In praise of Jack McIntosh
December 14, 2015
A short one today, and a sad one.
I heard last night on Twitter that Jack McIntosh has died at the age of 92. It would be hard to overstate what an inspiration he’s been to me. As a professional in a non-palaeo field who went on to do crucial work in sauropod palaeontology, he blazed a trail that I have tried in my small way to follow. I think it’s true to say that, without his example, I would never have got into palaeo research — never even considered it a possibility.
Jack McIntosh, still going strong at a conference late in life. Picture from this tweet by ReBecca Hunt-Foster. Hans-Dieter Sues for scale.
Others have written more about McIntosh’s crucial work — for example, determining the correct skull skull for Apatosaurus (McIntosh and Berman 1975), his careful historical work in collections (McIntosh 1981), his detailed monographic descriptions (e.g. McIntosh et al. 1996) and most recently his re-evaluation of Barosaurus (McIntosh 2005). When I made my own start in palaeo, around 2000, his chapter in The Dinosauria (McIntosh 1990) was the definitive overview of the sauropods.
Perhaps the best overview of his life and work is the interview that Jeff Wilson and Kristi Curry Rogers conducted with him for the afterword of the volume that they edited in his honour in 2005 (Wilson and Curry Rogers 2005). It’s well worth reading.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA — Leading sauropod expert Jack McIntosh beneath Apatosaurus Louisae at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, a forty-ton vegetarian named after Andrew Carnegie’s wife, which is over seventy-seven feet (over 23 meters) long and is the longest mounted dinosaur in the world. — Image by © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis
I’ll close with my own brief experience of meeting Jack, a privilege that I had only once. It was the 2007 SVP meeting in Austin, Texas. I somehow got invited to a sauropod workers’ lunch one day. By careful manoeuvring, I managed to sit myself next to Jack. At that stage I had two very minor papers to my name — the 2005 note on the phylogenetic taxonomy of diplodocoids and the 2006 Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems short-paper on dinosaur diversity. In short, I was a nobody.
But Jack was fascinated by what I was working on. At that time, the Xenoposeidon paper was in press — no-one had seen it but Darren (my co-author), the handling editor and three peer-reviewers. I sketched the holotype dorsal vertebra — literally on a napkin, if I remember rightly — and explained all the unique features. At this point, Jack was 84 years old and could certainly have been forgiven for just wanting to have his lunch in peace, but he was deeply interested. Even at the time I was aware of the honour of showing this work to a man who’d been at the forefront of my field for four decades.
I don’t remember whether we discussed it at the time, but I’d spent the previous week, with Matt, Randy Irmis and Sarah Werning, in the collections at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, working on the remains of a sauropod from the Hotel Mesa quarry in the Cedar Mountain Formation. When the paper finally came out four years later (Taylor, Wedel and Cifelli 2007), we named the new dinosaur Brontomerus mcintoshi in Jack’s honour. Very nearly but not quite a year earlier, Chure et al. (2010) had beat us to the punch by naming their brachiosaurid Abydosaurus mcintoshi after him.
To the best of my knowledge, that makes Jack the only person in history to have had two sauropods named after him in a year. A fitting tribute indeed.
Update 1 (16 December)
Ken Carpenter writes: “Mike, Here is the electronic card I made for McIntosh’s 90th birthday. I’d like to have posted at SVPoW.”
Update 2 (16 December)
Jeff Wilson has written a piece that goes into much more detail about McIntosh’s scientific achievements. Well worth a read.
References
- Chure, Daniel, Brooks B. Britt, John A. Whitlock and Jeffrey A. Wilson. 2010. First complete sauropod dinosaur skull from the Cretaceous of the Americas and the evolution of sauropod dentition. Naturwissenschaften 97(4):379-91. doi:10.1007/s00114-010-0650-6
- McIntosh, John S. 1981. Annotated catalogue of the dinosaurs (Reptilia, Archosauria) in the collections of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Bulletin of the Carnegie Museum 18:1-67.
