Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings

A few people will know that I have had a hard time with referees and papers of late. Refereeing is an essential part of peer review (whether people like it or not, it’s a model that’s not going away any time soon) so it’s critical for how science works. Or, indeed, doesn’t.

There’s lots of things to be said about refereeing issues, from bad and even poisonous reviews, awkward online systems and logins, filling in forms, missing figures and all the usual complaints, but specifically I want to talk here about the time it takes and professional contributions from academics.

I try to review papers that come my way and am regularly doing more than 20 in a year (I’m up to 12 already in 2026!). I try to get them all done in a few days after they have arrived and I think I’ve been late with a review exactly once in all my time as a referee.

Now, that’s some great self-congratulations out the way, I’ve had two papers in one of the ‘fast’ journals over the last few months (that is ones that ask for referees to return reviews in two weeks or less). One spent three months in review, came back with such minor corrections we had them done in an afternoon, but was then sent out for review again and has now been out for another 6 weeks. The other took over two months the first time round, again was returned relatively quickly with minor corrections, but was then out for another month. A third paper with another journal is on it’s second round of reviews each of which has taken over 4 months, and when I last wrote to the editor to hint that this was a long time, got no reply.

I do know that everyone is busy. I can’t review everything I get asked to do and I’m sure others are even busier. But as an editor, it’s frustrating that you can often send out seven or eight requests to get even two referees to agree to review a paper, and it’s very likely that one of them will take months or even simply never reply. All of that makes more work for the editors and delays for the authors. But most of all, it’s clearly demonstrably unfair. There are people out there regularly publishing papers who have never replied to a request or reviewed a paper ever and others who are always so bad (painfully slow, unhelpful, or unactionable reviews) that they are avoided, meaning that they get to get their papers reviewed but never have to share the burden of taking the time for other people.

Given that this is all voluntary, it does make it a difficult situation given the pressure on universities and research institutes. It’s easy to say that you can’t waste your time as a reviewer when your job could be on the line without the next grant or big paper, but if no one reviews papers (or grants!) then the whole thing will grind to a halt. We have been too reliant for too long on goodwill, but that does stop working when people stop playing. When I’m getting more and more requests to review papers as editors claim they can’t find anyone else, and I get more requests for papers miles outside my field (presumably because everyone else has already turned it down or failed to reply) it does begin to look like the system is creaking. So how to fix it?

It’s easier said than done of course, but there are a few things that could be done (or rolled out further to help).

The first, of course, is to actually pay academics for their time. Publishers make money from publishing science, and it is incredibly profitable and not impossible for them to then spend some of this on the free peer-review done for them. Not everyone is able to accept payments for such work (e.g., when working for some governments in museums etc.), but this could be paid to the employer directly to cover their time, be paid into funding accounts to support research. Easiest of all (as with PeerJ for example) it is possible to give people credit towards publication / or open access fees. That at least provides some incentive for reviews to be done and would surely encourage a few more people to engage with the process. It could then be further incentivized with higher rates for people who review faster, or return better reviews (I’ve been an editor on journals where you tick a box to say how fast and how good the review was).

The second thing that could help is to give proper credit for reviews. I don’t mean a system like Orcid (though a less-clunky and more overarching system that reached all journals would help) but recognition from employers. They like advertising when academics are editors at journals or publish papers in them, or get large grants, but referees are also contributing, as well as doing something that is part of their job as a scientist – reading the literature and keeping up with new ideas and data. So make it explicit that refereeing is something that is work time and can be used for job applications, promotion or tenure applications etc. That again would surely encourage a few more people to engage.

At least part of the problem too is that it is all cumulative with nasty feedback loops. If as an editor you have to email more and more people to try and find referees or chase them for reviews, that stops you doing other work faster, and it then delays reviews being done for the author. Sometimes requests come in because someone else has let things down and then you write a review which is either not needed because they finally came through, or the authors are then stuck with additional referee comments to work on. In short, the delays and lack of responses from some make more work for everyone.

I’d also add that as an editor and author, journals have made it surprisingly hard to find the email addresses of people these days. I regularly struggle to find the actual electronic contact details of prospective referees making it take more time to obtain and then limiting who I can invite if I simply cannot find an active account for them. Making the email address of all authors (and not just the lead author, though even that can be well hidden or missing) would make things faster all round and get more people involved. I left one journal as editor having been criticized for not getting a paper reviewed in good time, when I’d asked 14 people with none of them responding or accepting the invitation to review. I was pretty unhappy at apparently taking the blame for other people’s inaction and taking ever more of my time to track down more and more possible referees for a paper in a field that was not my area of expertise.

Finally, what actually requires reviewing and how can be modified to reduce the burden. I am not suggesting that papers should not be reviewed, but I can point to cases of things I have seen where the review process was clearly unnecessarily protracted and added time and burden that was not needed. For example, a paper where as a referee I had only the most minor comments (like a couple of sentences needed tweaking) and the other referee had none (accept as is), but it was sent back to both of us to review again (in the reviews, one referee even comments they were surprised they had been asked to look at the paper again). Similarly, I had a paper with very positive reviews that was tagged as ‘minor’ by the editor but then sent out back for review. A colleague of mine reported he’s had a paper that had similar rating, but it then went out to different referees who of course then had their own suggestions meaning more changes were needed, if all under the banner of ‘minor’ and then it went back for review again. I had a paper to review that was so completely unreadable (possibly translated though something online) that even the abstract was incomprehensible, and it should never have gone out for review in that state.

In these cases, editors should be in a position to make a decision and accept or reject a paper (or suggest what needs to be done), or perhaps send the paper back only to the referee who raised issues if the other already considered the work acceptable. This would cut the number of reviews needed and the amount of time it takes for all concerned, but it requires guidance from journals and actions from editors. Simply sending every paper out for review when it’s too poor to even be read, or back out for review when it clearly doesn’t need, it isn’t helping a system that’s already creaking under pressure.

