing. We blog because we love this stuff, and even at a technical niche blog like SV-POW! the majority of readers probably don’t care at all whether the information is peer-reviewed or “counts” for professionals; they mostly care whether it’s right or not.
One obvious solution to the Intolerable Problem is to simply let people cite anything they want, including blog posts and DML posts. This is already starting to be implemented–see examples here and here and more discussion here. This runs into two problems: one is permanence (there is no guarantee that the cited post will be up forever, or that the author won’t revise it later in response to criticism [as I have done with this very post!]), which can already be solved using tools such as WebCite (thanks to Cameron Neylon for bringing this to our attention in a comment on the previous post).
The other problem is that citations serve two functions, which are to establish priority and to lend authority to an argument. Citing a blog post may establish priority, but some researchers will cavil at the idea that a blog post is an authoritative source (for varying combinations of researchers and blog posts). Whether they would be right to cavil I don’t know; in the end the market will decide. The market–that is, the desire to attain professional respect and avoid censure–will also dissuade authors from larding up their papers with citations to trivial or worthless online sources.
Those who are troubled by the free discussion of papers, evidence, and hypotheses online need to realize that:
- it’s been going on for a long time (15 years for the Dinosaur Mailing List);
- it’s only going to accelerate in the future;
- it’s not a problem for the vast majority of people participating in the discussions;
- any solution must involve accommodation to the reality of how people exchange information online (immediately, freely, globally, without prior filtering).
These discussions are not going to stop, and ignoring the output of such discussions (because they “don’t count”) will eventually become prohibitively expensive as those workers who insist on playing only by the old rules are outmaneuvered by others who find ways to use all available information regardless of its provenience or “respectability”.
Paper journals will die when online journals stop sucking
Most online publications are hampered by having to be identical to the dead-tree versions (no links, no embedded video, no rotating 3D PDF images, etc.). Eventually people will realize that it is counterproductive to keep hobbling the new medium to make it as slow, flat, and inefficient as the old medium. Once one journal takes the hobbles off, others will do the same rather than lose contributors to cutting-edge outlets. A few boutique journals may still produce flattened, gutted versions of the online publications on paper. People still fly biplanes, too. Paper-based journals will never be popular again and their existence will not stop people from doing whatever technology allows them to in the online venues.
Note that this does not even refer to the economic argument against dead-tree publishing, which has already relocated encyclopedias and newspapers from ubiquity to marginality or extinction.
I’m surprised that the revolution isn’t farther along already. The cage is open.
Whither peer review and editing?
This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the old notion of “filter, then publish” is giving way to “publish, then filter.” There is no need for Slashdot’s or Kuro5hin’s owners to sort the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop to pressure people not to post drivel, because lightweight filters applied after the fact work better at large scale than paying editors to enforce minimum quality in advance.
Clay Shirky, 2003, “The Music Business and the Big Flip”
PLoS ONE is already going gangbusters, without peer-review prior to publication in many cases. The only holdup there is that the post-hoc review by commenters is not working out quite like they’d hoped, because few people are commenting. Not everyone agrees that there is a dearth of commenting at PLoS ONE; the larger point is that people publish there a lot and the community treats those pubs like they count, even though in many cases they are essentially un-reviewed.
[Update: I misunderstood peer review at PLoS ONE. Papers may be reviewed externally by people unconnected to PLoS, or by one or more unpaid Academic Editors, or by a combination. I had thought of the review by Academic Editors only, which accounts for 13% of papers, as a form of internal review, but according to Bora (down in the comments) it should count as external review. If you're happy with that--and the system is not without its critics--then all papers at PLoS ONE are externally reviewed prior to publication; even if you're not, pre-publication review by someone is still in place across the board at PLoS ONE, and 87% of papers are externally reviewed by people unaffiliated with PLoS. Post-publication commenting supplements rather than replaces pre-publication review.]
People do comment on blogs, all the time. Post-hoc review will work, in fact already does work, just fine on blogs. I predict that PLoS ONE clones of the future (PLoS TWO?) will emulate whatever features of blogs make people willing to comment on them but not on PLoS ONE v1.0.
Alternatively, the paucity of post-hoc commenting at PLoS ONE could be taken as further evidence that journal-mediated peer review, whether before or after publication, is dying just off to a slow start. I think that editorial control is not far behind. Both are locally extinct in some parts of the science publishing ecosystem, since people are already citing blogs.
