What’s up with your perforated parapophyseal ramus, Apatosaurinae indet. BYU 20178? — Featuring: What have we learned?
November 30, 2024
I happened to be reading back over Tutorial 34: How to document a specimen, when something caught my eye in the example photo we used of how to capture the label and appropriately positioned scalebar along with the specimen:
BYU 20178, cervical vertebra from an apatosaurine sauropod in ventral view, anterior to the left.
Somehow, when I wrote that post, I didn’t actually look at the photo I was showing you all as an example of How To Do It Right. And, worse, I ignored my own advice from the same tutorial: to actually look at the damned specimen while you’re right there with it.
If I’d done either, I would have noticed that the left parapophyseal ramus (at the top of the photo, supporting the cervical rib) has a whacking great hole in it. Here you go, in close-up.
Merely a close-up of the previous photo, showing the relevant area.
Infuriatingly, it’s one of only three photos I took of this specimen (it was during the Sauropocalypse of 2019), and the only one in ventral view.
BUT! Check out this posterior view, which is one of the other two photos. (The third is useless for our present purposes.)
BYU 20178, cervical vertebra from an apatosaurine sauropod in posterior view, upside down.
From this angle, it looks like a perfectly respectable apatosaurine cervical. Could it be that the parapophyseal ramus, facing us edge-on at top right in the photo, is just not displaying the perforation from this angle?
I dont think so: there is a distinctive pattern of cracks in the posterior face of the diapophyseal ramus, which you can see in both photos, and which I’m highlighting here in red here:
And here:
What appeared in the first photo to be the part of the parapohyseal ramus with those cracks is now seen to be diapophyseal. And that original photo up at the top doesn’t show a perforation at all, just an oblique view of the cervical rib loop. It looks like a perforation because from that one angle the parapophyseal ramus perfectly overlays the diapophyseal. But now we know what we’re looking for, we can see where the overlap is.
Here’s that first photo again with the overlap emphasized by adding a fake shadow:
What have we learned?
First, we’ve learned that nothing is up with the unperforated parapophyseal ramus of Apatosaurinae indet. BYU 20178. It can go about its business.
But there is a broader lesson here, about looking a photos of complex three-dimensional objects, especially when they also have complex surface textures. By all means, look at such photos and enjoy them — but be very careful about drawing conclusions from them in isolation. They can be terribly misleading.
So misleading that when I laid down the first sketch of this post, it really was going to be about the osteological novelty of the perforation. I’m laying my card on the table here, I’m dumbass enough to have walked right into the trap I’m warning about. The only thing that saved me was a trivial wrinkle of my method, which I’m going to share now in the hope that it helps. Here it is:
When I prepare an image for use in the blog, I don’t rename it from the camera’s uninformative name IMG_3527.JPG to something like BYU-20178–apatosaurine-cervical–ventral.JPG. No, instead I rename it pedantically to a filename that also retains the camera’s originally allocated filename — in this case, IMG_3527–BYU-20178–apatosaurine-cervical–ventral.JPG.
Why does that help? Because it meant that when I returned to this draft post long after that first sketch, I was able to see that image number 3527, locate the original IMG_3527, and see that I had IMG_3528 right next to it — and that photo had the critical posterior view.
This probably seems like a very little thing; but it’s helped me many, many times over the years. Not only in blogging, either, but in figure preparation for formal publications. When I make a multiview like the apatosaur cervical that’s Figure 6 of Wedel and Taylor (2023) on bifurcated cervical ribs, the layers aren’t just named things like anterior and ventral, but IMG_6735 anterior.That means if I need to check my interpretation of part of the figure, I can find the other photos I took around the same time to compare with.
I recommend it.
References
Behold! The glory of the Lego Giraffatitan
November 17, 2024
For our wedding anniversary last year (30 years!), Fiona gave me the very wonderful Lego 21320 kit, Dinosaur Fossils, which builds into impressive skeletons of Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Pteranodon. This is a truly great kit and I’d encourage anyone to go out and find one.
