The “Ultrasauros” holotype vertebra
December 22, 2010
I recently stumbled across this rather good photograph of the holotype vertebra of our old buddy “Ultrasauros“, thanks to Wikipedia contributor Ninjatacoshell, and thought you’d like to see it:
This is a rather legendary vertebra, but until recently there were no good photographs of it on the web (I know because I tried to find one for my talk at the Dinosaurs: A Historical Perspective conference in 2008).
See It’s Ultrasaurus… I mean, um, Ultrasauros… err, Supersaurus! for the now-traditional run-down of the taxonomic mess surrounding this specimen.
In other news, everyone in palaeontology should read Heinrich Mallison’s recent article No 4WD For Plateosaurus over on the Palaeontologia Electronica blog. He highlights a lot of important issues that have general applicability.
… but red-cyan anaglyphs are cooler
December 14, 2010
Over at his truly unique blog Paleo Errata, Jeff Martz is claiming that Stereopairs Are Cool. This assertion he supports with the following figure that he put together, showing a set of five stereopairs of a Longosuchus braincase:
Unfortunately, I am one of those who can’t “see” stereopairs, so these images are uninformative to me — or, at least, no more informative than your average inch-wide braincase photo.
So how else can we envisage the stereo information in these pairs of photos that Jeff took? My favourite way is using red-cyan anaglyphs — those goofy 3d images that you look at through 3d glasses. To compare, I did this to Jeff’s image. The process is simple: take two copies of the stereopair image, cut out all the right-eye views from one set and all the left-eye views from the other, then edit the colour levels of both layers. In one, take the red right down to zero, so you only have blue+green=cyan; in the other take the green and blue down so you only have red. Then stack one layer on top of the other and change its mode to “Lighten only”. Export the result as a JPEG and you get this result:
Armed with my red-cyan glasses (which, remember, I got as a freebie with a Lego catalogue), I can now make out the 3d structure really easily. Positives for the anaglyph approach:
- The 3D image is much easier to see
- The result takes up less space on the page
- Most importantly, the size limitation is removed: I have some beautiful whole-screen anaglyphs (e.g. Archbishop cervical, wallaby skull), whereas stereograms are restricted to a couple of inches’ separation.
The downside is, of course, that you need special equipment to see them –albeit equipment so laughably minimal that Amazon.com will sell you THREE PAIRS for $1.39, you cheap gits. But for those of who who are too poor to find $1.39, and who don’t have two friends with whom you can form an ad-hoc 3D-glasses buying consortium at a cost of $0.47 each, there is one further approach: a low-rent technique that I call a “wigglegram” for want of a better term. Here it is:
I discovered this approach by accident, when flipping through a bunch of photographs that I’d taken of, I think, the Archbishop. As a matter of policy, I take most of my photos twice, so that if I shake slightly or the auto exposure gets it wrong, I have a good copy that I can retain. I was trying to decide which of two nearly identical pictures to keep. But as it happened, I’d moved the camera slightly to the side between taking the first and the second, so as I skipped back and forth between them, I was seeing two slightly different perspectives.
So there you have it: three different ways to visualise 3d structure, each built from the same basic set of photos. They each have their merits, and I hope we’ll increasingly see more of all three of them, as we move into the Shiny Digital Future, and arbitrary limits on manuscript length and numbers of figures get lifted.
I leave y0u with an actual application of all this. Matt and I have, for some time, been working on a manuscript about caudal pneumaticity in sauropods, and we wanted to include a brief survey of which genera it’s been reported in. Among the candidates was Saltasaurus, which has a candidate pneumatic caudal vertebra that was illustrated thus by Powell (2003: plate 53, part 3):
Matt can “see” stereograms, and insisted that the dark patch on the side of the centrum is a pneumatic fossa. I wasn’t so sure, and in fact we got into quite an argument over whether or not to include this specimen in our list. The argument was neatly concluded when I had the obvious idea of converting Powell’s stereogram into an anaglyph:
References
- Powell, Jaime E. 2003. Revision of South American Titanosaurid dinosaurs: palaeobiological, palaeobiogeographical and phylogenetic aspects. Records of the Queen Victoria Museum 111: 1-94.
Pimp my ‘pod 2: haids
December 13, 2010
Here’s another dual-purpose post (part 1 is here), wherein I use some of Brian Engh’s cool art to riff on a related topic (with kind permission–thanks, Brian!). Back when he was first planning his awesome Sauroposeidon life restoration, Brian sent these head studies:
(Note that Brian’s ideas were still evolving at this point, and he roofed the nasal chamber with a keratinous resonating chamber instead of the inflatable sac seen in the finished product. I think both are plausible [not likely, just plausible] and look pretty rad, although the latter is obviously a lot more metal.)