Q: But–but–but? What about protecting the sanctity of the process? What about about guaranteeing respectability? What about prestige?
A: Hey, those questions would make a terrific opinion piece for your local newspaper–oops, too late.
I don’t deny that editors and peer reviewers often make significant contributions to the quality of published work. I just think that people will learn to get along without them if doing so allows faster and easier exchange of information. That was never possible on paper; it’s long been possible here.
A priori peer review and editorial control were invented because publications were scarce (in the Econ 101 sense of being limited) and there needed to be a barrier to entry. Now publication is instant, free, and global. Error correction and the assignment of value will still happen, but they’ll happen after publication rather than before, and they’ll be distributed rather than centralized.
Creeping blogification
Clay Shirky described the problem for newspapers and the recording industry as the existence of “cheap perfect copies”. An expanded but by no means exhaustive list for science publication includes:
- cheap perfect copies
- editable (but also archivable)
- sharable
- linkable (both incoming and outgoing)
- globally distributed
- instantly
- for free
- without pre-publication filtering
- with multimedia embeds (as opposed to including video etc. separately in the suppl. info.)
Online open-access journals currently take advantage of all of those capabilities except the last two. Newsgroup posts cover all the bases except the last one (so do tweets, despite the severe length limitations).
What covers everything? Blog posts. Which have the added advantage that people will comment on them without being asked.
But that’s not the whole simple story.
The center cannot hold–or can it?
So we’re looking at total chaos, right–a world where anyone posts anything they want, no one has any control, and no one knows how to find the good stuff? Well, two out of three, at least. I’m not worried about that last point, for two reasons.
First, thanks to search engines, aggregators, tags, tweets, links, etc., we already have pretty good tools for finding the good stuff. Those direction finders will get better even as the map gets more complicated.
Second, prestige will always be a motivator, so people will always compete to get into exclusive venues. Nature is not going away, although I think that in the near future they will decouple their online and print publications so that the former can take advantage of all the possibilities the web offers.
If I have a really good idea backed up with lots of data, I’ll keep trying to get it into the most prestigious outlet I can. I won’t put my best stuff on a blog just because it’s faster and less encumbered. Blogs probably won’t replace journals, at least not anytime soon. Rather, the spectrum of publishing possibilities will expand; below the category of Least Publishable Unit we’ll add Most Bloggable Unit and so on down to Least Tweetable Unit, and the new categories will interpenetrate with the old over time.
How nice for me
Well, what a striking coincidence that Mr. Paleo Blogger looks into the ole digital crystal ball and sees “bloggy with a 90% chance of exactly-what-he’s-already-doing”.
I can’t claim to be either uninterested or unbiased in all of this. But I am new to actually thinking about the implications. I hadn’t been to most of the above links or had any of these thoughts as of a week ago. When Casey first e-mailed me six days ago, I replied:
If you’re curious, here’s the short short version of my thoughts: science bloggers critique published papers and blog about unpublished observations all the time. Our post-paper run of posts might be an extreme or even vulgar example, and it might fire more discussion about “what counts?”, but I don’t see it as being different in kind from what many science bloggers do. Papers are papers and blogs are blogs, and I never intended to blur the lines. If people feel that all the blog posts only count as “crap some guys wrote on the internet” and that they can be safely ignored, that’s fine with me. If they think the blog posts deserve some higher level of recognition a la “what counts?”, then I’m honored, but that’s extra value that others are investing in our blog, and not anything that we’ve knowingly sought. I suppose you could turn around and say that I’m trying to have my cake and eat it, too, first with all the pro-paper blogging and now with this “I’m innocent” schtick. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that I’m too tired to figure it out tonight. All the more reason to have an open conversation about this stuff.
Now I realize that the lines between papers and blog posts are blurring, and whether we mean to or not, we SV-POW!sketeers are contributing (Darren’s doing double duty thanks to Tet Zoo). I still think that the investment of blog posts with respectability, value, citability, or whatever rests entirely with readers, and always will. Options range from treating posts like papers to treating them like bar conversations to treating them like spam. You decide.