But you know what’s even better that Lego Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Pteranodon? Lego Giraffatitan.
This is not a kit you can buy, but a rebuild of 21320, using free instructions provided by someone going by the name LegoFossil. I don’t know who that person is, but I salute him or her!
Part of what’s beautiful about this is that it’s not just any old Giraffatitan, it’s very recognizably the specific mounted skeleton in Berlin, with the same pose and the extra skull down at ground level where you can actually see it. But more than that: in a way I can hardly explain, it captures the spirit of that mount.
It looks great from lots of different directions. Check it out:
It’s not perfect — what is? The forelimbs are distinctly thicker in lateral view than the hindlimbs, where they should be pretty much the same. The scapulocoracoids are beautiful and big, but leave the ilia looking a bit anaemic by comparison. Limitations of the available connectors mean that the stride is somewhat exaggerated. But all these things are easy to forgive because it just looks so darned good.
That’s why it’s been sitting in the centre of our mantelpiece for the last seven months:
All hail the Lego Giraffatitan!
Back in 2013, John Conway was doing some paintings and Darren Naish was drawing lots of animals for a book. I chipped in to help with their artwork and some back and forth ensued. All this happened on Twitter, and I wrote it up in an SV-POW! post with lots of embedded tweets.
But with the progressing enshittification of Twitter (I refuse to call it X), that post is rendering less and less well, and at some point will probably fail completely. So I am reproducing it in a form not dependent on a doomed third-party API.
Enjoy this blast from ten years ago!
John Conway 🦣 @john
Stupid painting takes too long. I should outsource this.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
.@nyctopterus Here you go: 
That’ll be £8, please.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@nyctopterus Now I regret not having used MS Comic Sans for the lettering.
John Conway 🦣 @john
Salamanders are surprisingly difficult to paint. Too formless or something.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@nyctopterus “Salamanders are surprisingly difficult to paint” <– “Always with you it can not be done.” Here you go:
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@nyctopterus That’ll be £8, please.
Darren Naish
Urge to draw #temnospondyls won’t go away. Stop reading Schoch 1999, #JeholWealden2013 is tomorrow & it’s mostly #dinosaurs. But but – –
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Dude, I already drew you one. (You have to share with @nyctopterus though).
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor Brilliant work, thanks, I assume it’s CC BY? #terribledrawings #lame
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Even better, it’s CC0 — public domain! But hey, you accidentally misspelled #awesomedrawings
Darren Naish
There really do need to be lots more good temno drawings. I mean, good Platyhystrix pics: there’s Bakker’s… and that’s it.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣@TetZoo
Here you go.
That’s be £8, please.
Darren Naish
That’s seven #temnospondyls illustrated. Each one takes 20 minutes but can only spend time drawing on rare occasions.. otherwise writing.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Twenty minutes? Har har, that’s rubbish. I can do them in TWO minutes. Look, here’s my newest:
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor Oh wow, you’ve come through again with outstanding panache. Verily, Doug Henderson is quaking in his boots. #temnospondyls
Darren Naish
“When CM Kosemen told me of his plans to invite ppl 2 send in their own illustrations… I thought it was a tremendously bad idea” AYY Intro
Charon Henning
@TetZoo So bummed I missed deadline for this. LOVE the book. Supporting your podcast. #AllYOURYesterdays #tetrapodcats
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TheOddAngel @TetZoo I feel your pain. I also wasn’t able to finish my feathered Dipldocus in time to be included.
Ezequiel Vera
@MikeTaylor I believe there are many of us who missed the deadline… maybe there is an AYY: Episode Two in the future?
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
.@ezequielvera I hope you’re right, fort sake of my speculative quadrupedal tyrannosaur:
Charon Henning
@MikeTaylor Vaccuming up prey throughout the Cretaceous, the Hooversaurus Rex was a relentless predator ….
