Work on the Archbishop begins!
May 28, 2018
I know, I know — you never believed this day would come. And who could blame you? Nearly thirteen years after my 2005 SVPCA talkSweet Seventy-Five and Never Been Kissed, I am finally kicking the Archbishop descriptive work into gear. And I’m doing it in the open!
In the past, I’ve written my academic works in LibreOffice, submitted them for peer-review, and only allowed the world to see them after they’ve been revised, accepted and published. More recently, I’ve been using preprints to make my submitted drafts public before peer review. But there’s no compelling reason not to go more open than that, so I’ll be writing this paper out in the open, in a public GitHub repository than anyone can access. That also means anyone can file issues if they thing there’s something wrong or missing, and anyone can submit pull-requests if they have a correction to contribute.
I’ll be writing this paper in GitHub Flavoured Markdown so that it displays correctly right in the browser, and so that patches can be supported. That will make tables a bit more cumbersome, but it should be manageable.
Anyway, feel free to follow progress at https://github.com/MikeTaylor/palaeo-archbishop
The very very skeletal manuscript is at https://github.com/MikeTaylor/palaeo-archbishop/blob/master/archbishop-manuscript.md
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
May 29, 2018 at 2:10 am
Mike–
Not directly about your Archbishop work, but generally about open access.
I think I e-mailed you a while back about a study of the effects on science (as measured by citations) of making research more readily available, using an American WW II program of reprinting more cheaply German scientific works that had been extremely expensive because of copyright.
This (or closely related research) now seems to have appeared in a readily accessible WWWeb economics research site:
https://voxeu.org/article/effects-copyrights-science
May 29, 2018 at 8:13 am
Thanks, Allen!
May 29, 2018 at 10:21 am
How many ‘Palaeo project Challenges’ did this go through in the end? :)
May 29, 2018 at 10:30 am
I think in the end we just gave up on even listing it in the Palaeo Project Challenge. And then more recently there was this.
What’s happened in the last few years is that I’ve got a ton of papers mired in the depressing swamp of peer-review — three papers at PeerJ that have been reviewed and await my revisions, one of which has been in that state for two and a half years. I find this process too awful to plough through, but the fact that it’s hanging over me means I don’t feel free to work on the new stuff that’s actually exciting me. It’s a lose-lose.
In the end, sometime you just have to go “screw it, I’m going to do some work that I care about”.
May 30, 2018 at 1:06 am
Why was it name the Archbishop? Sounds like there’s a story behind this.
May 30, 2018 at 11:17 am
You know, you’d think there would be a story behind the name. But there isn’t. Here is its genesis, in a fourteen-year-old email, with irrelevant parts redacted.
—
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 18:41:51 -0700
From: Matt Wedel
To: Mike Taylor
Subject: Re: Brachiosaurs, Mostly (Well, Duh!) (Was: [StephanPickering@cs.com:
Re: evolutionary morphology of the neck system in some extant Theropoda])
Hey, I spent almost six months doing that with Sauroposeidon. I think it builds character and helps you bond with the animal.
Good start. Sketching what you don’t see is a terrible waste of time, if only because there’s so much more to draw.
[…]
In this case, I think everyone on the planet other than you, me, and Jack McIntosh has forgotten that the BMNH Tendaguru material exists. Possibly with good reason, since I haven’t ever seen this material and I’m not certain how much they have or what shape it’s in. But in any case, you should have free reign.
As for nicknames . . . what if we veered away from obvious transformations like “Angloposeidon” and “Anglotitan” and went for a cheeky non-sequitur like “the Archbishop.” I just think it would be very funny to get a message from you saying, “Well, I spent my first afternoon with the Archbishop, and the resulting photos and sketches are attached.”
Hmm, honestly, I had no idea how inappropriate that would sound until I wrote it. Now I’m all out of sorts and I’m afraid I’ll be no more help on this score today.
—
So now you know!