I think these are dynamite, because they show that you can avoid “shrink-wrapped dinosaur syndrome” (SWDS) and still make an anatomically detailed, realistic-looking life restoration. SWDS is what I call the common convention in paleo-art of simply draping the skeleton–and especially the skull–in Spandex and calling that a life restoration. I think it’s a popular technique because you can show off the skeleton inside the animal and thereby demonstrate that you’ve done your homework (especially to an audience that already knows the skeletons*). It gives artists an easy way to add detail to their critters; if you actually slab on realistic soft tissues and lose most of those skeletal and cranial landmarks, you have to come up with something else to make your animals look detailed and visually interesting. And by now it’s been going strong for several decades, so people expect it.
* Without harshing on anyone, I suspect that a lot of consumers of paleo-art have spent more time looking at dinosaur skeletons than looking at live animals and thinking about how much or little of their skeletal structure is visible in life, which may make them susceptible to mistaking “shows a lot of the bony structure” for “biologically realistic”. I suspect that because it was true of me for a good chunk of my life; as usual, the one ranting is ranting mostly at his former self. What cured me was dissecting animals and reading TetZoo–happily, two avenues of self-improvement that are open to everyone.
In the second image above (the one showing the innards) Brian kindly credited me for lending a little assistance. That assistance was mainly in forwarding him my full cranio-centric anti-SWDS rant, which I originally put together for a certain documentary that ended up using almost none of my ideas. I’ve been meaning to recycle it here for ages, and Brian’s new art is just the kick in the pants I needed. Without further ado:
“Sauroposeidon head suggestions no labels.jpg” [above] shows a mock-up of the skull, a traditional restoration of the head, the skull with accurate soft tissues, and an updated restoration. The traditional restoration looks like a lot of paleoart from the past two decades–it looks like someone shrink-wrapped the skull. But this is not what the heads of real animals look like at all. If you look at almost any animal, whether it is a lizard, croc,* turtle, snake, bird, cow, horse, rodent, or human, you can’t see the holes in the skull because they are filled with muscles or air sacs and smoothed over with skin. Here are the 8 specific features I fixed in the updated restoration:
* I got a little carried away here–some of the holes in croc skulls are not hard to make out, because their skin is unusually tightly bound to the very rugose skull. Most dinosaurs didn’t have that same skull texture, and there is little reason to think that their heads were similarly shrink-wrapped. Abelisaurs, maybe. Sauropods, not so much.
(1) the profile of the top of the head and start of the neck would have been smoothed out by jaw muscles bulging through holes in the top of the head (strange but true), and by neck muscles coming up onto the back of the skull.
(2) The fleshy nostril should be down on the snout at the end of the nasal troughs. The bony nostrils make that huge hump on top of the head, but they are continuous with these two grooves that run down the front of the face, and almost certainly the whole bony-nostril-plus-groove setup was covered by soft tissues and the actual air holes were down on the snout. That fleshy covering would have been propped up and not sucked down tight to the skull, so you wouldn’t be able to see the boundaries of bony nostrils from the outside. The fleshy nostril should also be fairly big; it is unlikely that a 50-ton animal with a head a yard long had nostrils the size of a horse’s.
(3) The holes in the skull should not be visible. The habit of drawing and painting dinosaurs with shrink-wrapped heads is so entrenched that smooth heads look undetailed and a little fake, but smooth heads are undoubtedly more accurate. The head wasn’t necessarily a completely smooth bullet–it probably had decorative scales and patches of color–but we can be fairly certain that the holes in the skull were not visible through the skin.
(4) The jaw joint is all the way at the back of the head, but past the tooth row the upper and lower jaws were bound together by jaw muscles. When the jaws opened, as shown in the lower images, the muscles were covered by skin. This skin might have been outside the jaws and stretchy, as shown in the attached image “bird cheeks.jpg”, or it might have been tucked in between the jaws as shown in “croc cheeks.jpg” [below].
Another caveat in my own defense: I know that condors do not have muscular, mammal-style cheeks, so the “cheek” skin here is doing more than just covering jaw muscles (farther back on the jaw the skin is covering jaw muscles). Remember that I was writing quick art suggestions for a less technically sophisticated audience, not a dissertation on condor heads. The take home point is that you can’t tell from looking at the condor below where the jaw muscles start or where the jaw joint is located (unless you already know something about bird skulls). Other than the gross outline, there simply isn’t much osteology on display–and this is a naked head!
(5) The eyes are usually reconstructed as small, dull, and centered in the vertical middle of the eye socket. In fact the eyes were probably located toward the top end of the eye socket, they were probably colorful as in most reptiles and birds, and they may have been pretty big. [But not that big; see Mickey’s comment below, and note that Brian got it right anyway.]
(6) The external ear hole is usually left out. It should be behind the back of the skull and in front of the hindmost jaw muscles.
(7) The profile of the back of the head follows jaw muscles, not the boundaries of the skull bones.