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TheOddAngel NOT DIRECTLY CONTRADICTED BY THE FOSSIL EVIDENCE, that’s our motto!
Ezequiel Vera
@MikeTaylor @TheOddAngel @TetZoo you haven’t seen my gliding ankylosaur :-P
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
Here you go, I’ve saved you the trouble.
Darren Naish
Wow, people really don’t like drawing braincases, do they? Especially crappy line drawings throughout the vertebrate literature, sigh…
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo “Wow, people really don’t like drawing braincases, do they?” <– Here you go.
CC By as usual.
@keesey
@MikeTaylor If you went with CC0 you could avoid the shame.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@tmkeesey Shame? I’m not following you.
@keesey
Let’s just say attribution is a double-edged sword. ;P
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor Hey, that’s >>>brilliant<<<, thanks again! But it’s an occiput, not a braincase :( Something tells me you don’t do skulls…
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo I copied it from the Suuwassea basicranium http://app.pan.pl/archive/published/app49/app49-197.pdf
I’m pretty sure it’s something to do with the head.
Darren Naish
Dear World: just because Burian made Diadectes green & like a fat iguana, doesn’t mean it was so. It could have been NOT GREEN, you know.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo “just because Burian made Diadectes green & like a fat iguana, doesn’t mean it was so.” <– Yes. Proof here:
Darren Naish
Thanks LOADS to @mattkeevil @RosemaryMosco @UK_Wildlife @Blackmudpuppy for salamander pics used at #TetZoo :) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2013/10/01/amazing-world-of-salamanders/
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo I can’t BELIEVE you didn’t use mine! All that work!
@phylopic
This wonderful article by @tetzoo
on salamanders reminds me that PhyloPic could really use more salamanders. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2013/10/01/amazing-world-of-salamanders/
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@PhyloPic Here you go:
Darren Naish
How long does it take me to draw a gar? I decided to time myself. A: about 15 mins. Results are pretty ropey but good enough.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo “How long does it take me to draw a gar? About 15 mins”<– Pathetic! It only took me ONE minute!
Will Petty 🌳🌳
@TetZoo C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la gar.
Darren Naish
When time allows, gonna draw fish. Each takes c 10 mins. Let’s see how many I get done in average work day. Follow #drawingfish. 1 so far.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Come on, slow-coach, I’m beating you already!
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor No you’re not, I’ve done two so far today. Anyway, it’s not a race :) #drawingfish #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo I retake the lead: THREE fish in a day!
#drawingfish #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt
Mark Witton
You know, I’m thinking that #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt is the true revolution in palaeoart we’ve all been waiting for.
Darren Naish
@MarkWitton Yeah, HE should have done those new Royal Mail #dinosaur stamps. Mike, you should be raising hell.
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo @MarkWitton Like this, you mean?
#MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt #rockinItOldSchool
Mark Witton
@MikeTaylor Yes. Constructed with the same consideration for scientific accuracy as the actual product, I see.
Darren Naish
#drawingfish I just did a hagfish, lamprey & chimaera which brings final count to 9 fish for the day. @MikeTaylor, did you beat me? :)
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Not yet … but the world has not seen the last of #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt! Bwahaha! Mwahaha!! BwahahaHAHAHA!
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo OK, here you: lamprey and hagfish
#MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt
Darren Naish
@MikeTaylor Aww shucks, much better than mine, but hope you don’t get hurt when I don’t publish yours in a book (unlike mine, which I will).
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Fine! I’ll make my own book! Of #MikeTaylorAwesomeDinoArt!
Charon Henning
@MikeTaylor Cult classic in the making ….
Darren Naish
We learnt at #SVP few yrs ago that Tsintaosaurus doesn’t look as it does in the books: anyone know if this has been published? #dinosaurs
@mike 🏴 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🦣
@TetZoo Yep, it’s right here.
SPECIAL BONUS!