- McIntosh, John S. 2005. The Genus Barosaurus Marsh (Sauropoda, Diplodocidae). pp. 38-77 in Virginia Tidwell and Ken Carpenter (eds.), Thunder Lizards: the Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana. 495 pp.
- McIntosh, John S. 1990. Sauropoda. pp. 345-401 in: D. B. Weishampel, P. Dodson and H. Osmólska (eds.), The Dinosauria. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
- McIntosh, John S., and David, S. Berman. 1975. Description of the palate and lower jaw of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus (Reptilia: Saurischia) with remarks on the nature of the skull of Apatosaurus. Journal of Paleontology 49(1):187-199.
- McIntosh, John S., Wade E. Miller, Kenneth L. Stadtman and David D. Gillette. 1996. The osteology of Camarasaurus lewisi (Jensen, 1988). BYU Geolgy Studies 41:73-115.
- Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Richard L. Cifelli. 2011. A new sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, USA. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 56(1):75-98. doi: 10.4202/app.2010.0073
- Wilson, Jeffrey A., and Kristina A. Curry Rogers. 2005. A conversation with Jack McIntosh. pp. 327-333 in: Kristina A. Curry Rogers and Jeffrey A. Wilson (eds.), The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London. 349 pages.
#OpenCon 2015: absolutely, indisputably, the best conference ever
November 19, 2015
I got back on Tuesday from OpenCon 2015 — the most astonishing conference on open scholarship. Logistically, it works very different from most conferences: students have their expenses paid, but established scholars have to pay a registration fee and cover their own expenses. That inversion of how things are usually done captures much of what’s unique about OpenCon: its focus on the next generation is laser-sharp.
They say you should never meet your heroes, but OpenCon demonstrated that that’s not always a good rule. Here I am with Erin McKiernan — the epitome of a fully open early-career researcher — and Mike Eisen, who needs no introduction:
(This photo was supposed to be Erin and me posing in our PeerJ T-shirts, but Mike crashed it with his PLOS shirt. Thanks to Geoff Bilder for taking the photo.)
It was striking the opening session, on Saturday morning, consisted of consecutive keynotes from Mike and then Erin. Both are now free to watch, and I can’t overstate how highly I recommend them. Seriously, make time. Next time you’re going to watch a movie, skip it and watch Mike and Erin instead.
Much of Mike’s talk was history: how he and others first became convinced of the importance of openness, how E-biomed nearly happened and then didn’t, how PLOS started with a declaration and became a publisher, and so on. What’s striking about this is just how much brutal opposition and painful discouragement Mike and his colleagues had to go through to get us to where we are now. The E-biomed proposal that would have freed all biomedical papers was opposed powerfully by publishers (big surprise, huh?) and eventually watered down into PubMed Central. The PLOS declaration collected 34,000 signatures, but most signatories didn’t follow through. PLOS as a publisher was met with scepticism; and PLOS ONE with derision. It takes a certain strength of mind and spirit to keep on truckin’ through that kind of setback, and we can all be grateful that Mike’s was one of the hands on the wheel.
At a much earlier stage in her career, Erin’s pledge to extreme openness reflects Mike’s. It’s good to see that so far, it’s helping rather than harming her career.
(And how is it going? Watch her talk, which follows Mike’s, to find out. You won’t regret it.)
There is so, so much more that I could say about OpenCon. Listing all the inspiring people that I met, alone, would be too much for one blog-post. I will just briefly mention some of those that I have known by email/blog/Twitter for some time, but met in the flesh for the first time: Mike Eisen and Erin McKiernan both fall into that category; so do Björn Brembs, Melissa Hagemann, Geoff Bilder and Danny Kingsley. I could have had an amazing time just talking to people even if I’d missed all the sessions. (Apologies to everyone I’ve not mentioned.)
Oh, and how often do you get to rub shoulders with Jimmy Wales?
(That’s Jon Tennant in between Jimmy and me, and Mike Eisen trying, but not quite succeeding, to photobomb us from behind.)