(8) Sauropods had true flip-top heads. The skull of Giraffatitan looks like nothing so much as an upside down toilet bowl, with the toilet seat for the lower jaw. Sauropods probably used that big gape to shove in as much plant material as possible per unit time. Crocodiles and many birds have an extensible throat pouch that allows them to bolt larger bites than you’d think, and the same was probably true of most dinosaurs, especially sauropods. There may have been a visible division between the muscular neck and this fleshy “gullet”. See “croc throat.jpg” and “bird throat.jpg” [below].
I think you could safely put on a lot more color. People are used to big animals being dull, but that’s because most big animals are mammals and, except for primates, all mammals are effectively colorblind. So big mammals are a horrible guide to how colorful other big animals might be. Komodo dragons and crocs are both fairly dull, but they’re all ambush predators and they have to be dull or they don’t eat. If I get inspired I might take your Sauroposeidon into Photoshop and color it up; otherwise maybe have your artists look at tropical birds, toss back a couple of stiff drinks, and throw caution to the wind.
Pimp my ‘pod
December 10, 2010
These are happy times for me. Dinosaur rap god and burgeoning paleoartist Brian Engh, AKA The Historian Himself, has finished a new life restoration of Sauroposeidon. Here’s a smallish view, just to give you a taste; for the high resolution awesomeness, check out Brian’s post here. While you’re over there, check out his line of mini-brachiosaur sculptures–the perfect gift for the sauropod-lover in your life (the a black one is already mine).
Did Sauroposeidon really look like this? Probably not. There’s no direct evidence for inflatable display structures in sauropods or in any other non-avian dinosaurs that I know of. But any life restoration of a dinosaur involves going out on a limb and positing things for which we have little or no direct evidence. So no life restoration is going to show exactly how Sauroposeidon looked. In my view, if you know you’re going to be wrong anyway, you might as well be interestingly wrong, and put in the kinds of plausible-but-not-fossilized structures that extant animals are replete with.
The larger, slightly more serious question then becomes, were big sauropods more likely to be visually flamboyant or big gray pachyderms? I think there is a case to be made for flamboyant sauropods, and I made it in the cover description for this paper (that illustration, by Brian Ford, is below). You can get the PDF for the full argument, but Brian Engh (hmm, just noticed the high correlation between Sauroposeidon life restorations and paleoartists named ‘Brian’) summarized it in eight words: “Brachiosaurs were big. Maybe too big for camouflage.”
The idea of flamboyant sauropods is a hypothesis, and for now a mostly untestable one. I could be wrong. I don’t have a lot invested in it. Flamboyant sauropods would be awesome, and there are already plenty of sauropod life restorations from the Big Gray Pachyderm school, so I’m happy to camp out the other end of the spectrum just for the heck of it. If doing so emboldens those who are trying to kick us in the brainpans with their paleoart, that’s a win-win. I’m not trying to take any credit here–far from it–just happy that the Brians and I have gotten to make common cause.
To make a clean sweep with this post, there is one other Sauroposeidon life restoration that I’ve had the good fortune to be involved with. That one is part of the “Cretaceous Coastal Environment” mural that Karen Carr painted for the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, an excerpt of which appears below (from this paper again, or see the full version on Karen’s website). While she was working on the mural, Karen sent me a draft illustration of Sauroposeidon for comment. My reply was basically, “Looks awesome. How about some spines?” Given the presence of dermal spines in diplodocids and armor in some titanosaurs, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to infer some kind of dermal ornamentation even in those sauropod taxa for which we have no direct evidence of it. I like Karen’s ground-level shot of the distant sauropods (that’s a squirrel-sized Gobiconodon in the foreground) because they look vast, like gods, and I think that’s how they would strike us if we could stand near them today.
Those aren’t all of the Sauroposeidon life restorations out there–Bob Nicholls has done a very sharp one, which unfortunately does not seem to be currently available on his webpage, and there are others–those are just the three I’ve had some small part in. It’s been a thrill, every time, to work with smart, talented, and hardworking people who can do something special that I can’t, which is bring the vanished world to life. When I was a kid, I didn’t want to just learn about dinosaurs, I wanted to see dinosaurs. I wanted to be a chrononaut. I ended up as a paleontologist because that’s the closest you can get to exploring in time.
So, thank you, Brian (and Brian, and Karen, and Bob, and others) for gracing Sauroposeidon with your skill. It’s phenomenal to get to see my favorite dinosaur with fresh eyes. And thanks to all the rest of you paleoartists out there, paid or unpaid, for your service as our eyes and ears in the past, for letting the rest of us get our mental boots muddy in worlds that we often approach only clinically. Keep those dispatches coming–we can’t wait to see where you’re going to take us next.
An open letter to Palaeontologia Electronica
November 23, 2010
For anyone who doesn’t already know, Palaeontologia Electronica is an on-line, open-access palaeontology journal — the only one in the world (unless you count Acta Pal Pol, which is freely available online and also published on paper.) PE is sponsored by the Palaeontological Association, the Paleontological Society and the Society of Vertebrtate Paleontology, the big three professional associations, so you can see that it’s a serious journal, not just some glorified blog. Among much else, it has published important sauropod papers such as Gomani (2005), Schwarz et al. (2005) and Rose (2007). PE is A Good Thing.