This post came about because of the death of Twitter. These days I am over on Mastodon, and it’s really good: absolutely no adverts, a collegial atmosphere, absence of nazis. Come and join us! I’m @mike if you want to follow me, and if you can’t find a server you like, John Conway’s sauropods.win has been working really well for me.
Here’s some art that I was commissioned to create as a celebration!
Tutorial 46: how to write an abstract
November 13, 2024
We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a profoundly fallible AI summary, we could read a summary written by the actual authors, who know the material inside out?
We can, of course. It’s called an abstract, and pretty much every paper has one. Back in ye[1] olden times, authors didn’t write them: they were created by third parties to summarise the main points of the article. These days, you — the author of a scholarly article — are expected to provide the abstract, typically 200-300 words or so, that in some sense represents the article.
But in what sense?
Too many abstracts represent their article by trying to whip up enthusiasm for it — not summarizing the findings but teasing the reader as though to pull them in like a clickbait headline. That’s really not how it should be, because the reality is that an order of magnitude more people — maybe two orders of magnitude more — will read your abstract than will read the paper it’s attached to. You can’t make people read your paper (especially if it’s behind a paywall), so you need to make the abstract count.
Here, then, are four simple rules for writing an abstract that gets the job done.
1. Summarize, do not introduce. I’ve written here before about how an abstract should be a surrogate for a paper, not an advertisement for it, and this remains the single most important thing to remember. For those 99 in 100 people who will read the abstract but not the paper, we need to make sure that the abstract tells them what they need to know. So don’t write:
The body size of the snake was estimated based on extant snakes with a morphometric affinity to Palaeophiidae. The cosmopolitan distribution of Pterosphenus schucherti is modelled based on the sea surface temperature (SST) constraints of the modern cosmopolitan snake Hydrophis platurus, and the known fossil localities of the species. The present findings provide crucial insights into the global paleoecological landscape of the Eocene
Instead tell us what what the body size[2] of the snake was, what cosmopolitan distribution you found, and what insights these findings provide in the global paleoecological landscape of the Eocene.
Otherwise people are going to read your abstract, and go away with the message “this snake had a body of some specific size, and had a distribution, and that provides some insights”. Is that what you want? Huh? Huh? No. Didn’t think so.
2. Do not assume specialist knowledge. This is difficult because we work in a specialist field and some amount of specialist terminology is inevitable. But we should still do our best to reduce the amount of background knowledge a reader needs to make sense of our abstracts — again, because the potential readership is so much wider than for our actual papers.
Needless to say (I hope), we should strive to make all our writing as comprehensible as possible — always writing “it flies fast” rather than “the taxon under consideration exhibits velocitous aerial locomotion”. But that goes double for abstracts. So for example, one might write:
The thickness of the articular cartilage between the centra of adjacent vertebrae affects posture. It extends (raises) the neck by an amount roughly proportional to the thickness of the cartilage.
For those versed in the neck-posture wars, it’s hardly necessary to point out that extension of the neck involves raising it (and flexion involves lowering it), but for the wider audience that reads an abstract it’s worth spelling out.
3. Omit needless words. This is, famously, one of Strunk and White‘s rules, and it remains excellent advice. As with “Do not assume specialist knowledge”, this is good advice for all writing but especially so for the abstract.
When I started my palaeo Masters (as it then was) at Portsmouth, I had a very bad habit of writing unnecessary double negatives of the kind the Sir Humphrey Appleby might use. Instead of saying “Taxon X resembles taxon Y”, I would say “is not dissimilar to”. I did this all the time. One of the best things Dave Martill (my supervisor) did for me was to red-pen all these circumlocutions. I hope I’m better now. You be better, too
(When I was doing the video to publicise Brontomerus in 2011, I mentioned Utahraptor near the end, and stupidly described it as “not unlike Velociraptor“. I was so mortified when I heard the first draft of the video that I got in touch with the videographer and begged him to snip out the “not un-“. He did a great job, and I bet you can’t hear the join.)
