The stupidest head
August 21, 2019
Left: Homo sapiens, head, neck and upper trunk in right lateral view (unprepared specimen). Right: Camarasaurus sp., skull in left lateral view. Photograph at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. 2016.
Well, that didn’t take long. Earlier today, my subterranean hacker collective released thousands of emails exchanged by Mike Taylor and Brian Engh, which touched on numerous issues of national and global security. Of most interest to SV-POW! readers will be this correspondence from just a few hours ago:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Mike: Artwork attached. [Scroll down to see Mike’s submission.–MJW]
Brian: NAILED IT.
I haven’t been responding here to entrants but i feel pretty safe calling this one the winner already. Thank you for submitting. We can now sit back and laugh as all the other feeble entrants squabble knowing that you’ve already got this one in the bag.
Mike: Thanks, Brian. I hesitated before submitting this, thinking it might not be fair to up-and-coming artists who need the win more than I do; but in the end, I decided that was patronising. If they’re going to win the prize, they have to beat me on merit. You never know: it could happen.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
So, it looks like Brian has made his decision and the contest is effectively over. Although Mike says that someone else winning the contest “could happen”, Brian’s already signaled his intention to “laugh as all the other feeble entrants squabble”, which hardly sounds like he’s going to be giving anyone else a fair shake.
In Brian’s defense, the art that Mike submitted is glorious:
So complex and subtle is this work, so playful in its blending of traditional and cutting-edge thinking, so packed with detail, life history, and sheer emotion, that I feel certain that it will usher in a new era of paleoart as the dominant aesthetic expression on this planet.
Still, I don’t see how #TheSummonENGH2018 is going to survive the inevitable scandal of having a winner secretly chosen on the second day of the contest. I’m torn between towering admiration for my friends and colleagues, and fear for the rifts this may cause in the paleoart community.
I’ve reached out to representatives of both Mike and Brian for comment, and I’ll keep you updated on this developing story as more information becomes available.
My good friend, frequent collaborator, and fellow adventurer Brian Engh has won the John J. Lanzendorf Paleoart Prize for 2D paleoart (there are also categories for 3D paleoart and scientific illustration). He’s in august company; previous Lanzendorf winners include luminaries like John Gurche, Michael Skrepnick, Mark Hallett, Todd Marshall, and Julius Csotonyi (among many others–see the complete list of previous winners here). Naturally I’m happy as heck for Brian, and immensely proud of him, not only for the award, but also for what he’s doing now. Usually when we say “pay it forward” we mean metaphorically, but Brian is literally going to pay it forward. He’s created his own paleoart contest, the SummonENGH 2018, and he will award half of his October Patreon take to the winner.
He lays out the rules on his blog and in this video:
There’s a Facebook group, here, and a hashtag: #TheSummonEngh2018 (Facebook, Twitter).
Why do I think this is cool? It’s no exaggeration to say that I am a paleontologist today because I was exposed to mind-bending paleoart from a young age. Brian cares about paleoart–he cares about making better paleoart, himself, and he cares about making paleoart better, for everyone. And now he’s putting his money where his mouth his and doing something to hopefully bring more visibility to the paleoart community, and help move the field forward. That’s admirable, and I’m happy to support the cause.
Also, when we visited the Aquilops display at Dinosaur Journey this summer, we were lucky enough to capture this single frame showing a 100% real paleo-energy discharge. I definitely felt something at the time, but I didn’t know the full extent of what had happened until Brian sorted through our photos after the trip. Apparently this was all fated to happen–some kind of transdimensional chronoparticle emission linking past and future–and who am I to argue with fate?
Now, go summon monsters!
Imposter syndrome revisited
September 13, 2018
My wife Fiona is a musician and composer, and she’s giving a talk at this year’s TetZooCon on “Music for Wildlife Documentaries – A Composer’s Perspective”. (By the way, it looks like some tickets are still available: if you live near or in striking distance of London, you should definitely go! Get your tickets here.)