And yet, even with global superstars around, the part of the weekend that impressed me the most was a small breakout session where I found myself in a room with a dozen people I’d never met before, didn’t recognise, and hadn’t heard of. As we went around the room and did introductions, every single one of them was doing something awesome. They were helping a scholarly society to switch to OA publishing, or funding open projects in the developing world, or driving a university’s adoption of an OA policy, or creating a new repository for unpublished papers, or something. (I really wish I’d written them all down.)
The sheer amount of innovation and hard work that’s going on just blew me away. So: OpenCon 2015 community, I salute you! May we meet again!
Update (Saturday 21 November 2015)
Here is the conference photo, taken by Slobodan Radicev, CC by:
And here’s a close-up of the bit with me, honoured to be sandwiched between the founders of Public Library of Science and the Open Library of Humanities! (That’s Mike Eisen to the left, and Martin Eve to the right.)
MYDD! #OpenCon edition
November 14, 2015
The palaeontology contingent at OpenCon 2015, all reminding you to Measure Your Damned Dinosaur!
Left to right: Jon Tennant, Mike Taylor, Ross Mounce.
The central irony of life in academia
November 10, 2015
Hey, look, there goes my future!
One thing that always bemuses me is the near-absolute serendipity of the academic job market. To get into research careers takes at least a decade of very deliberate, directed work, and then at the end you basically toss your diploma into a whirlwind and see where it lands. After all of that careful planning, almost all of us end up where we do based on the random (to us) set of jobs available in the narrow window in which we’re searching.
Did you dream of being curator at Museum X, or professor at University Y? Well, tough, those jobs went to Dr. Graduated-Two-Years-Sooner and Lucky Nature Paper, PhD, and they’re not retiring for three or four decades. Or maybe your dream job comes open right after you, your spouse, and your kids get settled in at your new acceptable-but-not-quite-dream job. Uproot or stay the course? Or what would be your dream job finally comes open but they’re looking for new junior faculty and you just got tenure at Tolerable State U.
This drastic mismatch between carefulness of preparation and randomness of outcome was present even pre-2008. The craptastic academic job market since then has only whetted the central irony’s keen edge. Getting grants and getting jobs is now basically a lottery. I’m not saying that good jobs don’t go to good people – they almost always do – but there are a lot of good people in jobs they never imagined having. And, sadly, plenty of good people who are now working outside of the field they prepared for because of the vicissitudes of the job market. A handful of years sooner or later and they might be sitting pretty.
This is on my mind because I recently had lunch with a physician friend from work and he was talking about applying for jobs as a doctor. “The first thing everyone tells you,” he said, “is decide what part of the country you want to live in first, then apply for the jobs that are there.” Doctors can do that because there are more than 800,000 of them active in the US. Paleontologists are mighty rarified by comparison – it’s hard to say how many of us there are, but probably not more than 2000 active in vert paleo. So the usual advice for budding biologists and paleontologists is exactly opposite that for physicians: “Forget about living where you want. Go wherever the job is and make the best of it.”
Oddly enough, I don’t remember this ever coming up in grad school. It’s something Vicki and I figured out at the end, as we started the process of applying for positions. There are alternate universes where we are at Marshall (they offered us both jobs, but not as attractive as UC Merced at the time), or at Northern Arizona (which is bittersweet because we have totally fallen in love with Flagstaff just in the past three years), or other places. If I were choosing a job site based on everything other than the institution, I’d spring for somewhere in Arizona or the intermountain west in a heartbeat.
But with all that said, we are happy here. It’s funny, when we got the job offers down here I thought, “LA? Crap, there goes the outdoor part of my life.” But Claremont has lots of parks, it’s tucked up against the San Gabriels and I can get into the mountains in 30 minutes, or out to the desert in 90. I’m spending more time outdoors than I have since I was a kid growing up in rural Oklahoma.
So I’m not complaining about my personal situation. Vicki and I both landed on our feet – and the fact that we both managed to stick the landing at the same institution is little short of miraculous. But we still had to step into the job market hurricane to get here.
If you’re a grad student and you’re reading this, I didn’t write it to freak you out. Just to let you know that it’s coming, and there are things you can do to improve your chances. Be aggressively curious. Write. Publish. Give good talks (and give lots of talks so you can become good at it). Broaden your skill set – if you’re going into paleo, knowing how to teach human anatomy probably doubles or triples the number of available jobs at any one time, even if many of them are not the jobs you’ve been dreaming of.
