One more SVP book signing
October 29, 2016
We keep selling out of books, which is a nice problem to have, but still a problem for people who want books. So we’re getting a final shipment this morning, and Mark Hallett and I will be at the JHUP booth signing books, starting at 12:15 and going until we run out of either customers or books.
Many, many thanks to everyone who has gotten a book or just stopped by to chat. We’re humbled by the great response we’ve gotten.
Parting question: someone on Facebook asked if we could sign and mail bookplates for folks who can’t get to our signings. I’m cool with that, just curious about how much interest there might be. Let me know in the comments.
Rebbachisaurus gets a proper description
July 8, 2015
This just in: Wilson and Allain’s (2015) redescription of Rebbachisaurus garasbae, the type and only true species of Rebbachisaurus!
Wilson and Allain (2015:figure 3). Holotype of R. garasbae. Dorsal vertebra (MNHN-MRS 1958) in anterior (A), right lateral (B), posterior (C), and dorsal cross-sectional (D) views. Anterior faces top in D. Scale bar equals 20 cm.
Here we see the much-admire’d dorsal vertebra that’s been on display for some time in the French National History Museum, and which we’ve seen here previously:
Jeff Wilson (left) and Ronan Allain (right), with dorsal vertebra of Rebbachisaurus.
(It’s a shame that photo didn’t make it into the paper, really.)
There’s good and bad news here. The good news is obvious: this is a really important specimen, the type of a whole sauropod family, and it’s been in dire need of redescription because Lavocat’s (1954) paper did a bit of a drive-by on it. It’s great that there’s a proper description at last.
The bad news is, you can’t read it — at least, not unless you’re a JVP subscriber or at a wealthy university. It’s been a while, I think, since we wrote about a non-open access paper here at SV-POW!, and it’s funny how little we seem to have missed them. A lot of the action in vertebrate palaeo, especially for dinosaurs, seems to have moved to open access journals — especially PLOS ONE and PeerJ, but also of course the venerable Palaeontologia Electronica.
Wilson and Allain (2015:figure 13). Holotype of R. garasbae. Right scapula (MNHN-MRS 1957) in medial (A) and lateral (B) views. Abbreviations: ac fo, acromial fossa; ac no, acromial notch; ac ri, acromial ridge; ss, origin of M. subscapularis. Inference of muscle attachment sites is based on comparisons with crocodile pectoral musculature (Meers, 2003). Reconstruction of distal margin of blade based on photograph of scapula in situ (Fig. 2A). Scale bar equals 20 cm.
It’s no secret that I am done with JVP (and Palaeontology, and the Journal of Paleontology, not that I’ve ever had a paper in that last one) until they become fully open access journals — and no, a hybrid OA option doesn’t cut it. I’m glad to have that notch on my bedpost, but I don’t feel any need to go back there.
But what I’d forgotten, or perhaps never really registered, is how terribly old-fashioned JVP papers look. No-one is disputing the journal’s high editorial standards or the importance of the work published there; but their tiny fonts, cumbersome two-column layout, and low-resolution black-and-white figures located bizarrely distant from the relevant text all make it feel like a journal badly in need of an overhaul for the 21st Century. I’m not sure what plans the Society has (it’s been years since I was a member) but I’d love to see JVP reinvented as a full-colour open-access journal, primarily online with printed copies only for those who want to pay for them. We’ll see.
Wilson and Allain (2015:figure 5). Holotype of R. garasbae. Computed tomography (CT) scans of the dorsal vertebra (MNHN-MRS 1958). A–E, transverse sections; F– G, frontal sections. Abbreviations: acpl, anterior centroparapophyseal lamina; cpol, centropostzygapophyseal lamina; cprf, centroprezygapophyseal fossa; ct, cotyle; lat. spol, lateral spinopostzygapophyseal lamina; med. cprl, medial centroprezygapophyseal lamina; med. spol; medial spinopostzygapophyseal lamina; nc, neural canal; pc, pleurocoel; pcdl, posterior centrodiapophyseal lamina; podl, postzygodiapophyseal lamina; posl, postspinal lamina; poz, postzygapophysis; prpl, prezygoparapophyseal lamina; prsl, prespinal lamina; prz, prezygapophysis; sc, subcamerae; spdl, spinodiapophyseal lamina; se, septum; tpol, intrapostzygapophyseal lamina. Scale bar equals 10 cm for CT images.