I’m not naïve enough to think that journals are just suddenly going to start paying all referees, or provide new guidelines for editors to follow (that get followed). But at least some of the things noted above would not be too hard to implement and can be pushed by editors and even authors at various journals or to their own institutes which could build some pressure in the right direction. There are enough issues already with peer review without it grinding to a halt because a handful of people can’t review everything while others want the benefit of the labour of others, without being willing to participate fairly in the process or make extra and unnecessary work though their unwillingness to make an effective decision.

There are improvements that can be made, and I think it is necessary to push for them. I will be writing to a couple of senior editors to point out some of these issues that I have directly experienced and encourage action. I hope some others may join me.

Following on from my last post on the importance of publishing data as well as testing hypotheses, I thought I’d expand a bit more on an associated problem with the idea that this area is increasingly overlooked or sidelined.

There is understandably an ever growing pressure on scientists to produce papers that get into higher ranked journals and display some form of prestige in their presentation. Limited grants, limited jobs, funding cuts and the general construction and pressure on higher education and museums makes this almost inevitable. So now an exciting new taxon is rarely enough to get into a major journal unless it’s also coupled with some analysis showing it’s critical place in evolution, 3D structures, big patterns and accompanying sexy and colourful graphics, which papers that don’t even feature fossils are ever more common.

The pressure is on to produce papers that are in top journals, or are highly cited, and that means securing a job, promotion or grant. Why give up your time to name a new species or report on a fundamental set of data if that’s time that could be spent on the most gee-whiz of projects with the biggest dataset and the most elaborate analyses? You can’t afford to if it won’t tick the box on your annual appraisal or will be sneered at by a hiring committee as insufficiently exciting and important.

This puts basic science at risk in two distinct and different ways. First of all, despite the number of palaeontologists in the field (which still seems to be growing, if slower than over the last couple of decades), fewer people are describing specimens, naming species, recording localities, correcting errors in the literature and the like. If we get to the point where we are only doing analyses and not actually accruing data with which to make those analyses, our ability to expand what we can know will eventually stop. Practically of course this is not going to happen, but it will surely slow progress if we are only ever working on the same set of data and not actually adding to our fundamental knowledge.

The other problem is that these big and sexy analyses rely on the fundamental data, but rarely credit it. Yes there might be a full reference list in the supplementary information or datasets, but the actual paper itself will not mention the dozens, potentially many hundreds, of papers from where the data was drawn. That means those foundational papers don’t get credited in things like Google Scholar or Pub Med, and appear to be less useful and important than they really are. That drives down their apparent relevance still further and makes them less likely to be ranked highly enough for an author to claim they are important to some hiring or promotion panel or funding body.

So, they are both undervalued and under credited. Couple that with the point I raised before that some referees apparently don’t even consider such data to be publishable without an analysis and it only makes it harder to get basic data out there. With the top journals now sometimes having 100 plus page SI with full descriptions and even depths of analyses and discussion to keep the main manuscript length down, it’s only going to get worse and even more normal papers (that have been important to the basis of the main paper) are not being cited and authors are not credited for their work and contributions.  

But I think there is a simple solution to this. Reference lists in papers should include all references, no matter where they appear in the paper or the SI, or alternatively, the SI should also be credited by citation counters. That would immediately be more fair (if your work formed any basis of the publication you should be cited) and it would massively drive up the citation counts on basic science papers (but not inflate them, merely get them to where they should be). That then also means these papers would be far more competitive in terms of how they appear compared to analytical papers, and make them much more appealing and make it more likely people would be willing to contribute their time to produce them. After all, if you get as many citations for your paper that resolves some important bit of taxonomy as you do for a more complex and expansive study, the former might suddenly become rather more appealing.

This would be easy to implement too, and provide a shift in perspective and framework for research that is badly lacking. Fundamental data is just that, fundamental, and these papers would not be possible without the background work. Yes, it all contributes to science, but it is only fair to credit the work that provided the material for your studies, and you should also contribute, not only take the work of others to elevate it. More basic data is needed, and we should all be working to produce it.

This is a similar post to my recent one about phylogenies in papers, in that it is a bit of a moan, but it also, I think, underlines a bigger point about science in general and scientific publications. The title might be provocative and earn a reflexive, ‘yes, of course’, but is it really?

I would contend that the classic progression of science is ‘observation – hypothesis – testing’ and I don’t think that’s too controversial as an idea. Yes, we want to get to tested hypotheses and confirmed ideas that build our understanding and give us a theoretical framework for understanding the natural world and how it works. But I think the first part of this is science in its own right.

Again, this post has been prompted by several reviews I have had for papers that claimed they were problematic even unpublishable, because a hypothesis wasn’t tested, and this is the point I want to get to. Leaving aside that we already write and publish review and synthesis papers that are intended to bring together knowledge and understanding, and no one has a problem with them, there are other papers too that don’t even attempt to test hypotheses. Although more rare now, there are still observation papers and notes that simply consist of things like the first record of a species in an area, or first observation of an unusual behaviour or other such records. They are literally providing a datapoint, and there’s no need to test a hypothesis (indeed there may not be a hypothesis to test if the data is simply ‘this bird was seen here’), but they are still useful, and still published and cited.

Ironically, I would think that for palaeontology this would be more natural. We spend an enormous effort logging strata and describing anatomy and this is all data, but not hypothesis testing. Even some things like naming species and identifying elements are creating hypotheses, but it’s rare we actually test them. Most notably of all, phylogenies are hypotheses, not answers in their own right, but it’s rare they are tested against say strata to see how they align. All of this is considered normal and unproblematic, but then publishing a set of data or a hypothesis is suddenly not science because of the lack of testing? I don’t see it, and moreover, I don’t see why others don’t see it. Collecting data and even exploring it e.g., seeing if there are any correlations or evaluating if it is consistent, are perfectly acceptable, and important in the formation of hypotheses and their future testing but that doesn’t mean it must be done now in this work.