Then, at the end, pour yourself one stiff drink and cast your fortune to the winds.
Good luck.
Many SV-POW! readers will already be aware that the entire editorial staff of the Elsevier journal Lingua has resigned over the journal’s high price and lack of open access. As soon as they have worked out their contracts, they will leave en bloc and start a new open access journal, Glossa — which will in fact be the old journal under a new name. (Whether Elsevier tries to keep the Lingua ghost-ship afloat under new editors remains to be seen.)
Today I saw Elsevier’s official response, “Addressing the resignation of the Lingua editorial board“. I just want to pick out one tiny part of this, which reads as follows:
The article publishing charge at Lingua for open access articles is 1800 USD. The editor had requested a price of 400 euros, an APC that is not sustainable. Had we made the journal open access only and at the suggested price point, it would have rendered the journal no longer viable – something that would serve nobody, least of which the linguistics community.
The new Lingua will be hosted at Ubiquity Press, a well-established open-access publisher that started out as UCL’s in-house OA publishing arm and has spun off into private company. The APC at Ubiquity journals is typically £300 (€375, $500), which is less than the level that Elsevier describe as “not sustainable” (and a little over a fifth of what Elsevier currently charge).
Evidently Ubiquity Press finds it sustainable.
You know what’s not sustainable? Dragging around the carcass of a legacy barrier-based publisher, with all its expensive paywalls, authentication systems, Shibboleth/Athens/Kerberos integration, lawyers, PR departments, spin-doctors, lobbyists, bribes to politicians, and of course 37.3% profit margins.
The biggest problem with legacy publishers? They’re just a waste of money.
Things to Make and Do, part 18: jar of wasps
November 3, 2015
Here’s the jar of wasps sitting out on the table in our back garden:
OK, this is not so much an interesting specimen as a handy hint.
We hosted a picnic during the summer and it was absolutely infested with wasps. (One person was stung — everyone else had to look super-carefully at their sandwiches before each bite.) That made me realise we needed to get rid of all the wasps that haunt the garden, and this trap is the solution.
It could hardly be simpler: it’s an old jar with a tablespoon of jam in the bottom, topped up to half way with water. Then a tinfoil lid with a small hole poked through it with a teaspoon handle.
For some reason, wasps just can’t resist it: they crawl in, then drown themselves in the water trying to get to the jam. Then more wasps come. And they just keep coming, as you can see in the photo. We’re going to have to dig the wasps out and throw them away so that the trap has enough space for more.
The great thing about this is that it only seems to catch wasps: not bees, which simply don’t seem to see the appeal in jam-water.
My cat’s neck skeleton (first five cervicals)
October 27, 2015
When I separated my cat’s head from its body, the first five cervical vertebrae came with it. Never one to waste perfectly good cervicals, I prepped them as well as the skull. Here they are, nicely articulated. (Click through for high resolution.) Dorsal view at the top, then right lateral (actually, slightly dorsolateral) and ventral view at the bottom.
Or you may prefer the same image on a black background:
For those of us used to sauropod necks, where the atlas (C1) is a tiny, fragile ring, mammal atlases look bizarre, with their grotesque over-engineering and gigantic wings.
Fighting apatosaur art #7: the world speaks!
October 22, 2015
I’d hoped that we’d see a flood of BRONTOSMASH-themed artwork, but that’s not quite happened. We’ve seen a trickle, though, and that’s still exciting. Here are the ones I know about. If anyone knows of more, please let me know and I will update this post.
First, in a comment on the post with my own awful attempts, Darius posted this sketch of a BROTOSMASH-themed intimidation display:
And in close-up:
Very elegant, and it’s nice to see an extension of our original hypothesis into other behaviours.
The next thing I saw was Mark Witton’s beautiful piece, described on his own site (in a post which coined the term BRONTOSMASH):
And in close-up:
I love the sense of bulk here — something of the elephant-seal extant analogue comes through — and the subdued colour scheme. Also, the Knight-style inclusion in the background of the individual in the swamp. (No, sauropods were not swamp-bound; but no doubt, like elephants, they spent at least some time in water.)
