Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

As I was clearing out some clutter, I came across this hand-written list of projects that I wanted to get completed:

Sadly, I didn’t put a date on the list. But I can estimate it as before 2013 (because of the reference of Why giraffes have short necks as a project still to be completed) but after 2011 (because the no necks for sex project is not listed.) So it’s probably from 2012, which means four years have passed since I wrote that list.

What have I achieved in that time? Not nearly enough.

• ICZN checklist refers to the short set of name-a-new-animal instructions that I was crowdsourcing here on SV-POW!. We started this on 10 February 2011, had it nearly done less than two weeks later, then … stalled for no reason at all. Eighteen months later, the ICZN changed to allow electronic publication, instantly rendering the in-progress document obsolete. Now I don’t know whether to kill the project or update it. Should have just published it in 2011.
• WTH (Why giraffes have short necks) was published in PeerJ, hurrah!
• PBJ stands for “Pneumatic Butt on a JANGO“. It was published in the PLOS ONE’s sauropod gigantism collection, hurrah!
• Archbishop is of course the Natural History Museum’s Tendaguru brachiosaur, which I have been planning to describe since 2004. Still not done. Shameful.
• “Apatosaurus” minimus is a descriptive project. Real work has been done, and I gave a talk about it at SVPCA in 2012. Not much progress since then. Lame.
• Astrolembospondylus refers to the starship-shaped cervical vertebra of the Barosaurus holotype YPM 429. That project has seen daylight as both an SVPCA talk in 2013 and a PeerJ Preprint — which is great. But once the reviews were in, we should have turned it around and got it submitted as a proper paper. For some reason, we didn’t, and this project, too, is in limbo. Weak.
• ODP is the Open Dinosaur Project. Do not get me started on that train-wreck.
• Neck cartilage: giraffe, ostrich, croc. This refers to a comparative dissection project to determine whether sauropods had intervertebral discs. I proposed it as a Masters project twice, but no-one bit; then I offered to up to anyone who wanted it on SV-POW!, with the same (lack of) result. Looks like it’s not sexy enough for anyone to invest the time into, which is a shame because it’s important.
• Limb cartilage limiting mass refers to the second talk I ever gave, at Progressive Palaeontology in 2004. It’s ridiculous that I never wrote this up. Ridiculous.
• Haemodynamics refers to Matt’s and my looong-running plans to write up our thoughts about Roger Seymour’s work that suggests blood-circulation issues prevented sauropods from having habitually erect necks. I’m going to blame Matt for this one’s lack of progress. (Not because he’s any more to blame than I am — just because I’ve been taking all the blame so far, and I want to share it around a bit.)
• Immature sauropods, pop. dynamics. Parts of this made it out in the recent Hone, Farke, and Wedel (2016) paper on dinosaur ontogenetic stages. Not as much as I’d have liked to see, but enough to make a dedicated paper about this not really feasible.
• Ostrich skull atlas. I made lovely multi-view photos of nearly every bone in my ostrich skull. My plan was, and sort of still is, to publish them all in a text-light paper. No progress on this. I still have a few bones left to photograph, and may need to completely disarticulate the mandible before I can do that.
• Wealden sauropod vert. analysis. I’d planned, going back to the earliest posts on this blog, to properly redescribe and analyse the many fascinating isolated sauropod vertebrae of the Wealden Formation. This is another one that I gave a ProgPal talk about before getting distracted. Not sure if this will ever happen: I’m still very interested in it, but even more interested in other things.
• Fossils explained is a series of articles for geologists, explaining various fossil groups in laymen’s terms (here is an example). Darren’s done half a dozen of them. Once many years ago I expressed an interest in doing one on sauropods, and the editor liked the idea. Then … nothing. My bad.
• Ventral compression bracing is a section that, heaven help us, we somehow decided we should remove from Why Giraffes Have Short Necks and make into its own paper. It got stalled on some croc-dissection work that Matt was doing with his student Vanessa and is now in limbo.

That’s fifteen projects that I had on the go, or planned to work on, four years ago. I make it that two of them (WTH and PBJ) have been published and one (Barosaurus) has made it as far as a the preprint stage. Three more are probably dead for various reasons, and that leaves nine where I’ve made woefully inadequate progress — in most cases, none at all.

Meanwhile, needless to say, I’ve added a bunch more projects to my To Do list since I scribbled this one out. (And to be fair to me, I’ve got a few other projects out in this time that weren’t mentioned in the note: neural spine bifurcation as Matt’s co-author, lead author on intervertebral cartilage and sole on its addendum; I slipped in as last author on Haestasaurus; and I wrote the SPARC briefing paper on evaluating researchers.)

What does all this mean?

I don’t know. Some of those no-progress yet projects are still very much alive in my mind — notably the Archbishop, of course. Others might never happen. Some are 90% done and I should just push them out the door.

One moral of this story is that I shouldn’t have burned 250 hours since Christmas playing Skyrim. But maybe a more constructive one is that it’s just really hard to know what projects are going to take wings and fly and which aren’t. My guess — and I’d love to hear some confirmation or denial in the comments — is that most researchers have a similar palette of half-done projects floating around their hindbrains, continually projecting low-level guilt rays. I guess I long ago gave up on the idea that I would ever finish all my projects, because the only way that would happen would be if I never started any more new ones — and that ain’t gonna happen.

Oh, here’s a better moral: ideas to work on are cheap. In fact Matt and I have so darned many that we sometimes just give them away here on SV-POW!. (I am pretty certain that there are lots more similar project-giveaway posts somewhere here, but we didn’t tag them at the time.)

Ideas are cheap; actual work is hard.