With less than four weeks to go, she’s starting to get nervous — to feel that she doesn’t know enough about wildlife to talk to the famously knowledgeable and attractive TetZooCon audience. In other words, it’s a classic case of our old friend imposter syndrome.
Wanting to reassure her about how common this is, I posted a Twitter poll:
Question for academics, including grad-students.
(Please RT for better coverage.)Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
(And feel free to leave comments with more detail.)
Here are the results at the end of the 24-hour voting period:
Based on a sample of nearly 200 academics, just one in 25 claims not have experienced imposter syndrome; nearly two thirds feel it all the time.
The comments are worth reading, too. For example, Konrad Förstner responded:
Constantly. I would not be astonished if at some point a person from the administration knocks at my door and tells me that my work was just occupational therapy to keep me busy but that my healthcare insurance will not pay this any longer.
What does this mean? Only this: you are not alone. Outside of a tiny proportion of people, everyone else you know and work with sometimes feels that way. Most of them always feel that way. And yet, think about the work they do. It’s pretty good, isn’t it? Despite how they feel? From the outside, you can see that they’re not imposters.
Guess what? They can see that you‘re not an imposter, either.
Martin Grötschel’s opening address to the APE 2018 conference (Academic Publishing in Europe)
March 28, 2018
The opening remarks by the hosts of conferences are usually highly forgettable, a courtesy platform offered to a high-ranking academic who has nothing to say about the conference’s subject. NOT THIS TIME!
This is the opening address of APE 2018, the Academic Publishing in Europe conference. The remarks are by Martin Grötschel, who as well as being president of the host institution, the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, is a 25-year veteran of open-access campaigning. and a member of the German DEAL negotiating team.
Here are some choice quotes:
1m50s: “I have always been aware of the significant imbalance and the fundamental divisions of the academic publication market. Being in the DEAL negotiation team, this became even more apparent …”
2m04s: “On the side of the scientists there is an atomistic market where, up to now and unfortunately, many of the actors play without having any clue about the economic consequences of their activities.”
2m22s: “In Germany and a few other countries where buyer alliances have been organised, they are, as expected, immediately accused of forming monopolies and they are taken to court — fortunately, without success, and with the result of strengthening the alliances.”
2m38s: “On the publishers’ side there is a very small number of huge publication enterprises with very smart marketing people. They totally dominate the market, produce grotesque profits, and amazingly manage to pretend to be the Good Samaritans of the sciences.”
2m27s: “And there are the tiny [publishers …] tentatively observed by many delegates of the big players, who are letting them play the game, ready to swallow them if an opportunity comes up.”
3m18s: “When you, the small publishers, discuss with the representatives of the big guys, these are most likely very friendly to you. But […] when it comes to discussing system changes, when the arguments get tight, the smiles disappear and the greed begins to gleam.”
3m42s: “You will hear in words, and not implicitly, that the small academic publishers are considered to be just round-off errors, tolerated for another while, irrelevant for the world-wide scientific publishing market, and having no influence at all.”
4m00s: “One big publisher stated: if your country stops subscribing to our journals, science in your country will be set back significantly. I responded […] it is interesting to hear such a threat from a producer of envelopes who does not have any idea of the contents.”
4m39s: “Will the small publishers side with the intentions of the scholars? Or will you try to copy the move towards becoming a packaging industry that exploits the volunteer work of scientists and results financed by public funding?”
5m55: “I do know, though, that the major publishers are verbally agreeing [to low-cost Gold #OpenAccess] , but not acting in this direction all, simply to maintain their huge profit margins.”
6m06s: “In a market economy, no-one can argue against profit maximisation [of barrier-based scholarly publishers]. But one is also allowed to act against it. The danger may be really disruptive, instead of smooth moves in the development of the academic publishing market.”
6:42: “You may not have enjoyed my somewhat unusual words of welcome, but I do hope that you enjoy this year’s APE conference.”
It’s just beautiful to hear someone in such a senior position, given such a platform, using it say so very clearly what we’re all thinking. (And as a side-note: I’m constantly amazed that so many advocates are so clear, emphatic and rhetorically powerful in their second, or sometimes third, language. Humbling.)