The new issue 13(3) of PE came out yesterday and was introduced by a post on the newish PE blog. In response I was moved to post a comment on that blog post. But because the blog is pretty new, it doesn’t seem to have attracted many readers yet, at least judging by the low number of comments, so I realised that what I’d said needed saying in a more widely read venue. Hence this SV-POW! article.
I am absolutely in awe of the Boltovskoy et al. World Atlas — my hat is off to everyone who worked on it, and it’s great that a reference work this comprehensive is freely available to the world.
But PE‘s tiny images are becoming more and more of an embarrassment: something has got to be done about this. It’s true that the maps in the PDFs are pretty high resolution (I can’t see exactly how high because my usual extract-images-from-PDF program isn’t working on these files for some reason). But the versions of the figures on the web-site are really inadequate — see for example Figure 6, which is a feeble 711×358 pixels — 1/4 Mp.
Compare that with, for example, Figure 10 (dorsal vertebrae) of the paper published in PLoS ONE today on new American iguanodonts. That image is 2067×2776 pixels — 5+3/4 Mp, or 22 times the size of the PE image.
Folks, I love PE and I really want it to succeed. But the PLoS journals, among others have raised the game. Hosting large images is so cheap now that it’s hard even to measure the cost: there is no excuse for PE to continue providing its figures only in what amounts to a thumbnail. Why shouldn’t the original image files submitted by the author be made available?
For me, and I am sure many other people, this is a deal-breaker. I simply can’t and won’t send any descriptive papers to PE, because when I prepare a 4100×3966 pixel figure like the one above [cervical rib “X1” of the Archbishop — click through that images for the full-size version], I can’t tolerate having it shrunk to 711×688 to fit PE’s 711-pixel width limit — a 33-fold drop from 16 Mp to 1/2 Mp.
Please, PE. Fix this. Surely it can’t be hard?
References
- Gomani, Elizabeth M. 2005. Sauropod dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous of Malawi, Africa. Palaeontologia Electronica 8(1):27A (37 pp.)
- Rose, Peter J. 2007. A new titanosauriform sauropod (Dinosauria: Saurischia) from the Early Cretaceous of central Texas and its phylogenetic relationships. Palaeontologia Electronica 10(2):8A (65 pp.)
- Schwarz, Daniela, Christian Meyer, Eberhard Lehmann, Peter Vontobel, and Georg Bongartz. 2005. Neutron tomography of internal structures of vertebrate remains: a comparison with x-ray computed tomography. Palaeontologia Electronica 8(2):30A (11 pp.)
Seems that SV-POW! is only the second greatest blog in the universe
November 19, 2010
Just noticed this over on ScienceBlogs:
Tetrapod Zoology conquers the world!
SV-POW!sketeer Darren’s Naish’s other blog Tetrapod Zoology has — rightly — often featured strongly in the Readers’ Picks sidebar; but this is the first time I’ve seen it, or indeed any blog, completely monopolise the list.
ScienceBlogs has other blogs that get more hits and more comments than Tet Zoo — mostly because they consist of flamebait — but when you want solid chunks of meaty, scientific nourishment, Tet Zoo now seems to be pretty well established as king of the hill. On the slight chance that any SV-POW! readers aren’t already regulars at Tet Zoo, let me recommend it in the strongest terms: I know of no other blog that does such a good job of presenting hardcore science in a readable, approachable manner.
So congratulations to Darren, and long may it continue!
Tutorial 10: how to become a palaeontologist
November 12, 2010
Last time around, I referred in passing, rather flippantly, to what I called Tutorial n: how to become a palaeontologist. Since then, I realised that actually I could write a tutorial on this, and that it could be surprisingly short and sweet — much shorter than it would have needed to be even a few years ago.
So here it is: how to be a published palaeontologist.
Step 1. Publish papers about palaeontology
… and you’re done.
Really.
If this sounds frivolous or facetious, it’s not meant to. It is the absolute, solid truth about how to be a published palaeontologist. It is a fact that the difference between published palaeontologists and other people is that only the former have published papers about palaeontology. If you want to move from the latter group into the former, then, that’s what you have to do.
I’m talking about proper publication in peer-reviewed journals, by the way: not just blogging (valuable though that is), not self-publication, not vanity publication. Making a genuine contribution to the science of palaeontology through peer-reviewed articles.
But Mike, it’s not that simple!
Yes, it is. It really is.
At times like this, I always remember Tom Clancy’s advice to would-be novelists. I used to be on a mailing list for writers, and the administrator, Greg Gunther, once posted this anecdote:
I was on an [email] list with Tom Clancy once. Mr. Clancy’s contribution to the list was, ‘Write the damn book’.