It’s great that Wilson and Allain had the Rebbachisaurus vertebrae CT-scanned, showing just how crazily lightly they are built: see figure 13, especially part A, above. But I have to admit to finding it strange that a 34-page paper that deals in detail with sauropod pneumaticity doesn’t cite anything by either Brooks Britt or our own Matt Wedel — surely the two people who have done the most important work in this area, certainly the most foundational work.
My 2009 paper (Taylor 2009, duh) does get a mention — not, this time, to disagree with me on the generic separation of Giraffatitan from Brachiosaurus, to but to acknowledge its recognition of the spinoparapophyseal lamina (SPPL) that occurs in D?8 of the Giraffatitan paralectotype MB.R.2181 (formerly HMN SII) and has now been recognised also in Rebbachisaurus.
Anyway, this is an important new paper, very well illustrated (apart from the annoyingly avoidable lack of colour) and with typically careful and exhaustive descriptions. It’s going to be very helpful, and it’s reawakened an idea that I once had …
… but that’s for another time.
References
- Lavocat, R. 1954. Sur les Dinosauriens du continental intercalaire des Kem-Kem de la Daoura. [On the dinosaurs of the Continental Intercalaire of the Kem Kem of the Daoura]. Comptes Rendus 19th International Geological Congress 1952(1):65-68.
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009a. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
- Wilson, Jeffrey A., and Ronan Allain. 2015. Osteology of Rebbachisaurus garasbae Lavocat, 1954, a diplodocoid (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the early Late Cretaceous–aged Kem Kem beds of southeastern Morocco. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 35(4):e1000701. doi:10.1080/02724634.2014.1000701
Why no PDF of the Smith and Benson Rhomaleosaurus monograph? An open letter to the Palaeontographical Society
December 4, 2014
I have sent this message to David Loydell and Beris Cox, the editors of the Palaeontographical Society’s monograph series. (Update: and to Steve Donovan, secretary of the society.)
Dear Palaeontographical Society,
I was delighted to see that Adam Smith and Roger Benson’s new monograph on the plesiosaur Rhomaleosaurus thorntoni is now out, as shown on Adam’s publications page. This is a long-awaited work on an important specimen.
But when I asked Adam to send me a copy of the PDF, I was surprised to find that he doesn’t have one, and doesn’t expect to be given one. Is this correct?
If so, can you please explain the society’s reasoning?
I would like to publish your response on my blog, https://svpow.com/, as others will also be interested in this. May I please have your permission to do so?
Many thanks,
Dr. Michael P. Taylor
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol
Bristol BS8 1RJ
Reference
Smith A.S. and Benson R.B.J. 2014. Osteology of Rhomaleosaurus thorntoni (Sauropterygia: Rhomaleosauridae) from the Lower Jurassic (Toarcian) of Northamptonshire, England. Monograph of the Palaeontographical Society 168(642):1–40 and plates 1–35.
Update 1 (two hours later)
David Loydell is no longer an editor for the Monographs of the Palaeontographical Society. Instead, I am writing to Steve Donovan, Secretary of the Palaeontographical Society.
Is my new sauropod-neck cartilage paper “published”?
November 6, 2014
In a comment on the last post, Mark Robinson asked an important question:
You linked to the preprint of your The neck of Barosaurus was not only longer but also wider than those of Diplodocus and other diplodocines submission – does this mean that it has not yet been formally published?
As so often in these discussions, it depends what we mean by our terms. The Barosaurus paper, like this one on neck cartilage, is “published” in the sense that it’s been released to the public, and has a stable home at a well known location maintained by a reputable journal. It’s open for public comment, and can be cited in other publications. (I notice that it’s been cited in Wikipedia). It’s been made public, which after all is the root meaning of the term “publish”.
On the other hand, it’s not yet “published” in the sense of having been through a pre-publication peer-review process, and perhaps more importantly it’s not yet been made available via other channels such as PubMed Central — so, unlike say our previous PeerJ paper on sauropod neck anatomy, it would in some sense go away if PeerJ folded or were acquired by a hostile entity. But then the practical truth is of course that we’d just make it directly available here on SV-POW!, where any search would find it.
In short, the definition of what it means for a paper to be “published” is rather fluid, and is presently in the process of drifting. More than that, conventions vary hugely between fields. In maths and astronomy, posting a preprint on arXiv (their equivalent of PeerJ Preprints, roughly) pretty much is publication. No-one in those fields would dream of not citing a paper that had been published in that way, and reputations in those fields are made on the basis of arXiv preprints. [Note: I was mistaken about this, or at least oversimplified. See David Roberts’ and Michael Richmond’s comments below.]