And finally (for now, at least) we have Matthew Inabinett’s piece, simply titled BRONTOSMASH:
I love the use of traditional materials here — yes, it still happens! — and I like the addition of the dorsal midline spike row to give us a full on TOBLERONE OF DOOM. (Also: the heads just look right. I wish I could do that. Maybe one day.)
Update (Monday 26 October)
Here is Oliver Demuth’s sketch, as pointed out by him in a comment.
Thanks, Oliver! Nice to see the ventral-on-dorsal combat style getting some love.
So that’s where we are, folks. Did I miss any? Is anyone working on new pieces on this theme? Post ’em in the comments!
Which was the biggest dinosaur? (Answer: it’s complicated)
October 20, 2015
I just gave an answer to this question on Quora, and it occurred to me that I ought to also give it a permanent home here. So here it is.
This is a great example of a question that you’d think would have a simple, clear answer, but doesn’t. In fact, as a palaeontologist specialising in dinosaur gigantism, I have an abiding fear of being asked this question in a pub quiz, and not being able to produce the name that’s written on the quizmaster’s answer sheet.
First, what do we mean by “biggest”? Diplodocus was longer than Apatosaurus, but Apatosaurus was heavier. Giraffatitan was taller than either. Let’s simplify and assume we want to know the heaviest dinosaur.
Second, estimating the masses of extinct animals is incredibly hard even when we have a pretty complete skeleton. For example, the gigantic mounted brachiosaur skeleton in Berlin (which used to be called “Brachiosaurus” brancai but is now recognised as the separate genus Giraffatitan) has been subject to at least 14 estimates in the published scientific literature, as summarised here. They vary from 13,618 kg to 78,258 kg — a factor of 5.75 for the same individual. That’s like looking at a human skeleton and not knowing whether its from Kate Moss or Arnold Schwazenegger. (There are reasons for this and I urge you to read the linked article.)
Third, the big dinosaurs tend to be very poorly represented. Giraffatitan is probably the heaviest dinosaur known from a more or less complete skeleton (though even that is put together from several different individuals) so I could give that as the answer to the hypothetical pub-quiz — though the answer sheet would probably be out of date and call it Brachiosaurus.
Fourth, which individual of a given species do we mean? I said Giraffatitan is known from a more or less complete skeleton. And my best guess is that that individual massed, say, 30,000 kg. But an isolated fibula of the same species is known that’s 12.6% longer than the one in the skeletal mount. That suggest an animal that masses 1.126^3 = 1.43 times as massive as the mounted skeleton — say 43,000 kg. There might be yet bigger Giraffatitan individuals. On the other hand, there is some evidence that Apatosaurus, which is usually thought of as not being so big, might have got even bigger.
Fifth, the very biggest specimens tend to be known from only a handful of bones. A good example here is the titanosaur Argentinosaurus, which is known from several vertebrae and a few limb bones, but not all from the same individual. It’s a good bet that it massed 60-70 tonnes — so maybe about twice as much as Giraffatitan, but much less than the often-cited 100 tonnes. Other, more recently discovered, titanosaurs seem to be in the same size class: Puertasaurus, Futalognkosaurus, Dreadnoughtus and more. They they are hard to compare directly due to the paucity of overlapping material, or at least described overlapping material. (Scientists are working on getting more of this stuff properly described in the literature, which will help.)
But, sixth, the very biggest dinosaurs tend to be apocryphal. There’s Amphicoelias fragillimus, known only from E. D. Cope’s drawing of the upper half of a single vertebra. This may have been 50 m long and massed 80 tonnes; but other published estimates say 58 m and 122 tonnes. We really can’t say from the very poor remains.
So if you get asked this question in a pub quiz, your best bet is to roll a dice, pick an answer, close your eyes and hope. Roll 1 for Giraffatitan, 2 for Brachiosaurus, 3 for Apatosaurus, 4 for Argentinosaurus, 5 for Dreadnoughtus and 6 for Amphicoelias fragillimus. Good luck!