That’s the finest advice I know on the subject, and it applies to palaeontology papers as well as to novels. If that doesn’t convince you, here is a post from noted science-fiction author Frederik Pohl, 87 years old at the time of writing, on the subject of establishing yourself as a short-story writer:
How do you get to be a writer?
- You sit down and write something.
- Finish what you write. Pensées don’t count. Neither do short stories without an ending.
- If the next morning you think it’s any good send it to some editor who might buy it.
- Repeat as needed.
Terse as this advice may seem, you could condense the whole thing to point 1. Sit down and write something. Heck, you don’t even need to sit down if you prefer to write standing up. In which case the advice reduces to write something.
If you, dear reader, are not yourself a published palaeontologist, then you are probably thinking of all kinds of objections now. Dismiss them: just start doing the work. To help you out, let me smack a few common objections down for you.
Objection 1. But I’m not a professional!
What do you mean by that? Do you mean that you don’t get paid to work on palaeontology? No-one cares about that: journal editors and reviewers will neither know nor care. For whatever it’s worth, both Darren and I are amateurs in this sense.
What matters — what journal editors and reviewers do care about — is whether you conduct yourself as a professional. And that’s up to you. Be courteous. Write clearly. Don’t be excessively critical of others’ work, especially if there’s a chance that you’ve misunderstood it. Submit to peer review. Turn your manuscripts around quickly. These are the aspects of “professionalism” that actually matter, and they are just as available to amateurs as to professionals.
Objection 2. But I don’t have a Ph.D!
Doesn’t matter. Lots of published palaeontologists don’t have Ph.Ds. My own first five papers came out before I got my Ph.D. Heck, John McIntosh, the undisputed king of sauropod science, never earned a Ph.D in palaeontology (though he has one in his day-job field of physics).
Really, what does a Ph.D get you? Only the right to sign your submission letters Dr. Simeon Halibutwrangler instead of just plain Simeon Halibutwrangler. Otherwise it has no effect whatsoever on the publication process. I mean it. Look at some papers: note how the authors’ names don’t include titles or credentials? Journal editors and reviewers probably don’t even know whether you have a Ph.D or not, and they certainly don’t care. What they care about is whether your manuscript is any good.
To be clear, I’m not saying a Ph.D is worthless. For one thing, it’s a necessity if you’re looking for a job in academia. But in terms of its effect on your ability to actually, you know, do science, it’s way overrated.
Objection 3. But I don’t have an academic affiliation!
Doesn’t matter. Greg Paul isn’t affiliated with a university: his recent papers in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature, Paleobiology and, oh, yes, Science, give a street address rather than an institutional address.
Again, what does the affiliation really get you? I would say three things: access to papers (see below), access to specimens (see below) and the right to put the name of a university on your papers. If you can work around the first two things — and you can — the lack of the third is not truly such a great hardship.
Obejction 4. But I don’t have access to papers!
Yes you do. This is a solved problem. We’re living in the Shiny Digital Future now.
Seriously. The rankest amateur living in 2010 has better access to the literature than the most hallowed professional of twenty years ago ever had.
Here’s a strange thing: although I’ve been affiliated with UCL for eighteen months now, I’ve never got around to setting up my off-campus institutional access to paywalled publishers like Elsevier and Blackwell. Now partly this is just plain laziness, which I’m not proud of. But I do think it goes to show how very much that kind of access is, these days, a pleasant luxury rather than a necessity. Because everything is open.
Objection 5. But I don’t have access to specimens!
Finally, we come to a real objection. Fossil specimens are held by museums, and museums are rightly careful about who they allow to play with their irreplaceable stuff. In general, it’s easier to get access to specimens as you become better known — either through the shortcut of an academic affiliation, or through publishing papers. But how can you publish papers if you don’t have access to specimens? You can’t, right? It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, right?
Well, wrong actually.
Obviously you can’t write descriptive papers without seeing the material you’re describing. But that is only one kind of paper. Reviewing my own output so far, I was rather shocked to find that only two of eleven papers (the Xenoposeidon description and Brachiosaurus revision) are descriptive, specimen-based work. Of the others, three were taxonomic (Diplodocoid PN, pre-PhyloCode PN and Cetiosaurus petition); one was statistical (dinosaur diversity survey), one was palaeobiological inference (sauropod neck posture); three were about the Shiny Digital Future (electronic publication of names, sharing data, ODP report); and one is basically a literature review (history of sauropod studies).
What this means is that I could have written 81.8% of my papers without ever looking at an actual specimen. So: write 81.8% of your papers, get them published, then when museum collection managers know who you are, go and look at their fossils and write the other 18.2%.
Objection 6. But what if my paper is rejected?