Maybe the most practical question to ask about the published-ness or otherwise of a paper is, how does it affect the author’s job prospects? When it comes to evaluation by a job-search panel, or a promotion committee, or a tenure board, what counts? And that is a very hard question to answer, as it depends largely on the institution in question, the individuals on the committee, and the particular academic field. My gut feeling is that if I were looking for a job in palaeo, the Barosaurus preprint and this cartilage paper would both count for very little, if anything. But, candidly, I consider that a bug in evaluation methods, not a problem with pre-printing per se. But then again, it’s very easy for me to say that, as I’m in the privileged position of not needing to look for a job in palaeo.
For Matt and me, at least as things stand right now, we do feel that we have unfinished business with these papers. In their present state, they represent real work and a real (if small) advance in the field; but we don’t feel that our work here is done. That’s why I submitted the cartilage paper for peer-review at the same time as posting it as a preprint (it’s great that PeerJ lets you do both together); and it’s why one of Matt’s jobs in the very near future will be getting the Barosaurus revised in accordance with the very helpful reviews that we received, and then also submitted for peer-review. We do still want that “we went through review” badge on our work (without believing it means more than it really does) and the archiving in PubMed Central and CLOCKSS, and the removal of any reason for anyone to be unsure whether those papers “really count”.
But I don’t know whether in ten years, or even five, our attitude will be the same. After all, it changed long ago in maths and astronomy, where — glory be! — papers are judged primarily on their content rather than on where they end up published.
SO close
August 21, 2014
I have often argued that given their long hindlimbs, massive tail-bases, and posteriorly-located centers of mass, diplodocids were basically bipeds whose forelimbs happened to reach the ground. I decided to see what that might look like.
Okay, now obviously I know that there are no trackways showing sauropods actually getting around like this. It’s just a thought experiment. But given how close the center of mass of Diplodocus is to the acetabulum, I’ll bet that this pose was achievable in life. If diplodocids had just pushed the CM a few cm farther back, they might have dispensed with forelimbs entirely, or done something different with them, like re-evolved grasping hands.
Image modified from Gilmore (1932: plate 6). Here’s a horizontal-necked bipedal Diplodocus and the original pose:
UPDATE the next day: I had forgotten that Niroot had already done a bipedal Apatosaurus, and a much more convincing one than mine. Go see it.
UPDATE the next week: Well, heck. Looks like the primary value of this post was so that people would remind me of all the other places the same idea has already been covered better. As you can see from the comment thread, Mike blogged about this at the WWD site, Scott Hartman drew it, and Heinrich Mallison showed that it was plausible. Sheesh, I suck.
Reference
- Gilmore, C. W. 1932. On a newly mounted skeleton of Diplodocus in the United States National Museum. Proceedings of the United States National Museum 81, 1-21.
I’m gathering all seven parts of Tutorial 19 (“Open Access definitions and clarifications”) in one place for easy reference. Here they are:
- Part 1: what actually is Open Access?
- Part 2: Gold and Green
- Part 3: a brief note on Platinum/Diamond
- Part 4: licences
- Part 5: copyright
- Part 6: open access that comes and goes
- Part 7: why your open-access journal should use the CC By licence
And see also this more recent post:
Enjoy!
All I want to do in this post is make people aware that there is a difference between these two things, and occasionally that affects those of us who work in natural history.
In one of his books or essays, Stephen Jay Gould made the point that in natural history we are usually not dealing with whether phenomena are possible or not, but rather trying to determine their frequency. If we find that in a particular population of quail most of the birds eat ants but some avoid them, then we know some things: that quail can tolerate eating ants, that quail are not required to eat ants, and that both strategies can persist in a single population.
This idea has obvious repercussions for paleoart, especially when it comes to “long-tail” behaviors. I dealt with that in this post, and also in the comment thread to this one. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.
Sometimes it is useful to talk about things that never happen, or that have at least never occurred in the sample of things we know of. Obviously how certain you can be in these cases depends on the intensity of sampling and the inherent likelihood of a surprising result, which can be hard to judge. If you argued right now that T. rex lacked feathers because no T. rex specimens have been found with feathers, you’d most likely be wrong; it is almost certainly just a matter of time before someone finds direct evidence of feathers in T. rex, given the number of T. rex specimens waiting to be found and the strength of the indirect evidence (e.g., phylogenetic inference, analogy: ornithomimids are known to be feathered even though most specimens are found without feather impressions). If you argue that sauropods are unique among terrestrial animals in having necks more than five meters long, you’re most likely right; being wrong would imply the existence of some as-yet undiscovered land animal of sauropod size, or with seriously wacky proportions (or both), and our sampling of terrestrial vertebrates is good enough to make that extremely unlikely.