4. Write the abstract after the paper, not before. It’s so tempting, isn’t it? You have a new, blank document. You type in the title, your name and academic address, and the word “Abstract”. Then you go ahead and summarize what the paper is going to to say.
Except you don’t know what the paper is going to say. Sure, you have a sense in your head of how it’s going to run, but no project plan survives contact with data. In my experience, almost every paper ends up saying something I didn’t anticipate when I started, or leaving out something I did expect to say, or drawing a different conclusion from the one I expected. (When I started to write my 2009 paper on Giraffatitan brancai‘s generic separation from Brachiosaurus altithorax, it was with the intention of proving that “Brachiosaurus” brancai was a perfectly cromulent species of Brachiosaurus, and I ended up discovering the exact opposite.)
So now I leave the abstract till last, so there is no danger that the ghosts of its early version will haunt it. I have a paper in the works now that’s reached 25 single-spaced manuscript pages and 15 illustrations, which I hope to submit within a week — but it’s abstract currently reads as follows:
Abstract
XXX to follow.
Only when the paper is actually complete will I go back, read through it, and summarize as I go, trimming down to 250 words or so if necessary when I’m finished.
Go thou and do likewise.
Notes
- “Ye” should be pronounced “the”, as it was in the days when it used to be written. It was always and only an abbreviation, “y” standing in for the “th” letter-pair. Similarly, the “e” on the end of “olde” was silent. So if arrange to meet your friends at a pub called “Ye Olde Hostelrie”, you should pronounce it “the old hostelry”.
- “Body size” as opposed to what other kind of size? Soul size? When you write “size”, body is understood. Just write size. And while I’m at it, do not give your paper a title like “A new, large-bodied omnivorous bat” or, worse, “A new large-sized genus of Babinskaiidae”. Seriously — large-sized? Again, as opposed to what? Big-hearted?
Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest. Here’s Liam’s question, lightly edited:
I’m currently a 3rd year Computer Science student, and as much as I love programming and Software Engineering as a whole, I’ve also always loved studying dinosaurs, and other specimens. I also have interest in potentially going for a PHD in paleontology one day to pursue this passion, which is why I wanted to ask for your opinion if it was possible to juggle both a full-time day job and a PHD program at the same time?
And my reply (which I did send to Liam the next day, but am only now getting around to posting here):
I never set out to do a Ph.D really. I just wanted an institutional affiliation so I could access online resources via the library, and it turns out that universities won’t (or at least 20 years ago they wouldn’t) just let you be an associate. So I signed up for a Masters, and that mutated into the Ph.D.
It actually wasn’t that hard, surprisingly — because you earn a Ph.D by doing research and I already wanted to do research and the Ph.D program was just a way to help me do that,
So my question for you is: do you really want to do research? If you do, then you probably can. You don’t get to year 3 of a CS degree without being a smart, analytical thinker, and your email tells me you’re a good communicator. The rest is all just stuff you learn: stuff about your taxon of choice, stuff about evolution, stuff about the various tools you can use for analysis and modelling.
But if you look deep inside yourself and decide that what you really want is to be the holder of a Ph.D, then forget it. If you don’t love the work for itself, you will soon grow to hate it. Then you become one of those dead-eyed zombie never-going-to-finish people. If down that path you start, destroy you it will.
So: it certainly is possible to juggle both a full-time day job and a Ph.D program at the same time. But I think you can only do it if either (A) you genuinely love both of them, or (B) you are truly exceptional.
So I have four pieces of advice.
1. Make sure you get a day-job that you love, not just tolerate. Don’t sign up for a Java factory to write enterprise beans for the enterprise just because the money is good. Find a job that lets you express all that creativity in building something of inherent value. You may have to sacrifice financially, but you’re at the perfect point in your life to make that choice, before you get hooked on the high-income lifestyle.
2. If you get onto a Ph.D program, make sure it’s one you love. For me that meant sauropods. For you, it might mean plesiosaurs or Permian synapsids or, for all I know, Miocene rodents. But don’t take an offer from a more prestigious institution just for the prestige: take on a research project that you actively want to do, and would do for the sheer fun of it even if you weren’t on the Ph.D program.