As with the previous post, this has not been something that has prevented me from publishing my work, but it is a comment I have had multiple times from referees on various projects over the years and I’ve had to argue it repeatedly, so it’s clear that this is an apparent concern for people. But it really shouldn’t be – the very act of reporting data (new fossils, anatomy, measurements, techniques) is important for science and doesn’t make a work unworthy of publication or somehow insufficient as content for a publication or the scientific literature. After all, where would we be without data?

I’ve been on a bit of a run for the last few years with naming a number of new species. In particular, that has been with papers where the primary purpose of the paper was simply to get the thing described, named, and work through the various comparisons necessary to demonstrate that it is new. However, for almost every one of these that I have done (both recently and in the past), referees and editors have suggested that a phylogeny should be included in order to properly show exactly where the new taxon might fit.

This sounds immediately sensible and reasonable, but actually I think it’s rather problematic for a number of reasons. As this has come up so much, and is something I have discussed with some colleagues in the past, it roused me into writing this post about the problem. Partly, obviously, so I can moan about it. But also literally as a placeholder for the next time this comes up and so I can point to this post and not have to explain yet again why I don’t think a taxonomy paper needs a phylogeny.

So here are my reasons in no special order, though somewhat ascending in terms of complexity and importance. In theory at least, any of these can be ‘overruled’ by whatever it takes to make a paper correct and acceptable should be done, but the central argument I would make is that it’s not required at all because:

1) It’s not the paper being written. If the paper is a taxonomy one, it doesn’t need to be a systematics one. The two are obviously linked, but the fields are not synonymous and just because a species or genus is named doesn’t inherently require a phylogeny. If the definition and diagnosis is solid, that should be sufficient.

2) There may not be space. I did recently get the inevitable request to add a phylogeny in a paper that was already well over the space limit in that journal. So adding in new methods, results, and discussion sections, as well as at least one new figure is obviously adding a lot of material, and that means either cutting something else I want to include, or paying even more in excess charges.

3) The expertise may not be there. Not everyone can put together a phylogeny, and it can be a huge amount of work. Even just adding a single line to an existing matrix and coding it up and then running it is really time consuming, and not everyone has the time to do some extra big piece of work to add to a project. But if you are learning how to do this as it’s not your area, it’s then a massive ask, and it’s not as simple as ‘just get a coauthor to help’ if they don’t have the knowledge either, or you don’t want to bring someone in on the paper.

4) Critically, I would make the point to say what does a phylogeny actually add to a taxonomy paper? Unless it is some incredibly odd and aberrant or unique taxon where it is not at all clear what it is related to, as part of the descriptions and comparisons, it should be obvious what clade (even quite a narrow one) the species belongs to. This is because we now define so many clades and even single nodes on cladograms are defined by unambiguous traits that have been established through phylogenetic analyses. What were we doing with all this data if not to help define clades and work out the identity of isolated or incomplete or new material?*

So, if we already know that this new species is a member of group X because it has so many features in common with them, and likely shares unique traits, what does the phylogeny tell us?  That it might branch slightly earlier or later than one or two other species is not inherently informative about any evolutionary patterns, radiations or anything else. Unless you actually then add an analysis of rates of changes, or patterns of single traits etc., the phylogeny alone isn’t adding very much (and potentially, adding almost nothing).

The resulting cladogram will also still only be a hypothesis, and for many groups will either be entirely congruent with every other result going, or will clash with at a least one result where there are very different competing results. Yes, adding in one new line can really be crucial for resolving various clades, but that is pretty rare. Looking at my own species for example, we named Zhuchengtyrannus as a tyrannosaurine and in every analysis it has come out as one, Bellubrunnus was named as a rhamphorhynchine and in every analysis it has come out as one, and Petrodactyle was named as a ctenochasmatoid, and probably a gallodactylid and has come out as a gallodactylid. Even before we ran the analysis for Skiphosoura we were confident it would come out as a derived non-pterodactyloid monofenestratan with the proportions of the wings and tail, and so it came to be.

This adds a final relevant point here – there are new phylogenies coming constantly. It’s such a mainstay of so many studies that if a phylogeny isn’t included here, the taxon will almost certainly appear in one very soon afterwards (as indeed happened for all of the species named above, where it only took a year or so for them to be formally analysed). The odds that multiple people will code and analyse this animal with a revised and updated matrix, and do it better, and more thoroughly, in a dedicated paper, very soon is very high. So why push for what will likely be a rushed, imperfect result that will be a lot of work and probably uninformative, if something better will follow soon anyway?

All in all, I think that’s a fairly comprehensive set of solid reasons that a taxonomy paper does not inherently require a phylogeny. More importantly, I think it’s something referees and editors should stop suggesting it. It’s not the only thing like this either. I similar see or get requests on papers that say ‘just do a histological section’ or ‘just CT scan it’ or ‘just check it with method X’ like this is trivial, or even necessary. I remember for the Zhuchengtyrannus paper being asked to CT scan it by one referee, before been assured that there wasn’t even a scanner in China capable to taking the specimen! Even if there was, the time, money, software, and expertise needed to get a scan and then do something meaningful was very much out of our reach. Yes, it would have been nice, but it’s not a trivial ask by any stretch of the imagination, and not necessary to describe and name the animal.