The reason for this post is that sometimes people confuse that last argument, which is about sampling and induction, with the argument from personal incredulity.
For example, in our no-necks-for-sex paper (Taylor et al. 2011), we included this passage:
Sauropoda also had a long evolutionary history, originating about 210 million years ago in the Carnian or Norian Age of the Late Triassic, and persisting until the end-Cretaceous extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs about 65 millions years ago. Thus the ‘necks-for-sex’ hypothesis requires that this clade continued to sexually select for exaggeration of the same organ for nearly 150 million years, a scenario without precedent in tetrapod evolutionary history.
One of the reviewers argued that we couldn’t include that section, because it was just the argument from personal incredulity writ large, like so:
There are no other known cases of X in tetrapod evolutionary history, and therefore we don’t believe that the case in question is the sole exception.
…with the second part of that unstated (by us) but implied. But we disagreed, and argued (successfully) that it was an argument based on sampling, like so:
There are no other known cases of X in tetrapod evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that the case in question is the sole exception.
Now, it is perfectly fair to criticize arguments like that based on the thoroughness of the sampling and the likelihood of exceptions, as discussed above for T. rex feathers. Just don’t mistake arguments like that for arguments from personal incredulity.* On the flip side, if someone makes an argument from personal incredulity, see if the same thing can be restated as an argument about sampling. Maybe they’re correct but just expressing themselves poorly (“I refuse to believe that the moon is made out of cheese”), and maybe they’re wrong and restating things in terms of sampling will help you understand why.
* If you want to get super pedantic about it, they’re both arguments from ignorance. But one of them is at least potentially justifiable by reference to sampling. Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, but it may get to be that way as the sampling improves (e.g., there is no evidence of planets closer to the sun than Mercury, and at this point, that is pretty persuasive evidence that no such planets exist).
Parting shot: one thing that has always stuck in my head from Simberloff (1983) is the bit about imagining a large enough universe of possible outcomes. And I’ve always had a perverse fascination with Larry Niven’s “Down in Flames”, in which he pretty much demolished his Known Space universe by assuming that every basic postulate of that universe was false. Neither of these follow directly on from the main point of the post, but they’re not completely unrelated, either. Because I think that they yield a pretty good heuristic for how to do science: imagine what it would take for you to be wrong–imagine a universe in which you are wrong–and then go see if the thing that makes you wrong, whatever it is, can be shown to exist or to work. If not, it doesn’t mean you’re right, but it means you’re maybe less wrong, which, if we get right down to it, is the best that we can hope for.
The photos have nothing to do with the post, they’re just pretty pictures from the LACM to liven things up a little.
References
- Simberloff, D. (1983). Competition theory, hypothesis-testing, and other community ecological buzzwords. The American Naturalist, 122(5), 626-635.
- Taylor, M. P., Hone, D. W., Wedel, M. J., & Naish, D. (2011). The long necks of sauropods did not evolve primarily through sexual selection. Journal of Zoology, 285(2), 150-161.
Titanosaurs have stupid cervicals
March 21, 2013
As I noted in a comment on the previous post, titanosaurs have stupid cervicals.
As evidence, here is as gallery of titanosaur cervicals featured previously on SV-POW!.
1. From Whassup with your segmented lamina, Uberabatitan ribeiroi?, an anterior cervical of that very animal, from Salgado and Carvalho (2008: fig. 5). As well as the titular segmented lamina, note the ridiculous ventral positioning of the cervical rib. It’s like it’s trying to be Apatosaurus, but it just doesn’t have the chops.
2. From Mystery of the missing Malawisaurus vertebra, this alleged vertebra of that taxon from Jacobs et al. (1993:fig. 1), which completely fails to resemble all the other cervicals subsequently described from Malawisaurus (see the earlier post for details). Note the crazy sail-like neural spine and super-fat parapophyseal stump.
3. From Futalognkosaurus was one big-ass sauropod, this completely insane posterior cervical vertebra of Futalognkosaurus in right anterolateral view, with Juan Porfiri (175 cm) for scale. It’s super-tall — much taller than it is wide, and seemingly taller than it is long.