3. Consider doing a research Masters. It’s much less of an investment in time, money and effort, and will help you figure out whether you actually love doing this. It’s probably also easier to get onto a Masters, as you won’t be asking your supervisor to take such a big gamble on someone who’s doing it part time. If you can survive for an unpaid year after you graduate in CS, you could do a full-time Masters in a year; otherwise you can do it over a longer period as you work. (The University of Bristol is really good for this: you can do a one-year course that’s mostly research and which gives you a wide range of possible projects.)
4. Consider whether you need a higher degree at all. John McIntosh, the greatest of all sauropod palaeontologists, had no formal qualification in palaeontology (though he did have a doctorate in physics). That was in a time when it was hard to get access to the literature outside of formal programs, but that’s not true any more. If what you really want is to do research, then maybe just do the research? There is tons on this in the SV-POW! tutorial section. (And, again: if what you really want is not to do research then you will probably hate, and flunk out of, a Ph.D anyway.)
At that point Matt chipped in with more advice, which I’m including here:
My additions will be few.
Read Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on, if you haven’t already. Pick a topic, or find an advisor (official or otherwise) who will inflict one on you, then do this: Tutorial 38: little projects as footsteps toward understanding.
Then just keep doing that. If it leads to anything presented or published, yay, you’re doing science (it’s not science until it’s communicated, until then it’s just self-improvement). If it leads to a degree — and if that’s what you want, can afford, and are willing to make space for in your life — great! But the degree should arise out of the research, and not the other way around.
At least, that’s how it was for me. I got the opportunity to do research as an undergrad, and just kept going after I graduated. I was in a Master’s program, but my planned thesis topic didn’t pan out — which was the best possible outcome — so my actual MS thesis ended up being something organically spun out of my undergrad research. Then I got into a PhD program, but none of the things I planned to do panned out — which was, again, the best possible outcome — so my actual dissertation ended up being something organically spun out of my Master’s research.
Looking back, my personal research program was the continuously existing, actually important thing, and the theses for the various degree requirements were just chunks of that continuous whole that I extracted and submitted (to degree-granting institutions, and also to journals, but chunked differently) at the dramatically appropriate moments. And that has continued to work right up until now. I don’t need to turn in the segments for degree requirements anymore, now they can just be blog posts, abstracts, and papers.
If you have a day job you’ll end up doing paleo on weekends and evenings, but hell, I spend most of my day time teaching or in meetings, and a huge chunk of my research gets done on weekends and evenings, so I don’t know that you’re much worse off than most folks trying to make progress in this field.
Whatever happens, good luck, and as Mike said, follow the things you love, because that’s the only way you’ll stick with them.
The fate (so far) of my 50 submitted papers
November 8, 2024
At the end of October, I submitted a paper that’s been hanging over me for a couple of years. I’ve been in the habit of tracking nearly all my submissions since I started out in palaeontology, it happens that this one is number 50 in the list. It feels like an interesting time to stop and take stock of them all.
NHMUK PV R5937, “The Archbishop”, cervical vertebra S (probably C7). A. Reconstruction of right lateral view with neural spine, prezygapophysis, diapophysis, parapophysus, condyle and cervical rib restored. Most anatomical features are as in the reconstruction of Cervical V: only unique elements are labelled. B. Left lateral view. C. Dorsal view with anterior to the right. D. Posterior view. E. Right lateral view. F. Anterior view. Scale bar 20 cm.
And, no, the recently submitted paper in question is not the Archbishop description. I just tossed this image in because, hey, this is Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week.