What is good, and what is needed for what the authors are trying to do with the paper, are not the same thing. We are community, working together with different skills, support, funding, access, and time, to try and learn what we can and do effective science. Pushing for something that may even be inappropriate if it forces people to include something they are not comfortable doing, or requires a major amount of work, or to bring in additional collaborators, or means restructuring the paper isn’t a reasonable request at the best of times. When that doesn’t actually improve the paper, and will be rapidly superseded, it makes it a doubly inappropriate request.

It’s an apparent reflex that a new species needs a new phylogeny. To be fair, I have got all these papers through without needing one, so it’s not like there is a ban in play. But it is clearly a pervasive attitude that I seem to have to fight against every time, and I wonder how many phylogenies have been run and published because either the referees or editors insisted, or the authors thought the paper would not get through without it. It’s difficult enough to do good taxonomy these days without adding unnecessary barriers and I hope this is something that can be resisted.

*Yes, you can use phylogenies for lots of other things too, but all the data defining nodes is most useful for this exact thing. Also, it’s notable that when anyone publishes a new specimen of a known species, it’s assumed that the diagnostic traits are sufficient to place the new specimen with that species. No one insists on a phylogeny to make sure they come out together, with the implication that such traits are a good indicator of what is and isn’t a species, except, apparently, when one is new, when suddenly they are not enough on their own.

This is a revised and updated version of an old post of mine that’s now nearly 10 years old, so it seemed sensible to give it a polish and re-release it into the wild. So, what do you do to become a paleontologist?

This question comes around and around again online, and I still regularly get e-mails asking exactly this from people who are interested in becoming palaeontologists or getting into paleontology. There is plenty of good advice out there in various forms but even having a post on this before and doing a whole podcast episode on it (Terrible Lizards: TLS07E06 Working with dinosaurs) has not stopped the emails to me or question appearing online.

For anyone who has come to this blog because of this post and doesn’t know me, I am a palaeontologist working on dinosaur behaviour and have been for over two decades (I got my PhD back in 2005). Though I’m British and based in the UK, I’ve had palaeontology jobs in Ireland, Germany and China and I’ve got numerous colleagues in the US, Canada, all over Europe and in places like Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and South Africa that I have talked to about working there, so I have a decent picture of what issues are relevant wherever you are from and where you want to be. There will of course be things I don’t cover below or that vary significantly (e.g. the duration of various degree programs and what they specialise in etc.) but this should cover the basics.

Hopefully this will help answer the major questions, and clear up some big misunderstandings and offer some advice to get into palaeontology. There are also some harsh truths here but I’m trying to be open and honest about the realities of trying to make a career of this competitive branch of science. So, with that in mind…

What do you think a palaeontologist does?

A lot of people asking about getting into the field seem to be seduced by the apparent image of the field as a glamorous science. There’s fieldwork in exciting places, media coverage (you can be on TV, in movies!), new discoveries, naming new species and generally being a bit cooler than the average biochemist or experimental physicist. But if this is what you think, it’s actually pretty misleading. You are only seeing the very top people and most of us don’t get much time in the field or travelling in a given year, and spend most of their time in an office and while that might include writing papers, there’s plenty of grant writing, admin, teaching, and less exciting stuff. I rarely get into the field and probably >90% of my time is spent teaching and doing admin work for my university. A fair chunk of my research and outreach output is done in my own time taking up evenings and weekend and even vacations. I don’t get to sit around and play with fossils all day and there are very, very few people with senior enough research positions who get perhaps even 50% of their time to do real research and fieldwork. There will always be paperwork and admin that needs doing and even writing research papers or planning a field season can be really quite tedious at times. Real joy comes from discoveries in the field or in research, but these are moments you work for, there’s not a constant stream of them.

So, it’s worth making sure you have a realistic impression of real life as a palaeontologist and ask yourself if you have realistic expectations of what the job might entail and where you may end up. That said…

Do you know what jobs are available?

Palaeontology tends to be thought of as people digging up fossils and then maybe researching on them and / or teaching about them. Palaeontologists are scientists and they work in museums or universities. That’s not wrong, but it masks a pretty wide range of careers and employers. It goes back to my point above, there are lots of jobs for palaeontologists or people working in the field of palaeontology and in addition to researchers and lecturers, there are science educators, museum curators and managers, exhibition designers, specimen preparators, photographers, science writers, palaeoartists, and consultants of various kinds. People can work for media outlets, national parks and other government bodies, companies that mount or mould specimens, that monitor building sites and roads for uncovered fossils, and others.

One of these might be more what you are interested in – you don’t have to end up as the senior researcher in your national museum to have ‘made it’ and similarly, that can mean you have a very different set of requirements to get a different kind of job. You pretty much have to have a PhD to teach at a university, but you can potentially get a job working preparing fossils with little more than a good high school education in some museums. Experience and engagement with the field can always lead to you changing paths. You can start off as an artist or preparator and end up writing papers or even going a PhD, and I know of people who started out in science without a degree (or at least a relevant one) that are now full professors or have some senior palaeontological position.

There are also lots of opportunities in various places to be a volunteer, and you certainly don’t need a PhD or even a degree to get involved in scientific research. I know of high schoolers who have managed to publish papers – some drive and knowledge can go a long way, and there are people who have an entire palaeontological research career as a ‘hobby’ with no formal background who have worked their way into being a researcher alongside their regular job. There are opportunities to engage in the science without actually holding a professorship at a big university. If some of the information coming up is a bit daunting, there are options and alternatives.

Do you know what the job market is like?