4. From Ch-ch-ch-changes, cervical 11 of Rapetosaurus, from Curry Rogers (2009:fig. 5). Notice how tiny the centrum is compared with the tall superstructure, and how the neural spine has such a distinct peak. Weird.
5. From Talking about sauropods on The Twenty-First Floor, cervical 9 of the same Rapetosaurus individual, from Curry Rogers (2009:fig. 9). The neural spine is a completely different shape from that of C11, but that is presumably mostly due to damage. One of the interesting things here is the apparent lack of pneumatic foramina in the centrum. They’re there somewhere: Curry Rogers (2009:1054) writes “In cervical vertebrae 9, 11, and 12, the centrum bears an elongate shallow pneumatic fossa with two anterior pneumatic foramina surrounded by sharp, lip-like boundaries.” But they are hard to make out!
The meta-oddity here is that the cervicals of the four titanosaur genera pictures here are all so different from each other. What does this mean?
Probably only that Titanosauria is a huge, disparate, long-lived clade that encompasses far more morphological variation than (say) Diplodocidae. It’s a truism that we don’t, even now, really have a handle on titanosaur phylogeny — every new study that comes out seems to recover a dramatically different topology — so our perception of the clade is really as a big undifferentiated blob. In contrast, the division of Diplodocoidea into Rebbachisaurids, Dicraeosaurids and Diplodocids (plus some odds and ends) is nicely established and easy to think about.
So. Lots of work to be done on titanosaurs.
References
- Curry Rogers, K. 2009. The postcranial osteology of Rapetosaurus krausei (Sauropoda: Titanosauria) from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29(4):1046-1086.
- Jacobs, L.L., Winkler, D.A., and Downs, W.R., and Gomani, E.M. 1993. New material of an Early Cretaceous titanosaurid sauropod dinosaur from Malawi. Palaeontology 36:523-534.
- Salgado, L. & Carvalho, I. S. 2008. Uberabatitan riberoi, a new titanosaur from the Marília Formation (Bauru Group, Upper Cretaceous), Minas Gerais, Brazil. Palaeontology 51:881-901.
Publishers do not manage peer-review, either. We do.
February 27, 2013
I was reading Stephen Curry’s excellent summary of Monday’s Royal Society’s conference on “Open access in the UK and what it means for scientific research”. One point that Stephen made is:
[David Willetts’s] argument is that pursuance of green OA leads to an unstable situation in which the cancellation of subscriptions (because readers have free access) drains the system of the funds needed to manage peer review and other publishing costs.
As an analysis of the difficulties of Green OA, this is admirably precise. But my eye was caught by that phrase “funds needed to manage peer review and other publishing costs.”
I think we should make an effort to wean ourselves off the habit of talking about “managing peer review and other publishing costs”. We all recognise that publishers do not provide peer-review — we do. But it’s also true that publishers don’t manage peer-review, either. Once again, we do that, by acting as unpaid academic editors.
I know that this is not news. We all know this. But a habit of speech is affording publishers a degree of credit that their efforts don’t merit, and that clouds the debate. Let’s apportion credit where it belongs.
Of course there are still “other publishing costs”. These are real and not negligible (even though PeerJ’s financial model suggests they are much less than we have sometimes assumed). It’s right that we should acknowledge that there really are publishing costs; and that whatever financial model we end up will need to pay them somehow. But let’s make an effort to be more precise about what those publishing costs are. Managing peer-review is not one of them.
How to start a new open-access journal: practicalities
July 17, 2012
Mathematician David Roberts has pointed me to a useful new five-part series by Martin Paul Eve, entitled Starting an Open Access Journal. It’s well worth a look, for how it engages with so many practicalities and how tractable he makes it all seem.
- Part 1 — planning and social issues.
- Part 2 — Open Journal Systems, ISSNs, DOIs, CLOCKSS
- Part 3 — Launching, editorial/review procedures
- Part 4 — Copyediting, proofreading, typesetting
- Part 5 — After you publish the first issue
We’re actually pretty well served for open-access journals in our field (Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, Palaeontologia Electronica, PalArch’s journal of vertebrae palaeontology, soon PaleoBios, and of course PLoS ONE). But for scientists in other fields that have fewer options, starting their own journal may well be the single most effective thing they can do to advance open access. (It’s going to look pretty good on the CV, too!)
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