Reformat for a different journal and send it straight back out. This happens to everyone. It’s just part of the process. My very first paper was rejected; we just sent it back out. The Xenoposeidon paper was rejected without even being reviewed; we just sent it back out. Our neck-posture paper was rejected without review twice; we just sent it back out. As I write this, Matt and I are busy revising two papers that we co-wrote, both of which were rejected. Any day now, we’re going to send them back out. [Update, March 2014: those two papers became Taylor and Wedel (2013a) on sauropod neck anatomy and Wedel and Taylor (2013b) on caudal pneumaticity.]
Objection 7. But I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to put in the work!
Oh. Well, there you have me. That really is a problem.
So what’s stopping you?
I know a whole bunch of people who should be published palaeontologists but aren’t. Some of them know far, far more about extinct animals than I do, and I am frankly bewildered that they have somehow never made it into print: I assume they are letting themselves be defeated by some kind of psychological barrier.
Others are just feeling their way into this field, in many cases by blogging. They have more excuse for hestitancy, but no real reason for it. As a success story, I could cite Brian Switek of the blog Laelaps, who took a while to warm up to the idea of academic publishing but recently placed his first major paper (“Thomas Henry Huxley and the reptile to bird transition“) in the dinosaur history volume.
Well. I could say more about the nuts and bolts of writing and submitting papers, and I will do so in Tutorial 14. But for now, I am leaving this here. Because the single, simple point that this article makes is such an important one. Write papers.
Tutorial 9: how to get copies of academic papers
November 9, 2010
There’s recently been a rash of requests for PDFs on the VRTPALEO mailing list. Or maybe “plague” would be a better word. What invariably happens is that a new paper comes out, and someone emails the list saying “Please can someone send me a PDF of this?”; then another half-dozen or so people all reply to the list saying “I’d like a copy, too”. (The situation is exacerbated by the VRTPALEO list’s utterly advanced policy of forcing all replies to go to the whole list instead of just to the person being replied to, but that’s a whole nother rant.)
The result is of course that several thousand people get half a dozen spams. Yes, it’s true that it only takes a couple of seconds to recognise and delete such messages. But when two thousand people each take two seconds to delete a message, that’s 4000 seconds of time that could have been used for something useful. In other words, to save yourself a couple of minutes’ work, you’ve wasted more than an hour of other people’s time.
Folks, this has to stop.
So what should you do when you want to get hold of a paper? It’s a simple three-stage process. And before you ask, yes, this is good for hobbyists as well as professionals.
Step 1: Google
Just search for the title of the paper. You’d be surprised how often it just turns up. Sometimes it’s in an open-access journal, such as Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, Palaeontologia Electronica or PLoS ONE. Sometimes the author has posted a copy, as for example I do with all my stuff and Matt does with his. Sometimes, there just happens to be a copy lying around somewhere — for example, because a lecturer made it available to his students.
Often, though, the paper you want is out there, but paywalled. So go on to …
Step 2: ask the author
Nine times out of ten, the abstract pages that the big commercial publishers put up include the author’s email address. So just drop him or her a line asking for a copy.
Dear Dr. Haddockwhittler,
I was interested to see the abstract of your new paper on eroded non-diagnostic ornithopod pedal phalanges in the Journal Of Small Boring Fossils. I would be very grateful if you would send me a PDF. Many thanks.
And you’ll almost always get the PDF back within a day or two. Sometimes authors don’t respond at all — most likely because they’ve not seen the message; and very occasionally they don’t have the PDF themselves. But these are very rare situations. And I have never, ever, known an author to just flatly refuse to send out a PDF.
I’ve had a few people telling me that they’re nervous about cold-contacting an Actual Credentialled Professional, and that they fear getting the brush-off because of their own amateur status. Put this foolish idea out of your mind. Every professional is always delighted when anyone, professional or not, is interested in their work.
SPECIAL BONUS FRINGE BENEFIT: every now and then, you may find that as a by-product of such a request, you strike up a conversation with the author. If you and they are interested in the same stuff, you sometimes find that you each have light to shed on the others’ thoughts. As a matter of fact, this is precisely how I met and became friends with Matt (which in turn is how I became a palaeontologist — a story that I must tell some time in Tutorial 10: how to become a palaeontologist). Usually this won’t happen: you’ll just have a brief, courteous exchange, and move on. But sometimes it might.
But suppose you can’t find the author’s email address? (This is much more common with older papers.) Or suppose it’s a really old one — a classic Janensch paper or something — and the author is dead? Or suppose you send an email, but the author never responds? Then on to …
Step 3: ask a friend
If you know someone who’s at an institution that has good access to subscription resources, drop them a line as ask whether they’d mind pushing a copy your way. If you’re friends already it’s probably because you’re interested in the same stuff, which means that they’ve likely already downloaded the paper in question — or, if not, they’ll be grateful to you for the heads-up. Even if not, you’re only wasting one person’s time instead of two thousand.
And if all else fails …
… then fall back to the original: email the list and ask whether anyone can help. Sure, there’s a place for this: it’s part of what the list is there for, and it can be absolutely invaluable when you’re trying but failing to track down an obscure old paper.