Despite the above listed variety of jobs out there, there are still not a huge number of jobs in palaeontology, and fewer still for academic positions. Worse, there a lot of people who want them. If you are desperate to get into an especially sexy area like dinosaurs or carnivorans then it’s even worse. For every academic job there are likely to be 10 well qualified candidates (and quite possibly 20 or more), and these are all people who have held at least one postdoctoral position (maybe 1 available for every 5 people), and have a PhD (maybe 1 available for every 20 or 30 people who want to do it). It’s very common for people to slowly drift out of the field simply because they cannot find a job even after years and years of training and experience and a good record of research. I know of colleagues who did their PhD around the same time I did and never found a permanent position. Others are stuck in jobs they would rather not be in, hoping for something better and, sadly, when finances are tight, palaeontology is often a field which suffers cuts more than other sciences (we are seeing closures of museums and research institutes at the moment). As with the point above, I’m not saying this to put people off (though I’m sure it does), but it is worth knowing the reality of the situation. Getting on a degree program, even coming top of the class will in no way ensure you get on a doctorate program, let alone in the field you want to study, let alone a job at the end of it.

Do you know what the career trajectory is?

As noted above this can vary enormously depending on what you may want to try and do, but I’ll focus here on academic positions since that’s what most people do want to do, and it’s generally the longest and most involved pathway. First off you will need an undergraduate degree, increasingly this tends to be in the biological sciences though there are lots of people with a background in geology. You’ll need to know at least some of each, but it’s perfectly possible to forge a palaeontology career (depending on what you do) with a very heavily biased knowledge in favour of one or the other (my degree was in Zoology and I know extremely little about different rocks, their formation, or what it means). Most people don’t specialise seriously until later in their career, so don’t worry about doing one and assuming it’s a problem, and don’t get hung up on doing a palaeontology degree – there simply aren’t many of them about and it’s not a deal at all if you have not done one.

With a good degree you can get onto a Masters program which will obviously increase your knowledge further and improve your skills, and then onto a doctorate which will be anything from 3-6 years depending where you do it. It could take a year or two to get onto a given program if there is something specific you want, or of course you may need to work to get the funds necessary for tuition fees etc. Most people will also then go on a take one or two positions as a postdoctoral researcher or similar before finding a permanent job. Some of these are short term (a year or so) and some can be much longer (5-year special research fellowships are rare and great if you can get them, but a one- or two-year contract is more common). You may end up taking some short-term jobs (parental leave cover, or for a sabbatical etc.) and can bounce around on contracts for a while before landing a permanent position. All told, it’s likely to be at least 10 years and could easily be 15 or 20 between starting at university and a first year undergraduate and having a permanent position at a university as an academic. This can also involve moving round the country or between countries (and continents) to find a job (I went from Bristol to London to Bristol in the UK, then Munich, Beijing, Dublin, London, Bristol again (for only 3 months) and then settled in London across 18 years) and all the hassle and expense that entails. Again, if you are dead set on working on taxon group X at university Y, be aware that it’s likely to be a very, very long shot or needs to be a very long-term career goal.

How do you start?

Assuming that this is still something you think you want to go for, how do you actually start on the road to becoming a palaeontologist? Well, the short version is to go to university and do well. That’s what I did, at least in part because I wasn’t any more interested in palaeo than some other fields in biology and I kinda drifted this way (this is really common, even people who start absolutely dedicated to working on one particular area get sidetracked by new interests or simply the available opportunities).

If you are looking ahead even to that, then just focus on your schoolwork to get the best qualifications you can. Palaeontology is a science and these days you need some maths and computer skills and the more the better. Being good and maths (specifically statistics) and programming will be of far, far more use to you at university and beyond in a career than learning the names of dinosaur species or the exact age of a given formation. Other basic subjects like English to improve your writing and communications skills will be useful too, biology on its own will only get you so far.

Of course, with so much more information out there now online there are much better ways to get started and to learn something about possible careers, universities, current research, museums to go to, etc. etc. You may be surprised to find that a what of what you know is not that relevant or important for getting into the field. Knowing a whole bunch of facts isn’t a bad thing, but understanding principles, being good at absorbing knowledge and interpreting things and coming up with ideas and testing them are far more important. You can always look up a fact if you forgot it or don’t know it, but if you can’t effectively come up with ideas to test, collect good data and organise your thoughts and communicate them, then it’s obviously hard to do good science. Learning things like names of species and times and places they are from is obviously a good start, but don’t think it’s a massive head start on potential peers.

Obviously, you’ll want to focus on palaeontology, but biology and geology sources are important too, a wider knowledge base will be better than a narrow one. So, in sort of an order that will lead to you learning and understanding more and getting better:

• Read online. There are tons of good sources out there – follow people on Blusky, join Facebook groups, listen to podcasts, read blogs etc. etc. and that’s before the absolute wealth of information on Wikipedia (that also then links to other sources including research papers!). Absorb information on biology, geology, current research trends, the history of the subject and the fundamentals of science. Engage and discuss things with people.
• Read books. Build up your knowledge base with some good popular science books and then if you can access them, get hold of some university level books that are introductory for subjects you want to engage in. There are good books out there on palaeontology generally and various branches like invertebrate palaeo, mammals, human origins etc. Public libraries can often get even very technical works in for free and there are others online. Some books can be very cheap second hand. (I’ve got some suggested ones below)
• Get more practical experience and engage with the field and fossils if you can. Visit museums and go fossil hunting. If you can, volunteer at a museum and get some experience and training no matter what form it might be. It will be useful, but again, having experience in the field won’t be a major advantage to get into a given degree program compared to understanding things.
• Read papers. Large chunks of the scientific literature are online and available. You won’t get everything you want, but you will be able to see a lot of things. Learn from them, not just the science being done, but look at patterns and trends and look at how papers are written and delivered, how hypotheses are produced and tested. See what makes a good argument and a good piece of work. These will be very hard to engage with if you have never done something like that before, but it is absolutely something you can build up to.
• Get to a scientific conference if you can. As with reading papers, it may be hard to dig into technical material given by experts aimed at other experts, but you will learn something from it, and get to see scientific discourse in action and meet people. Speak to students about how they got started in the field and speak to academics about their programs and what finding or positions may be available.
• Try to get involved in scientific research if you can. Offer your services to academics with whatever your current skills and knowledge you have and see if you can help. It might be very peripheral sorting out specimens, or merely collating data or drawing things for a figure and it might not end up in authorship on a paper, but it would get you actively engaged and see the process of research up close. I have had people assist me from Germany and Australia, so you don’t need to be physically in the same building to collaborate and get valuable experience and training.
• Be open about learning and try to do things yourself and be independent. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, but asking for help before you have even tried to do something yourself is not a great way to learn. So work on your skills, but if you are doing the above this should come naturally – the act of finding books, podcasts, tracking down papers, finding out when and where conferences are, who is the right person to contact at the local museum, where is a good fossil hunting spot etc. will build the skills to be an effective learner which will make everything else easier. It also shows independence – no one wants to work with someone who can’t do anything for themselves without asking for help or advice first.