Also, I tried to keep the writing above value-neutral but probably failed. It’s hard not to get a bit evangelistic about the potential advantages of online publication and online everything else, a tendency I call DISSUADE: Da Internet Shall Save Us All Dead-trees Excepted. Getting published in science hasn’t always been easy up until now, but the process has been relatively clear and familiar. And stable, on decadal and even centennial timescales. Everything about scientific publication is about to get much more fluid and much less clear, and it will probably stay that way for a long time, and it may stay that way forever. Not all of the changes will be for the better, and it may be hard to decide what’s better and what’s worse until we look back with some perspective. Mechanical looms were bad for weavers but good for everyone else. I think many of the changes discussed in this post and the previous comment thread are likely, and some are inevitable.
Set against the shiny digital future is the inertia of the academy and those of us who roost there. I’m not going to stop publishing papers in dead-tree journals (although I will never publish in a journal that doesn’t provide PDFs to authors). Heck, I’m not even going to stop publishing in closed-access journals, some of which are run by societies I admire and want to participate in (after all, everything is open anyway). At the same time I will keep blogging, and while I will frequently bring up technical stuff I don’t want to publish more formally (at least not yet), I will try not to deliberately blur the lines any more than I already have. I don’t need to; the web is already blurring them faster than most of us can keep up.
Hang on.
Oh, about that mystery vert…
Metapophyses, I haz them
…at the end of the post Necks Lie. Nima called it–good spot on the split neural spine. It’s a mid-cervical of Barosaurus, AMNH 6341, in the big bone room (well, one of many big bone rooms) at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. A cast of this vertebra makes up part of the neck in the awesome mounted skeleton in the museum rotunda. Here’s that skeleton, with Mike for scale.
Thanks for slogging through all this. We’ll get back to perforated postcentrodiapophyseal laminae, sacralized caudal transverse processes, and the air space proportions of pneumatic vertebrae soon.
Addendum (from Mike)
Matt is much more ready than I am to throw away peer-review, editorial control, and journals in general. Sometimes, the reasons that things are the way they are, are good ones; it’s not in the interests of professional iconoclasts like Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow to point that out or to discuss the strengths of how things are today, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept their arguments as uncritically as (say, to pick a name out of the air completely at random) Matt.
Anyway, happily, G. K. Chesterton foresaw the abolition of journals in favour of blogs, and commented thus:
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
- Heretics (1905).
A new perspective, or the same old thing?
Brachiosaurus and friends from here (hat tip to Ville Sinkkonen).
In an e-mail with explicit permission to quote, our colleague Casey Holliday sent the following thoughts about our new paper and the subsequent ten days of related blogging:
I don’t know guys. I like your blogs, and your papers are fine. And I liked this paper. And I’m a fan. But it looks to me that you blogged about far more data, in- or not in support of your paper than you actually presented in your paper. So,…wtf? The posts on Dinomorph far exceeded your (or any) published rebuke. Your explanation (and honorable erred parts) of the semicircular canal data also exceeded that actual published part too, with extra photos, description etc. (is that error going to be OA published too?) Also additional pix of necks (e.g., Nigersaurus), and not only from sauropods that would have
potentially bettered the original pub. So what’s fair? Why weren’t
these data also included in the publication? Maybe it’s not my business and was taken up in review…I don’t know. Frankly, none of this blog stuff really counts in the peer-reviewed world of “real” publications. Its not like this blogging and comments all count as Supplementary Data either. But also, I’m obviously here commenting on it, so also crossing into the fray…But who really cares about all this discussion? Its no different than the DML or any other noise in the internet world (or is it). Similar to what Paul Barrett was posting on Tet Zoo…what counts? Why take up arguments here, when they should (maybe?likely?) be taken up more formally and privately.If you’re going to air all this additional data and unreviewed
opinion, then I think this discussion is important.I think this phenomenon of the sauropod neck paper is really
interesting. We have 3 scientists that published a paper, and then, thanks to their current blogosphere cred, basically unleashed a hype not seen in this way previously that I can remember. Maybe that’s the interesting part? and kudos. But interestingly…we’re seeing this intersection of traditional publication (OA or not), blogosphere description, and perhaps, almost certainly, excellent self-promotion.I’m still a fan. I think this paper is generally solid. But I’m
particularly interested in this phenomenon and hope this is a fair
place to raise it.
The comment field is open, and we SV-POW!sketeers are going to refrain from commenting for a couple of days to let the conversation develop unfettered.
We are genuinely curious to know what you think.
This just in: we are idiots
May 14, 2009
Do you want to know how stupid my co-blogger Matt Wedel is? Having already discussed the ostrich Struthio camelus in Wedel et al. (2000b), that total idiot went on to misspell the trivial name as “camellus” in Wedel and Cifelli (2005:52). What a doofus.