If you do this, then please use a meaningful subject for your email. If you just write “PDF request” than I will delete it without even opening it, and I bet most other people will, too. Do yourself a favour and write something terse but informative, like “Looking for PDF of Haddockwhittler 2010 on ornithopod phalanges”.
Another situation where mailing the list with a PDF request is appropriate: when you don’t know exactly what it is that you’re looking for, and you need expert guidance. For example, I did this when looking for an ostrich osteology: I didn’t know of a good one (and hadn’t been able to discover the existence of one using Google), so I asked. Not a problem.
But, people, this should be the last resort, not the first.
(There are those that say Inter-Library Loan should be on the List Of Things To Do Before Spamming VRTPALEO, but that’s not usually an option for amateurs with no formal affiliation.)
Well, I hope that’s helpful. Now go forth and obtain papers!
—
This post is an expanded version of an email that I have written many, many times to individuals. I got bored of writing it over and over, and figured that it would be quicker and easier to post this, and then be able to point people to it.
The Archbishop … restored!
October 15, 2010
This post is nearly three weeks late — it’s based on a piece of artwork that appeared on 25 September, and which I wanted to write about immediately. But it got washed away in the flood of camel necks (which by the way is not over yet), and then in the festival of articular cartilage, then by the whole “Amphicoelias brontodiplodocus” thing and the subsequent discussion of amateurs in palaeo, and then by what was already an overdue announcement of my sauropod history paper and the attendant copyright nonsense. So it’s been a stupidly busy time here at SV-POW! Towers, but now the air has cleared a little, and it’s time to look at this beauty:
Life restoration of NHM R5937 "The Archbishop" (Brachiosauridae incertae sedis), by Nima.
This would be a beautiful piece of art by any standards — the world can always use brachiosaur art! — but what makes this extra special for me is that it is the first ever life restoration of my very own brachiosaur, BHM R5937, the Tendaguru specimen known as The Archbishop. It’s by SV-POW! regular Nima, and I am absolutely delighted to see it. It’s very Greg Paul-like, and I mean that in the most positive sense. (I may not be a fan of Greg’s taxonomic vicissitudes, but his art is just beautiful.)
Over on his blog, Nima has described in detail how he created this piece, and shows four progressively refined versions (of which the one above is the last) — I urge you to check it out if you’re interested in art, brachiosaurs or both.
Nima’s blog-post also includes a brief history of the Archbishop, mostly taken from my 2005 SVPCA talk. It’s a good summary, but I do have a few comments to make. (I typed a lot of this in as a comment to the original post, but Blogger ate my comments as usual.)
- The specimen is not known as M23, and has never been — that is in fact the designation of the Tendaguru quarry from which is was excavated. Paul (1988) mistakenly conflated the quarry name with a specimen number, and referred to this specimen as BMNH M23, and Glut’s (1977) encyclopaedia perpetuated the error, but it’s always been R5937.
- “The giant Brachiosaurus finds of the Germans” are now, of course, Giraffatitan.
- “Controversy lingered” — well, no, not really. The problem was worse than that: no-one paid a blind bit of notice to the specimen before 2004.
- “It turns out the double spine claim was totally bogus and unscientific” — well, we don’t really know that yet. It’s certainly true that none of the prepared vertebrae (five cervicals, two complete dorsals and an additional dorsal spine) have bifid spines; but Migeod reported these from the anterior dorsals, and it’s not clear that we have those. A fair bit of material remains in jackets, and more has probably been lost or destroyed. So it is possible, if unlikely, that one day we’ll open one of those jackets and find good evidence for bifid spines.
- “Close-up of the Archbishop vertebrae (doesn’t look much like the mitre of an archbishop to me, but who knows” — well, the name The Archbishop is not based on any resemblance of the bones to a mitre. (Nor is it based on anything else. It’s completely arbitrary.)
Last 0f all, what about the actual picture? Well, the long, thin, snakelike neck is beautiful art, but I don’t think it’s great science. The height of the cervicals that we have for this animal show that the neck would have had to be quite a bit dorsoventrally taller than shown here. And because there were only 13 cervical vertebrae — 12 if you omit the atlas, which is really a whole nother kettle of badgers, a neck bent into a strongly sigmoid pose like this would exhibit noticable kinks at some of the intervertebral joints — as you can see in giraffes when they twist their necks.
That aside, though, this is great. Again, I am really delighted that it’s out there. Congratulations to Nima!
Who owns my sauropod history paper?