Before I get into the details of what happened to those submissions, I want to note that of the 31 papers listed in my CV, eight are not listed in my submissions database. Five of them I didn’t track because I was not the lead author and so not involved in the submission process (Sharing: public databases combat mistrust and secrecy; Running a question-and-answer website for science education: first hand experiences; Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications; The Anatomy and Phylogenetic Relationships of “Pelorosaurus” becklesii (Neosauropoda, Macronaria) from the Early Cretaceous of England; The Moral Dimensions of Open). And three more don’t appear because they were minor works that didn’t go through the full formal review process (The Open Dinosaur Project; Better ways to evaluate research and researchers; Comment (Case 3700) – Support for Diplodocus carnegii Hatcher, 1901 being designated as the type species of Diplodocus Marsh, 1878).
That means that the 50 submissions I have in my database represent only 23 published papers — a hit-rate of less than 50%. What’s going on?
Well, first, my submissions list includes three “published” papers that aren’t on my CV: a Europasaurus entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a nomenclatural correction to my Giraffatitan JVP paper, and the Barosaurus neck preprint. So that means 26 of the 50 submissions are published.
What about the rest?
Five more submissions are still open: the Barosaurus neck paper based on that preprint, still in review limbo after eight years; an accepted chapter in a long-delayed edited volume; a paper on Joni Mitchell that was given Major Revisions from a humanities journal for (I thought) spurious reasons; an anatomy paper at PeerJ whose revisions should soon be finished; and the newly submitted paper that I mentioned at the top of the page.
Four more submissions, I have just abandoned. One was the original submission of what became Almost all known sauropod necks are incomplete and distorted, which I later resubmitted as new after I stalled for six years on responding to reviews. Another was a short note correcting a nomenclatural error in a Nature paper, which was basically ignored. Two more are chapters for the Phylonyms volume, which … well, that’s a long and depressing story for another day.
That leaves 15 submissions that were rejected. Some of these are dead forever: for example, the first palaeo paper I ever submitted, a dinosaur diversity analysis, which I ended up “publishing” as a sort of post-preprint ten years later. Some I gave up on after rejection, such as an attempt to reconcile phylogenetic and Linnaean taxonomy (rejected twice), a brief summary of dinosaur diversity that I optimistically sent to Science when I was young and stupid, and an RWA-era comment on what a “private-sector research work” is (three times at different journals!).
The other eight rejections, more happily, having been rejected from one or more journals eventually found homes elsewhere: my first (eventually) published paper, on phylogenetic nomenclature of diplodocoids; the Xenoposeidon description, our neck-posture paper (twice!), Why Giraffes Have Long Necks (also twice!), the Brontomerus description, and the paper on vertebral orientation (rejected from PeerJ as “out of scope”, idiotically).
So the final score comes out as follows:
- 26 published
- 5 still open (of which I am optimistic about at least three)
- 4 abandoned
- 15 rejected (representing 10 distinct manuscripts, of which six have since been published)
What to make of all this?
One thing to think about here is whether 50% is actually a decent batting average. Maybe a 50-50 chance of any given submission making it into the journal in question is not too bad?
And the reason why that may be so is that persistence tends to pay off: of my ten rejected manuscripts, more than half have gone on to be published elsewhere — garnering 400 citations so far (42, 57, 156, 95, 48 and 2, in chronological order). That is a happy thought to have in mind the next time I run into a rejection.
Another encouraging observation is that the rejections have tended to be concentrated towards the earlier part of my career: 14 of them in the eight years from 2004 to 2012, and only one in the twelve years since. I think there are three reasons for this, two of them good and one bad.
- I’ve got better at writing papers. That’s good.
- I’ve got better at judging what to submit and where. I’ve stopped aiming optimistic opinion pieces at Science and Nature and Biological Reviews. That’s good, too.
- I’m better known now, and that’s bad. Or, at least, it’s bad that being better known means I get better outcomes.
As scientists of course we strive to evaluate every work on its merits, not according to the name or status of the author, and deliberate actions are often taken to make sure that’s what’s done. For example, the reviewers don’t know who wrote the abstracts submitted to get a talk at SVP or SVPCA. And yet, and yet. The truth is that I have had a few ad-hominem reviews, and I’m sorry to say they were all concentrated in the first few years of my career.