And do you want to know how dumb my other co-blogger Darren Naish is? Throughout Naish and Dyke (2005), he consistently misspelled the species name of Elopteryx nopcsai as “nopscai“, despite extensively discussing Nopcsa, who the species was named after. What a moron.
It’s a good thing I would never do anything so stupid.
Er. Read on …
Brachiosaurus altithorax holotype FMNH P25107, last five dorsal vertebrae in right lateral view. Photograph by Phil Mannion.
So I have this paper in press about the two “Brachiosaurus” species and how they are not really congeneric — I think we’ve mentioned it a few times. It’s now very nearly a year since I submitted it, under the title: A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1904 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai Janensch 1914. And now — now, a year on, after having re-read this manuscript some insane number of times — I finally notice my own grotesque error: Riggs of course named B. altithorax in 1903. Argh! So in the last few days, I’ve spent some crazy amount of time going through and changing this title in my dissertation (where it pops up as Chapter 2), in my CV, in my on-line publications list … and of course, making a GIGANTIC sign in flashing red neon, to be suspended before my eyeballs at all times, reminding me to fix this in the page-proof when that turns up.
(Actually, I think this error is the most astounding of all: not only did I miss it myself, but so did my Ph.D supervisor, the handling editor at SVP, both peer-reviewers, the self-invited third “reviewer” who sent his unsolicited comments, both of my examiners and the two or three people that I’ve sent preprints to. Incredible that ten or more people could all miss such a horribly obvious mistake right there in the title.)
So. You’d think that just about exhausted Matt’s, Darren’s and my doofosity, right? Oh ho ho. Not so, because we have a paper in press that we wrote together. We submitted it, revised it according to the reviews, commented on the page-proofs and told the journal it was all ready to go. And then — THEN — we noticed a horrible, stupid mistake right in the middle of the abstract. The paper is about osteological neutral pose, but we’d written “osteological neural pose”. And all three of us missed it. (Happy ending: we told the journal what we’d done, and it wasn’t too late to fix.)
So the moral of the story is: we are idiots.
Just thought you ought to know.
References
- Naish, Darren and Gareth J. Dyke. 2004. Heptasteornis was no ornithomimid, troodontid, dromaeosaurid or owl: the first alvarezsaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from Europe. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie Mh. 2004(7): 385-401.
- Taylor, Michael P. In press. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrae Palaeontology.
- Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Darren Naish. In press (2009). Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54(2).
- Wedel, Mathew J., and Richard L. Cifelli. 2005. Sauroposeidon: Oklahoma’s native giant. Oklahoma Geology Notes 65(2):40-57.
- Mathew J. Wedel, Richard L. Cifelli, and R. Kent Sanders. 2000b. Osteology, paleobiology, and relationships of the sauropod dinosaur Sauroposeidon. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 45(4):343-388.
SVP, our first birthday, the ghost of blogging yet to come
October 24, 2008
Just got back from SVP, the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. SVP is always a blast; beyond the inherent coolness of four solid days of intense paleo-everything, I get a chance to catch up with my “SVP friends”–the pool of friends, some of them close, that I only see for a few days each year.
This year there was an extra bonus, which was making friends with a lot of paleobloggers that I’d previously only known as e-quaintances. There was even a paleoblogger lunch, which drew a big enough crowd that people at opposite ends of the table couldn’t effectively converse. That’s okay, though. I have a ‘critical mass’ theory about shared meals and parties, which is that they are usually lame unless there are enough people to sustain more than one conversation at the same time. By that standard, the paleoblogger lunch was a flying success. Unfortunately there weren’t any sauropods at the lunch, so it’s not really germane to our purpose here.
However, I did engineer a photo with a subset of paleobloggers that would be fair game, and you can see it above. This was at the welcome reception at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. From left to right we’ve got Haplocanthosaurus (sauropod vertebra picture of the week: check), a disembodied floating T. rex head (it’s an oracle), a mosasaur, Megaloceros, Mammuthus (one of the least stinky of the stinkin’ mammals), and Allosaurus. Oh, and down in front are Julia Heathcote (Ethical Palaeontologist), moi, Amanda Northrop (Self-Designed Student), and Neil Kelley (microecos). Neil is the only real paleontologist of the bunch; you can tell because he’s holding a beer.