As RLUK’s David Prosser noted: “I bet this wasn’t what the conference organisers were expecting. A fabulous, hard-hitting polemic on big publishers #OA.”
Note. This post is adapted from a thread of tweets that I posted excerpting the video.
How crazy are the cervicals of Mendozasaurus?
February 1, 2018
There’s a new paper out, describing the Argentinian titanosaur Mendozasaurus in detail (Gonzalez Riga et al. 2018): 46 pages of multi-view photos, tables of measurement, and careful, detailed description and discussion. But here’s what leapt out at me when I skimmed the paper:
Gonzalez Riga et al. (2018: figure 6). Mendozasaurus neguyelap cervical vertebra (IANIGLA-PV 076/1) in (A) anterior, (B) left lateral, (C) posterior, (D) right lateral, (E) ventral and (F) dorsal views. Scale bar = 150 mm. Sorry it’s monochrome, but that’s how it appears in the paper.
Just look at that thing. It’s ridiculous. In our 2013 PeerJ paper “Why Giraffes have Short Necks” (Taylor and Wedel 2013), we included a “freak gallery” as figure 7: five very different sauropod cervicals:
Taylor and Wedel (2013: figure 7). Disparity of sauropod cervical vertebrae. 1, Apatosaurus “laticollis” Marsh, 1879b holotype YPM 1861, cervical ?13, now referred to Apatosaurus ajax (see McIntosh, 1995), in posterior and left lateral views, after Ostrom & McIntosh (1966, plate 15); the portion reconstructed in plaster (Barbour, 1890, figure 1) is grayed out in posterior view; lateral view reconstructed after Apatosaurus louisae (Gilmore, 1936, plate XXIV). 2, “Brontosaurus excelsus” Marsh, 1879a holotype YPM 1980, cervical 8, now referred to Apatosaurus excelsus (see Riggs, 1903), in anterior and left lateral views, after Ostrom & McIntosh (1966, plate 12); lateral view reconstructed after Apatosaurus louisae (Gilmore, 1936, plate XXIV). 3, “Titanosaurus” colberti Jain & Bandyopadhyay, 1997 holotype ISIR 335/2, mid-cervical vertebra, now referred to Isisaurus (See Wilson & Upchurch, 2003), in posterior and left lateral views, after Jain & Bandyopadhyay (1997, figure 4). 4, “Brachiosaurus” brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181, cervical 8, now referred to Giraffatitan (see Taylor, 2009), in posterior and left lateral views, modified from Janensch (1950, figures 43–46). 5, Erketu ellisoni holotype IGM 100/1803, cervical 4 in anterior and left lateral views, modified from Ksepka & Norell (2006, figures 5a–d).
But this Mendozasaurus vertebra is crazier than any of them, with its tiny centrum, its huge, broad but anteroposteriorly flattened neural spine, and its pronounced lSPRLs.
I just don’t know what to make of this, and neither does Matt. And part of the reason for this may be that neither of us has had that much to do with titanosaurs. As Matt said in email, “Those weird ballooned-up neural spines in titanosaurs kind of freak me out.” And I could not agree more.
And of course as sauropodologists, we really should familiarise ourselves with titanosaurs. There are a lot of them, and they account for a lot of sauropod evolution. Someone recently made the point, either in an SV-POW! comment or on Facebook, that titanosaurs may be to sauropods what monkeys and apes are to primates: a subclade that is way more diverse than the rest of the clade put together.
It’s starting to look like an extreme historical accident that Camarasaurus, diplodocines and brachiosaurids — all temporally and/or geographically restricted groups — were the first well-known sauropods, and for decades defined our notion of what sauropods were like. Meanwhile, the much more widespread and long-surviving rebbachisaurs and titanosaurs were poorly understood until really the last 25 years or so. For the first century of sauropodology, our ideas about sauropods were driven by weird, comparatively short-lived outliers.