Any, though in particular all, of these will give you a huge advantage when it comes to getting started for real on a degree, or with a new palaeontology job, or internship. The best students know what they know and what they don’t, and have the initiative and drive to seek out opportunities to learn and get experience and are not put off by setbacks. You may not be able to get to a conference or find an academic looking for help, but you really should be able to start at least reading books and even papers and developing your knowledge and understanding. That will massively appeal to people looking to recruit to positions or studentships and can make a big difference.

If you are looking to take someone on and they know a lot about the subject matter, that’s great. But most probably won’t and even if they do, you’ll want them to be able to go beyond that – can they find and absorb new information, come up with new ideas, work out how to test them, plan to collect data, and interpret it, work out what help they need and when, and communicate all of this effectively? That is someone who you can send off to tackle any problem in science whether they know about it now or not, and is someone you definitely want to work with.

TLDR

Palaeontology is a hard field to break into, most don’t make it even if they are hard-working and talented and deserve it. But, if it’s what you really want to do, then be aware of the risks and go into it open eyed but also hopefully armed with a bit of knowledge and advice as to what you can do to stand a better chance. Be prepared to have to move, be prepared to have to sacrifice a great deal (time, effort, salary), be prepared to end up somewhere very different to what you might have expected or planned, but also be prepared for the possibility of a fantastic job. All of it is of course up to you, but I wish you the best of luck and I hope this is some useful advice.

To finish off, here’s a few more things to get you started, suggestions of various books to read and ways to help build up your knowledge from the most basic information all the way up to academic work:

Books to read to become a palaeontologist | Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings

A list of posts I created with various basics including things like how to find papers and what to do at a conference: The complete ‘how to’ guide for young researchers (so far) | Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings

Various websites with resources to check out if you want to get into research and be able to access and build up data and information:

Online resources for palaeontologists | Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings

Pterosaurs have three parts to their wings. There’s the big ‘main’ wing (the brachiopatagium) that goes from the tip of the fourth finger down to the ankle, there’s the little propatagium that sits in the crux of the elbow and is supported by the pteroid bone, and then there’s the uropatagium (or sometimes cruropatagium) which sits between the legs.

The brachiopatagium gets all the attention and for good reason, it makes up most of the wing, and it’s the most commonly preserved, and we know a lot about it already including some remarkable details of the stiffening fibers, muscle fascia layers and the potential for airsacs to be embedded in them. The propatagium is perhaps the rarest to preserve, but given that it’s shape is largely controlled by the size and shape and orientation of the pteroid, and we have a good handle on that, it’s not a very contentious issue. The uropatagium on the other hand has been an issue for a very long time with all manner of arguments about its size, shape, structure and how it varied between lineages. And so my new paper out today with Edina Prondvai, is a long overdue review of the information we have on this unusual bit of the flight apparatus.

Lots has been written about this before, but the information is scattered across numerous papers and reinterpretations of interpretations which means that things are, at best, rather unclear and at worst actively contradictory – even for single specimens. This doesn’t mean that our work is the definitive or correct version, but hopefully it at least brings everything together and makes it all as clear as possible. I would say the main conclusions we came to on just about everything would really fit with the general current consensus anyway, there’s nothing heterodox here, but as ever, clarity is important!

So, the really short version (of what is really quite a long and detailed paper) is that there are two basic plans for the uropatagium. First is the classic non-pterodactyloid version that is large and sits between the legs, being attached on both sides down to the ankle and supported by the long fifth toe, and is also attached to the tail in the midline. The derived pterodactyloid condition has a split uropatagium, so it’s really a pair rather than a single sheet, with each side sitting in the crux of the leg, down to a now reduced fifth toe and probably terminating at the base of the tail in the midline. Like the brachipatagium (but possibly unlike the propatagium), the uropatagium does have some stiffening fibers present in it, but they only turn up in a few specimens so might not always be present or be generally thinner and less likely to preserve.

This really is the big overall conclusion of the work, and it may not seem like a lot, especially when a lot of this is hardly news. It’s also though still rather sparse overall, we really don’t have that many of these membranes preserved and most of them are for non-pterodactyloids. Even the pterodactyloids we do have are all ctenochasmatoids meaning the data only covers one branch of the pterodactyloid tree and only for specimens from the Jurassic. So, we don’t really know what is going on in any other pterodactyloid lineage or in the Cretaceous as a whole. Based on the shape and structure of the fifth toe and tail in these animals, it’s reasonable to infer that the pattern it is probably very common if not universal for pterodactlyoids, but we don’t actually know.