May 30, 2018 at 7:24 pm
LMAO! Thanks for sharing the story. At least you didn’t drunk name a dinosaur Mojoceratops. Heard the paleontologists were intoxicated when they named it.
June 19, 2018 at 6:42 am
Mike – in the SVPCA slides for the Archbishop, you note there are 3 teeth, doubtfully associated with the specimen. Was the association doubted by Migeod himself or someone else, and are the teeth in the NHM collections? I’ve been looking at Tendaguru sauropod dentitions, it would be neat if these could be located/compared too…
June 19, 2018 at 8:53 am
Hi, Ian. Here’s what Migeod (1931), which is basically the only publication to describe the specimen at all, says (page 90):
I have never come across these teeth during my adventures in the NHMUK collections; but then I admit I have never particularly paid attention to teeth. If you should happen across them, that would be great news.
From Migeod’s description, you can see that even he himself found the assignment of the large tooth dubious, but seems to have accepted the two smaller teeth without question. But since the large one was most likely shed by a scavenging theropod, it doesn’t seem unlikely that the same may also have been true of the small ones. “Pointed, with a slightly serrated inner edge” is a rather perfunctory description of the tooth — does that sound to you like it could be that of a brachiosaur?
June 20, 2018 at 6:12 am
Excellent, thanks Mike! I’ll contact the NHM and see if they have any knowledge of the teeth.
The description potentially could be of a brachiosaur tooth – unworn teeth of Giraffatitan do have a pointed tip, and certainly smaller unworn ones I’ve seen do have denticles/serrations on one edge only. 6+1/2 inches is big even if it includes the roots though, and I don’t remember seeing the denticles on the largest teeth, though most are already fairly worn.
In Giraffatitan there is also a pretty big size difference between e.g. the largest premaxillary teeth, and the smallest dentary and maxillary teeth from the rear of the jaw. And a smaller difference in shape from front to back toothrow positions, so without seeing them nothing in the description rules out the smaller ones belonging to the same individual.
Of course one or more could be obviously theropod teeth too…
June 20, 2018 at 7:48 am
Thanks, Ian, I appreciate your getting involved :-)
June 20, 2018 at 8:13 pm
Mike, if you end up as an author on a tooth paper, I am going to mock you without end.
June 20, 2018 at 8:18 pm
I might be the author of a tooth paragraph one day, if I get enough help. But beyond that, I think you can rest easy.
June 25, 2018 at 8:31 am
Corruption starts with small steps…
(There is a Giraffatitan-like tooth at the NHM, Paul Barrett is looking whether it belongs to the specimen, and if any other teeth can be found)
July 6, 2018 at 8:59 am
[…] of course I really really need to get the Archbishop paper […]
December 31, 2018 at 3:01 pm
[…] vertebrae again and went to Utah for the first of several stints of fieldwork this year. Mike started work on the Archbishop (allegedly), and blogged about Argentinosaurus poop. My series on bird neural […]
June 13, 2019 at 6:49 pm
[…] Anyway, for reasons that have never been very clear, Jensen concluded that the remains represented not one, not two, but three gigantic new genera: a diplodocid, which he named “Supersaurus”; a brachiosaurid, which he named “Ultrasaurus”; and an unidentifiable which he named “Dystylosaurus”. All these names were informal at this point, like “Angloposeidon” and “The Archbishop”. […]
October 14, 2020 at 3:59 pm
[…] in 2018 I did something significant, which was to actually start writing the paper in public. Now anyone can follow the progress of the project — and it’s progressing. The manuscript […]
January 24, 2022 at 10:19 am
[…] 2022) that’s been longer in gestation than most (although, yes, all right, not as long as the Archbishop). I guess the first seeds were sown almost a full decade ago when I posted How long was the neck of […]
October 3, 2022 at 8:43 am
[…] — but it was our first time writing a joint paper in the open (Mike had started writing the Archbishop description in the open a few months earlier). It was also the last, or at least the most recent, manuscript […]