That our appreciation of titanosaur diversity has come so late says something about how our discovery of the natural world is more to do with geopolitics and the quirks of exploration than what’s actually out there. Sauropods were defined by diplodocids for so long because that’s what happened to be in the ground in the exposed rocks of North America, and that’s where the well-funded museums and expeditions were.
We at SV-POW! towers have often wondered how different our idea of what dinosaurs even were would be if the Liaoning deposits had been available to Buckland, Mantell, and Owen. It seems like that unavoidable that, if they’d first become familiar with feathered but osteologically aberrant (by modern standards) birds, one of two things would have happened. Either they would either have never coined the term “Dinosauria” at all, recognizing that Megalosaurus (and later Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus) were just big versions of their little feathered ur-birds. Or they would have included Dinosauria as a primitive subclass of Aves.
References
- González Riga, Bernardo J., Philip D. Mannion, Stephen F. Poropat, Leonardo D. Ortiz David and Juan Pedro Coria. 2018. Osteology of the Late Cretaceous Argentinean sauropod dinosaur Mendozasaurus neguyelap: implications for basal titanosaur relationships. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 46 pages, 28 figures. doi:10.1093/zoolinnean/zlx103
- Taylor, Michael P., and Mathew J. Wedel. 2013. Why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks. PeerJ 1:e36. 41 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables. doi:10.7717/peerj.36
Note. This post contains material from all three of us (Darren included), harvested from an email conversation.
The giant brachiosaur cervical of Arches National Park
December 31, 2017
As Matt recently noted, we both have a ton of photos from various expeditions that we’ve never got around to posting — not to mention a ton of specimens that we’ve seen but never got around to working on. Here is one of the most exciting:
As you can see, this is a massive cervical vertebra from a sauropod, probably a brachiosaurid, eroding right out of the ground. It’s in an undisclosed location in the Arches National Park, which we visited in May 2016. The neural arch is in amazingly good shape, though the end of the right prezygapophysis has broken off and been displaced slightly upwards. The postzygapophysesal facet is difficult to make out. Here’s a rough-and-ready interpretive drawing to get you oriented, with the completely missing parts speculatively sketched in light grey. (We don’t know how much more of this vertebra might be preserved underground.)
Apart from its size, the most striking thing about this vertebra is how very pneumatic it is — corroborating the long-standing hypothesis that pneumaticity tends to be positively allometric. If you compare with the much-loved 8th cervical vertebra of the Giraffatitan brancai paralectotype MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN SII), you can see similar “sculpted” features on the arch of that vertebra, but they are much less developed and ramified:
(This photo is in of course in left dorsolateral view, whereas the aspect of the Arches vertebra available to us is right lateral, and slightly ventral of true lateral.)
How big is the Arches vertebra? Stupidly, we didn’t have measuring equipment with us when we were visiting the park, so we don’t have an exact figure. But we can get some idea by extrapolating from the photo above. The stretched-out arm-span of an adult man is close to his height. I’m 1.8 m tall, so allowing for the downward slope of my arms, we might guess that the fingertip-to-fingertip measurement is about 1.7 m. If that’s right, measuring off the photo, the preserved portion of the vertebra is nearly twice that, at 3.3 m — and the complete length must have been somewhat longer, as the back end of the centrum is completely missing. Something in the region of 3.6 m might not be too far out. But as always, note that these are extremely speculative figures based on multiple layers of approximation.
We really need to get back out there, measure that thing properly, and of course try to find a way to have it excavated.
Heaven protect us from a “UK National Licence”
April 1, 2015
This abomination — a proposal for a “UK National Licence” for open-access papers, making them available only in the UK, is not an April Fool joke. It’s a serious proposal, put forward by HEPI, the Higher Education Policy Institute, which styles itself “the UK’s only independent think tank devoted to higher education” (though I note without comment that they routinely partner with Elsevier).
It’s desperately disappointing that British academics should propose something as small-minded and xenophobic as this, which I can only refer to as the UKIP Licence. Let’s start counting some of the ways this is a terrible, terrible idea.