Although they are obviously quite different animals in a lot of ways, it is notable that the bats show a much greater variety of uropatagial shapes and attachment patterns than do the pterosaurs with varying degrees of attachment to the tail and their calcar (an ankle bone analogous to the pterosaurian fifth toe). That’s despite the fact that pterosaurs clearly have a lot more variation going in terms of size at least compared to bats, and arguably in some other features like terrestrial ability and adoption of marine habitats. In other words, if the relatively ecologically conservative bats have a whole bunch of uropatagial shapes that have evolved in the last 50 million years, how likely is it that the pterosaurs only really had two (plus a probable intermediate shape in something like Skiphosoura) across their much great ranges of size, habits and time? The obvious answer is that of course we don’t know, but it does at least suggest that we might be missing a few odd versions, with the anurognathids being a clear case that seem to combine a long toe and short tail, but their uropatagia are very poorly preserved. The flipside of this argument is that the other wings seem to be incredibly conservative, so maybe this variation we are seeing in the uropatagium is actually quite a bit in context. It’s the sort of thing we can’t easily solve without more specimens.

As I say, there’s a lot more in this long paper. But I’ll also close with saying that it’s taken a while to get here, this project was started at least 15 years ago and was supposed to be a partner to the paper I did with Ross Elgin and Dino Frey on the brachiopatagium that came out in 2011, so it’s been in gestation for quite a while. But good data doesn’t date, and this has been an ongoing source of contention so while it’s taken us quite some time, it’s been great to dust it off and finally get it out. This may also give a little hope to anyone who has had a project stuck for a while that it can still come out one day.

The full paper is available here: HONE DWE & PRONDVAI E. 2025. The shape, structure, function, and evolution of the pterosaurian uropatagium. An Acad Bras Cienc 97: e20250129. DOI 10.1590/0001-3765202520250129.

The azhdarchid pterosaurs are well known for including the largest flying animals of all times in their ranks. Giants like Quetzalcoatlus could reach 10 m in wingspan, and in addition to being huge overall, they had large heads on often very long necks. But research on them was often rather limited with their fragmentary remains and problematic taxonomy.

The famously long time it took to see a full description and proper definition of Quetzalcoatlus really did hold up quite a lot of research. Lots of azhdarchid pterosaur bits and some important specimens from across North America and elsewhere were in something of a limbo. They might well belong to this animal (and many we referred to it) but it was hard to be sure until we knew exactly what it actually was.

So it should be no surprise that between this, and some other work giving us a good idea of how azhdarchids varied as they grew and variation along the important neck vertebrae might now ‘release’ a bunch of other specimens from limbo. And so enter Infernodrakon hastacollis – the ‘hell dragon’ with the ‘spear neck’ from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana.

A new paper led by Henry Thomas came out late last week (catching us out a bit, which is why I’m late with this post), is now out naming and redescribing quite a well known azhdarchid specimen. This is a single neck vertebra that couldn’t be much more ‘end Cretaceous’ if it tried – it was actually found alongside the juvenile T. rex skeleton known as Jane. This specimen had been described in 2006 as Quetzalcoatlus sp., but now we have the context to look again, we think it’s a new species.

Henry started this project some time ago and one of the major things that was done as part of this work was to 3D scan and carry out retrodeformation of the really rather crushed cervical. Working with Timothy Gomes and Joseph Peterson (who are also authors on the paper), they were able to restore this element effectively, though the two ends, which contain most of the useful taxonomic information, were in much better shape already.

The single neck bone is some 350 mm long but is only a few centimetres wide. That makes it incredibly long, even by azhdarchid standards, and it may be proportionally longest vertebra recorded. Obviously one vertebra isn’t the best starting point for working out the size of the animal, but we estimate that it had a wingspan of around 4 m wingspan, though it is not clear if the individual was an adult at the time it died or was still growing. It’s at least possible that Infernodrakon could have reached giant sizes in a large animal.

Despite the inevitable early comparisons to Quetzalcoatlus, we found that it actually had more in common with another giant, Arambourgiana from Jordan. The paper contains a new and detailed phylogeny of the azhdarchids, including a whole bunch of isolated bits which we take a look at, and suggest that there might be some more taxa out there hiding among these parts. Not a real surprise really, but still nice to have some support for this idea and a framework for some more detailed assessments in the future.

I want to finish off by thanking Henry for inviting me onto the project, and the other coauthors for their contributions. Finally, we need to thank Jun-Hyeok Jang for their superlative artwork that they did as a restoration of the animal that was used in the paper.

The paper is online here if you want to see it: Thomas, H.N., Hone, D.W.E., Gomes, T., Peterson, J.E., 2025. Infernodrakon hastacollis gen. et sp. nov., a new azhdarchid pterosaur from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana, and the pterosaur diversity of Maastrichtian North America. Journal of Vertenrate Paleontology, e2442476.

I’m delighted that today I have a new paper out with a really exciting new pterosaur, that I think adds an awful lot to our understanding of pterosaur evolution, as well as the animal itself being rather interesting. It’s often fairly easy to say that a new find ‘fills a gap in the fossil record’ but some gaps are much bigger than others, or a situation is rather complex that can be clearly resolved with the right fine (or at least, provide an interesting new hypothesis). To follow through this new find and its implications, we need to start with a short bit of pterosaur history and evolution.

For the first couple of centuries of pterosaur research we could split them into two groups: the rhamphorhynchoids and pterodactyloids and the two simply didn’t connect. The earlier rhamphorhyncoids (now properly called ‘non-pterodactyloid pterosaurs’) had proportionally small heads and necks, a separate naris and antorbital fenestra, a short wing metacarpal, wing fingers where phalanx 1 was quite short and 4 quite long, a long fifth toe and, most obviously, a long tail that was usually bound together with long zygapophyses. The pterodactyloids were then the opposite, long heads and necks, a single merged nasoantorbital fenestra (NAOF), a long wing metacarpal, a long 1st and short 4^th wing phalanx, a reduced 5^th toe and a short and unbound tail.

