Now that Matt and I have blogged various thoughts about how to orient vertebra (part 1, part 2, relevant digression 1, relevant digression 2, part 3) and presented a talk on the subject at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress, it’s time for us to strike while the iron is hot and write the paper.

Figure A. NHMUK PV R2095, the holotype dorsal vertebra of Xenoposiedon proneneukos in left lateral view. A. In the canonical orientation that has been used in illustrations in published papers (Taylor and Naish 2007, Taylor 2018b, in blog-posts and on posters and mugs. B. Rotated 15° “backwards” (i.e. clockwise, with the dorsal portion displaced caudally), yielding a sub-vertical anterior margin in accordance the recommendation of Mannion (2018b). In both parts, the blue line indicates the horizontal axis, the green line indicates the vertical axis, and the red line indicates the slope of the neural arch as in Taylor (2018b: figure 3B, part 2). In part A, the slope (i.e. the angle between the red and green lines) is 35°; in part B, it is 20°.

We’re doing it totally in the open, on GitHub. You can always see the most recent version of the manuscript at https://github.com/MikeTaylor/palaeo-vo/blob/master/vo-manuscript.md and you can also review the history of its composition if you like — from trivial changes like substituting a true em-dash for a double hyphen, to significant additions like writing the introduction.

More than that, you can contribute! If you think there’s a mistake, or something missing that should be included, or if you just have a suggestion, you can file an issue on the project’s bug-tracker. If you’re feeling confident, you can go further and directly edit the manuscript. The result will be a tracked change that we’ll be notified of, and which we can accept into, or reject from, the master copy.

We hope, by making all this visible online, to demythologise the process of writing a paper. In a sense, there is no magic to it: you just start writing, do a section at a time, revise as you go, and eventually you’re done. It’s much like writing anything else. (Doing the referencing can make it much slower than regular writing, though!)

By the way, you may wonder why the illustration above is “Figure A” rather than “Figure 1”. In all my in-progress manuscripts, I just assign letters to each illustration as I add it, not worrying about ordering. Only when the manuscript is ready to be submitted do I take the order that the illustrations occur in (A, D, G, H, B, I, E, F, for example, with C having been dropped along the way) and replace them with consecutive numbers. So I save myself a lot of tedious and error-prone renumbering every time that, in the process of composition, I insert an illustration anywhere before the last existing one. This is really helpful when there are a lot of illustrations — as there tend to be in our papers, since they’re all in online-only open-access venues with no arbitrary limits. For example, our four co-authored papers from 2013 had a total of 69 illustrations (11 in Taylor and Wedel 2013a, 25 in Wedel and Taylor 2013a, 23 in Taylor and Wedel 2013b and 10 in Wedel and Taylor 2013b).

References

• Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013a. Why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks. PeerJ 1:e36. doi: 10.7717/peerj.36
• Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013b. The effect of intervertebral cartilage on neutral posture and range of motion in the necks of sauropod dinosaurs. PLOS ONE 8(10):e78214. 17 pages. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078214
• Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2013a. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications. PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 10(1):1-34.
• Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor 2013b. Caudal pneumaticity and pneumatic hiatuses in the sauropod dinosaurs Giraffatitan and Apatosaurus. PLOS ONE 8(10):e78213. 14 pages. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078213