Dear SV-POW! readers: don’t be That Guy. When you’re asked to review a manuscript by someone you’ve never heard of, put the fact that you’ve never heard of him or her aside, and review the damn manuscript, not the author. That’s not too much to ask.
Anyway, that’s my fifty submissions in 20 years. (In fact, now I come to check the dates, I see that today is exactly the 20th anniversary of getting back the Reject Without Review verdict on the first palaeo paper I even submitted!). Let’s hope I can get more efficient in the next 20.
My favorite piece of paleoart is now for sale
November 6, 2024
Sobia “helping” Brian Engh draw Ornatops.
I’ve written here before about Donald Glut’s The New Dinosaur Dictionary and the looooong shadow it cast over my adolescence. That book introduced me to a lot of artists I’d never heard of. The Dinosaur Renaissance was named two months before I was born, so I grew up with a mix of old school paleoart from the 1960s and before, and newer restorations by the likes of Bob Bakker, Greg Paul, William Stout, and — fatefully — Mark Hallett. Among the older artists that I first encountered in The New Dinosaur Dictionary was Neave Parker. Parker was active in the middle of the 20th century, painting dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals for the British Natural History Museum, the Illustrated London News, and books by Edwin Colbert and W.E. Swinton (see this page at the old Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs, and this almost comically ungenerous piece at the NHMUK).
Parker’s work was oddly evocative for me. It’s true that little of it holds up today in terms of anatomical accuracy, but the execution really worked for me — especially at the small scale and relatively low resolution (by modern standards) of the reproductions in The New Dinosaur Dictionary, which compressed the brush strokes into invisibility, lending the work a near-photographic crispness. Combined with Parker’s penchant for bright light and stark shadows, the work had a documentary-like air of reality, like I could step into the scenes and squint up at the sun.
I realize this is a highly personal take, and you may feel completely differently about Parker’s work. I’m not describing my objective assessment of his work in 2024, but its subjective effect on me in the early 1980s. I imprinted on Parker’s vision of the past, as I did on the work of William Stout and Mark Hallett and the rest. Specifically, I internalized from Parker’s work that when I stepped out of the time machine, the Mesozoic would be sun-drenched, and there would be palm trees.
This is Brian Engh’s painting of the hadrosaur Ornatops (McDonald et al. 2021) on display at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. It’s phenomenal, but like almost all pieces by my favorite artists, I prefer the original pencil sketch, for reasons I explained back when. Here’s my print of it, awaiting a frame:
This resonates for me on so many levels. The sun, the shadows, the (paleobotanically correct) palm trees, the sense that I could step through and run my hands over the animal’s skin and feel each bump and wrinkle. The sheer technical virtuosity on display. Perhaps most of all, the way that it collapses all the time between 1984 and 2024, letting me play chrononaut both in the Cretaceous and in my own life, a gangly kid in my dad’s recliner, The New Dinosaur Dictionary open in my lap, plummeting down the rabbit hole. And that is why this goofy horse-faced no-vertebral-pneumaticity-havin’ hadrosaur is, in fact, my favorite piece of paleoart ever.
Do you encounter flat surfaces in your daily life? Do the right thing.
Brian Engh recently launched his new website for Living Relic Productions, and there’s a store where you can buy his art. Both Ornatops pieces are there, the color painting because it was one of the first things he put up as a test article, and the pencil sketch because I requested it and he accommodated me (thanks, fam!). He also has some sweet stickers, so you can class up the joint with sauropods. Go have fun!
References
- Glut, D.F. 1982. The New Dinosaur Dictionary. Citadel Press, 288pp.
- McDonald AT, Wolfe DG, Freedman Fowler EA, Gates TA. 2021. A new brachylophosaurin (Dinosauria: Hadrosauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous Menefee Formation of New Mexico. PeerJ 9:e11084 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.11084
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