This all changed with Darwinopterus and the discovery of a pterosaur with a big head and neck, an NAOF but otherwise a very much non-pterodactyloid body plan. This gave us a new grade, the monofenestratans, and when a bunch more species and specimens were found or recognised, they formed a nice cluster that were all close to one another but clearly different from their forerunners and the later pterodactyloids. It certainly answers some questions – the head and neck evolved first and then the rest of the body changed, but it’s not really showing a clear transition or pattern of all of these various characters that are being altered. All of the characters past the neck might have changed second, but in which order did they alter, and which ones came first in the head? For that, we’d really need some more intermediates, one that plugs the gap from the non-pterodactyloids to the first monofenestratans, and then again from these to the pterodactyloids? To try and simplify the problem, we have A, C and E, but can we get B and D? Well, guess what?

So in the new paper out today, I and my colleaguesdescribe and name a new monofenestratan, Skiphosoura. There’s a *lot* I could say here, but there’s a lot in the paper and a massive supplementary info section, so I’ll try and keep this short and sweet and concentrate on the big stuff.

First off, it’s huge, the biggest known from anything like a complete specimen and one of the largest things in the Solnhofen (important aside, it’s from the Solnhofen), alongside the biggest Rhamphorhynhcus and Petrodactyle coming in close to 2 m in wingspan. Although disarticulated, it’s nearly complete with almost every bone present and they are in somewhat 3D, so we get access to tons of data we’ve not had before in the monofenestratans. It has a bony head crest, it’s got big teeth, it’s pretty robust and it’s got long legs. Looking at the specimen that first time I saw it, it was clear it had some odd features and it certainly looked more derived than Darwinopterus and the others, but was it really? When we ran a phylogenetic analysis is where things really got interesting.

Skiphosoura really does come out as ‘D’ in the analogy above, it’s got a bunch of features that we associate with the early monofenestratans, but it’s also got some very pterodactyloid like features that show a transition from one state to the other and plug this gap very effectively. Even more intriguingly, Dearc, the recently described Scottish giant is pulled up from being a derived rhamphorhynchine close to Rhamphorhynchus, and to being ‘B’, the link from these to the monofenestratans. Lining these up we then get a really clear transition for pretty much all of the characters I listed up top.

The head in Dearc is notably long and its neck is longer than earlier forms, plus the naris is huge so these are all more derived that we see in the traditional ‘rhamphorhynchoids’ but are not yet at the  monofenestratan condition (and as an aside, have a more derived prepubis too, so it’s not quite all head and neck first). In Skiphosoura, we have the big head and long neck and confluent NAOF of the monofenestratans, but we also now have a longer wing metacarpal than before, the wing finger proportions are nearly all the same, so 1 is longer and 4 shorter than the earlier forms but not at the pterodactyloid ratios, the fifth toe is greatly reduced, but still has two bones and not the one of the pterodactyloids and most notably the tail is short, but still bound by zygapophyses. So, we’ve got a bunch of features that more derived than in Darwinopterus and kin, but not quite at the pterodactyloid condition.

This is really, really cool. This is giving us a real insight into the pattern and timing of changes across the whole skeleton and what that means for how and when all these different and important shifts happened. Remember that the pterodactyloids get much bigger than the earlier forms, and have a fundamental change in their wing shape (the massive reduction in the uropatagium that comes with a short tail and reduced 5^th toe) and a fundamental difference to how they walk, so these are not just anatomical traits changing, they represent a fundamental shift in their biology and with massive implications for how pterosaurs changed over time and the opening up of new niches and the creation of a new body plan. Skiphosoura and Dearc really plug those gaps and help show the transition and this should be a major source of research going forwards looking at those changes to the body plan and the implications to flight and terrestrial locomotion to explain how the pterodactyloids became the animals that they were and that dominated the Cretaceous. Hopefully this is a first, but major, step in that progression.

There are obviously various other things in this paper too, that are at least worth mentioning here briefly. While this is not the first monofenestratan from the Solnhofen, these are currently very rare and so this is quite an addition. The 3D nature of the skeleton adds a ton of new information on these intermediates and is basically the only one that is preserved like this right now, so it’s really important in that regard. We have a new phylogeny in play, that it addition to the resolution in the middle of the tree, adds some novel relationships down the bottom (or firms up some previously very uncertain areas), and on a personal level, it’s nice to see Petrodactyle included and it pop out basically where I thought it would, and with some more characters supporting it’s identification as a valid taxon. I should mention at this point, that there’s a ton of new characters in this tree (which is really comprehensive) and, if we’re right about the relationships, there is a serious bit of taxonomic revision needed on the various Darwinopterus-like taxa with animals previously considered different species of a single genus being spread around the tree. Finally, we have some commentary on ecology and behaivour of these animals, so there is a lot crammed in and stuff that is relevant to pterosaur evolution, taxonomy, relationships, anatomy, flight, ecology and more. It is, therefore, I think fair to shout about it quite a bit!

Obviously to round off, I want to thank my collaborators and coauthors, Adam Fitch, Stefan Selzer, and René Lauer and Bruce Lauer (and the Lauer Foundation). It’s taken a ton of work to get to this point and I’m delighted we made it. Now go read the rest of the paper because there’s a lot to unpack here and this isn’t doing much more than scratching the surface. You can access it here:

Hone, D.W.E., Fitch, A., Selzer, S., Lauer, R., & Lauer, B. 2024. A new and large darwinopteran reveals the evolutionary transition to the pterodactyloid pterosaurs. Current Biology.

While I’m posting links, it seems like a good opportunity to mention that like so many others, I have made the leap to Bluesky, and I do also have a (not that much used) LinkedIn account too. So if you want to follow me there, please do. For now my Twitter is still running, but I think it’s only a matter of time till that fades, but my Facebook page is still doing fine. There will be a new episode of Terrible Lizards next week that will be all about this paper, so more info coming there soon too.