1. It’s not open access by any existing definition of the term. For example, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which first coined the term, describes OA as “free availability on the public internet” (i.e. not a subnet), “permitting any users” (i.e. not just British users) “without financial, legal, or technical barriers” (i.e. no filtering on IP addresses).
2. It positions the UK as the one country in the world willing to poison the open-access well, prepared to destroy value for 199 countries in the hope of increasing it for one. This makes it a classic prisoner’s-dilemma “defect” strategy — an approach which has been shown by multi-algorithm tournaments to reliably downgrade the defector’s outcome.
3. British people gain more when 200 countries are working on advances in health, education, etc., than when only one is. This tiny-minded licence, if adopted, would hobble British innovation, health and education, as well as that of the rest of the world.
4. Most important, it’s mean. We have to be better than this. Publishing research about diseases that kill millions in third-world countries, then preventing scientists in those countries from reading that research is not just stupid, it’s despicable. It’s hard to imagine behaviour more unrepresentative of the values that we like to imagine the UK embodies.
Oh, and 5. it won’t work, of course. Barring access by IP address is a notoriously flawed approach, which hides content from Brits abroad while allowing access to anyone anywhere who knows how to use a Web proxy.
Putting it all together, this is about the most misguided proposal imaginable. I would like to see its authors, both of them senior at UCL, withdraw it with all possible haste, and with an appropriate apology.
[I would have left this comment on HEPI’s blog-post announcing their proposal, but comments are turned off — perhaps not surprisingly. I did leave a version of it on the Times Higher Education article about this.]
Update the next day: see also David Kernohan’s post A local licence for Henbury.
Update 9th April: this post, lightly modified, is published as a letter in today’s Times Higher Education. More importantly, you should all go and read Stephen Curry’s much more dispassionate, but equally critical, analysis of the National Licence proposal.
Dinosaur National Monument quarry map
February 25, 2015
The Carnegie Quarry, at Dinosaur National Monument, near Jensen, Utah, is arguably the most impressive dinosaur-fossil exhibit anywhere in the world — a covered, semi-excavated quarry that’s absolutely packed with big dinosaur fossils.
It’s also notoriously difficult to photograph: too big to fit into a single photo, and with poor contrast between the bones and matrix. This is the best picture I’ve found of part of it (from here) …
… although this one (from here) conveys the scale better:
It’s one of the great sadnesses of my life that I’ve yet to visit DNM.
The quarry is historically important: discovered by Earl Douglass in 1909, it yielded among other specimens CM 3018, the holotype of Apatosaurus louisae and the principle subject of Gilmore’s (1936) monograph.
I’ve only recently become aware (thanks, Matt!) of Ken Carpenter’s (2013) detailed treatment of the history, sedimentology and taphonomy of the quarry — an important work that deserves to be widely read. Pages 10-14 are largely taken up with parts A-E of figure 10 — a big multi-page map of the quarry, showing the location of its most important specimens. Unfortunately, the five sections of this figure are all at slightly different scales in the PDF. I’ve rescaled them and pasted them together into a single big (4387 × 1210) image which I reproduce here:
Carpenter (2013:fig 10): map of the Carnegie quarry, composited from parts A-E.
Enjoy!
Update (six hours later)
I just heard from Ken Carpenter, who created the illustration. He has kindly sent me the full-resolution version — which is four times as big as the one I extracted from the PDF — and gave me permission to post it here on SV-POW! under the CC By licence. So here it is!
Thanks, Ken!
Second update (12 March 2015)
Over on the Extinct Monsters blog, Ben Miller has published The Carnegie Quarry Diaspora. It’s a beautiful illustrated survey of some of the most important specimens to have come out of this quarry, including no fewer than seven important sauropod individuals.
References
- Carpenter, Kenneth. 2013. History, sedimentology, and taphonomy of the Carnegie Quarry, Dinosaur National Monument, Utah. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 81(3):153-232.
- Gilmore, C. W. 1936. Osteology of Apatosaurus with special reference to specimens in the Carnegie Museum. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum 11: 175-300.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 