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Mike drew the straw for our first birthday post, but I didn’t want to let it pass unremarked. This blog started as a joke on e-mail. “We ought to make a blog of nothing but sauropod vertebra pictures.” “Like APOD?” “Yeah, but weekly so we don’t drive ourselves crazy.” Next thing I knew, Mike had set up the blog and registered Darren and me as contributors. Then I posted a couple of times and BAM! we’re a year into it.
At first I thought we’d be struggling to get a year’s worth of material. I even made up a list of stuff I wanted to blog about, just in case I ever ran out of inspirado. I won’t tell you what’s on the list, but I will tell you that there are 27 things on the list and so far I’ve only gotten to six of them. So the outlook is good.
I have no idea how long we’ll be doing this. It never occurred to me after about the first month. If there is a Life Lesson (TM) in paleontology, it’s that nothing lasts forever. No sense getting an ulcer about it. Just enjoy what you have, and have a little fun.
We’ll do the same.
A year in sauropod vertebrae
October 12, 2008
What with all the fuss over Aerostron, it seems that we missed SV-POW!’s first birthday. Yes, it’s been just over a year since the very first post, Hello world!, showed us the Brachiosaurus brancai cervical vertebra HMN SII:C8 that we have seen so many times since in various ways. Since we kicked off on 1st October 2007, we’ve written a total of 82 posts (so more like one and a half per week than the one a week we advertised), and accumulated 1002 comments. (Congratulations to Andy Farke, who wrote the 1000th comment).
We’ve covered a lot of ground this year, from the the frivolous to the ferociously technical, so it’s hard to pick favourites. But from my own very biased perspective, I particularly enjoyed all eight days of the extended Xenoposeidon week, a rather exhausting series of posts that may make Xeno the most blogged dinosaur on the Internet — or at least, the most blogged mid-to-posterior partial dorsal vertebra. Also noteworthy was Matt’s flagrant playing-to-the-gallery “showdown” and Darren’s observation of a newly recognised site of pneumaticity (which I want to cite in a paper but won’t be allowed to).
Still, there’s no hesitation for me in picking my favourite series: it would have to be the four posts of axial-anatomy humiliation, Your neck is pathetic, Your torso is also pretty lame, Your sacrum is negligible and Your coccyx is contemptible.
A highlight this year was hearing SV-POW! namechecked by John Hutchinson in his introductory remarks at a workshop on functional morphology at the Natural History Museum. I also heard a rumour somewhere that Paul Upchurch tells his students to read this site. I have no idea whether that’s true or not, but I think it sounds pretty awesome so I am going to assume that it is until I hear otherwise.
I seem to recall when we kicked this thing off that we intended only to run it for one year, then archive it and shut it down. But it’s been going well enough, and we’ve enjoyed it enough, that there is no prospect of our calling it a day for a while yet. One of the reasons for that, I think, is that sharing a blog between three people has worked fantastically well. It’s meant that we’ve been able to keep up a half-decent rate of posting non-trivial articles without the load on any one of us being too great. (How on earth Darren manages to post daily on Tetrapod Zoology I can’t imagine). And this is my message to the world on the occasion of SV-POW!’s birthday: shared blogging is excellent, and I would love to see more team-run palaeo blogs out there. I’ve joked in the past about blogs like Basal Ornithopod Third Metatarsal Picture of the Week, but in all seriousness I would love to see people taking on super-specialised aspects of dinosaur palaeo as we’ve done here. I would read such blogs avidly, and our modest-but-non-negligible hit-counts here at SV-POW! (69,170 hits as I write this) suggests that there is a hardcore market for this kind of blog. So have at it, people!
As it happens, right around now is also an important time for me, Matt and Darren because on Friday night we submitted our first joint-authored paper. I’ll say no more about that now, because hopefully before too long we’ll be able to discuss the published version. But making that submission was a landmark moment for The Three SV-POW!sketeers. Hopefully there’ll be more where that came from.
Finally, I give you the actual sauropod vertebra you’ve all been waiting for. It is a cast of the 2nd dorsal vertebra (the only one preserved ) of the holotype and only specimen of Puertasaurus reuili Novas et al. 2005, with lead author Fernando E. Novas himself for scale. This is one of those photos that just make you go “Woah!”; or, if you are so inclined, “Dude!”. Enjoy!
Puertasaurus reuili, second dorsal vertebra, in anterior view, with Fernando E. Novas for scale.