October 13, 2010
Here is an oddity. When the Geological Society sent my the PDF of my sauropod-history paper, their e-mail contained the following rather extraordinary assertions:
We are pleased to provide you with 20 free electronic reprints of your recently published paper to distribute as you wish. These reprints are available as PDF downloads and are available from the following URL http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/reprint/343/1/361.pdf?ijkey=CuTipeiHIhUaWsR&keytype=finite
Please note the following important points
1. These electronic reprints may NOT be used for commercial purposes or posted on openly accessible websites, and are subject to the terms and conditions described here: http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/site/GSL/author_terms
2. You may forward this message to your co-authors or colleagues in order for them to access the paper also, but do remember that access is restricted to a TOTAL of 20 PDF downloads (unless you otherwise have subscription access to the content). Non-subscribers may purchase additional downloads on a pay-per-view basis.
I think, and I hope you will all agree with me, that the idea of providing a finite number of “electronic reprints” is profoundly misguided and patently unenforcible. But let’s skip blithely around that and focus on the core issue.
In general, I find it iniquitous that when authors freely contribute their work to journals and books — especially books as spectacularly expensive as the Dinosaur History volume — the publishers try to restrict those authors’ rights to give copies of their own work to their friends and colleagues. It’s just wrong. It should be enough that we allow them to publish and sell our work for no fee; that they should then limit what we do with it is — well, I hate to repeat myself, but I can’t think of a better word than: wrong.
The scourge of copyright assignment
Publishers can pull this kind of stunt because they own the work. In short, they can do what the hell they want with it. And the reason they own the work is because we blindly hand over copyright to them. We’ve been doing it for years; decades for those of us who’ve been in the game longer.
Why do we do this?
I know I’ve mentioned this before [Choosing a Journal, Time for the Revolution] but there really is no justification at all for publishers to require authors to sign copyright over to them — yet this practice remains ubiquitous. And there is no justification for us to keep on rolling over and giving them what they want — yet we do.
Why do we do this?
(I know I already asked that question, but it bears repeating.)
Well, they don’t have this one!
As I went to fill in the ubiquitous copyright assignment form for the history paper, I noticed that it offered a choice between two sections:
Geological Society's copyrght assignment form (except)
As an alternative to the usual “I hereby assign to the Geological Society of London full copyright and all rights” clause (section 2 of the form above), it offers section 3 as follows:
3. To be filled in if copyright does not belong to you
(b) The copyright holder hereby grants the Geological Society of London permission to publish the said contribution in paper, electronic, and facsimile formats, and for electronic capture, reproduction, and licensing in all formats, in whole or in part, now and in perpetuity, in the original and all derivative works and also grants non-exclusive rights to deal with requests from third parties in the manner specified in paragraphs 2 and 4 below.
So I formally transferred copyright to my wife, Fiona:
And filled in section 3 of the form instead of section 2. Of course, there is no earthly reason why they shouldn’t offer copyright-holding authors the option of just giving the Geological Society the rights it actually needs, but since they don’t do that I was happy to take advantage of the loophole.
And that is why I happily encourage you to download as many copies of the PDF as you wish — have twenty-one of them just for yourself if you like. It’s mine, I can give you as many copies as I wish. It’s my wife’s, and she’s granted me a non-exclusive licence to give you as many copies as I wish. [Thanks to DK Fennell for this correction.]
Happy ending, right?
Well, no, actually. For two reasons.
First, the really extraordinary thing about this is that the published version of my paper includes the copyright statement above, at the bottom of the first page, asserting that the work is copyright the Geological Society of London even though I carefully took explicit steps to ensure that this is not the case.
How did that happen? I can only assume that the Society, like other publishers, is so used to everyone just blindly signing away copyright that they used their standard boilerplate without even bothering to look at the form I returned to them. That speaks all sort of bad things. The world has become a twisted place.
The second reason this isn’t really a happy ending is that I don’t feel great about having retained copyright on a technicality. We, the authors, shouldn’t have to sneak around giving copyright to our spouses and avoiding the Great Giveaway by means of stealth. We ought to be simply and flatly refusing to give away copyright when it’s perfectly clear that the publisher doesn’t need it in order to publish. (Publishers often use language like “In order to expedite the editing and publishing process and enable Wiley-Blackwell to disseminate your Contribution to the fullest extent, we need to have this Copyright Transfer Agreement executed“, but we all know that’s not true.)
So what should we do?
I can see three ways we can avoid giving publishers total ownership of our work.
- Simply don’t submit to journals that require copyright transfer. Most do, but not all. Among the honorable exceptions are the PLoS journals, and Zoologica Scripta. If any of you know of others, please shout in the comments.
- If using publishers that do require copyright transfer, look for weasely strategies such as the one I used for the history paper; but better is:
- Just refuse. Publishers know they don’t need copyright, and there is an established form for withholding it: the SPARC Addendum. I’ve not used that before, but it’s time I started.
We must have been mad to have handed over all our stuff for all these years. What the heck were we thinking? Time to start taking it back — so we can give it to the world. After all, the main reason I want to retain my copyright is so that the publisher can’t require me not to post the PDF freely on my own website, and I am sure the same is true of 99% of scientists who want to retain their copyright.
Publishers must not be allowed to be a barrier to the dissemination of science!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week