How light could a giant azhdarchid be?
October 19, 2015
I imagine that by now, everyone who reads this blog is familiar with Mark Witton’s painting of a giant azhdarchid pterosaur alongside a big giraffe. Here it is, for those who haven’t seen it:
(This is the fifth and most recent version that Mark has created, taken from 9 things you may not know about giant azhdarchid pterosaurs.)
It’s one of those images that really kicks you in the brain the first time you see it. The idea that an animal the size of a giraffe could fly under its own power seems ludicrous — yet that’s what the evidence tells us.
But wait — what do we mean by “an animal the size of a giraffe”? Yes, the pterosaur in this image is the same height as the giraffe, but how does its weight compare?
Mark says “The giraffe is a big bull Masai individual, standing a healthy 5.6 m tall, close to the maximum known Masai giraffe height.” He doesn’t give a mass, but Wikipedia, citing Owen-Smith (1988), says “Fully grown giraffes stand 5–6 m (16–20 ft) tall, with males taller than females. The average weight is 1,192 kg (2,628 lb) for an adult male and 828 kg (1,825 lb) for an adult female with maximum weights of 1,930 kg (4,250 lb) and 1,180 kg (2,600 lb) having been recorded for males and females, respectively.” So it seems reasonable to use a mass intermediate between those of an average and maximum-sized male, (1192+1930)/2 = 1561 kg.
So much for the giraffe. What does the azhdarchid weigh? The literature is studded with figures that vary wildly, from the 544 kg that Henderson (2010) found for Quetzalcoatlus, right down to the widely cited 70 kg that Chatterjee and Templin (2004) found for the same individual — and even the astonishing 50 kg that seems to be favoured by Unwin (2005:192). In the middle is the 259 kg of Witton (2008).
It occurred to me that I could visualise these mass estimates by shrinking the giraffe in Mark’s image down to the various proposed masses, and seeing how credible it looks to imagine these reduced-sized giraffes weighting the same as the azhdarchid. The maths is simple. For each proposed azhdarchid mass, we figure out what it is as a proportion of the giraffe’s 1561 kg; then the cube root of that mass proportion gives us the linear proportion.
- 544 kg = 0.389 giraffe masses = 0.704 giraffe lengths
- 259 kg = 0.166 giraffe masses = 0.549 giraffe lengths
- 70 kg =0.0448 giraffe masses = 0.355 giraffe lengths
Let’s see how that looks.
On the left, we have Mark’s artwork, with the giraffe massing 1561 kg. On the right, we have three smaller (isometrically scaled) giraffes of masses corresponding to giant azhdarchid mass estimates in the literature. If Don Henderson (2010) is right, then the pterosaur weighs the same as the 544 kg giraffe, which to me looks pretty feasible if it’s very pneumatic. If Witton (2008) is right, then it weighs the same as the 259 kg giraffe, which I find hard to swallow. And if Chatterjee and Templin (2004) are right, then the giant pterosaur weighs the same as the teeny tiny 70 kg giraffe, which I find frankly ludicrous. (For that matter, 70 kg is in the same size-class as Georgia, the human scale-bar: the idea that she and the pterosaur weigh the same is just silly.)
What is the value of such eyeball comparisons? I’m not sure, beyond a basic reality check. Running this exercise has certainly made me sceptical about even the 250 kg mass range which now seems to be fairly widely accepted among pterosaur workers. Remember, if that mass is correct then the pterosaur and the 259 kg giraffe in the picture above weight the same. Can you buy that?
Or can we find extant analogues? Are there birds and mammals with the same mass that are in the same size relation as these images show?
References
- Chatterjee, Sankar, and R. J. Templin. 2004. Posture, locomotion, and paleoecology of pterosaurs. Geological Society of America, Special Paper 376. 68 pages.
- Henderson, Donald M. 2010. Pterosaur body mass estimates from three-dimensional mathematical slicing. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 30(3):768-785.
- Witton, Mark P. 2008. A new approach to determining pterosaur body mass and its implications for pterosaur flight. Zitteliana 28:143-159.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week