Bristol Zoo

P1000875The zoo in Bristol has gone through a number of names in its distinguished history (first opening in 1836) and is currently the ‘Bristol Zoo Gardens’ though for a long time it was the last surviving ‘zoological and botanical gardens’ in the UK, and quite possibly the world. In fact thanks to its age it has a long-standing minor disagreement over its position as the ‘oldest’ modern zoo since while London Zoo first opened its doors in 1828 it was not until 1847 that it opened them to the general public and not just the member of the Royal Zoological Society and thus either predates Bristol by 8 years, or is 11 years younger.

P1000884In any case, both are important historical collections that have survived and even thrived in the modern era. Bristol Zoo is small and self contained close to the city centre but nevertheless manages to cram in a great deal and uses the limited space very well. Like London, they have moved away from large animals (elephants, rhino, giraffe etc.) so that despite the small size of the zoo, the enclosures themselves are roomy. Despite its age Bristol is one of the most modern zoos in Europe with almost every major building being either new or recently renovated and the collections as a result are very nice. Continue reading ‘Bristol Zoo’

Say hello to Aardonyx

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The skull of Aardonyx, courtesy Adam Yates.

Hopefully you have now said you ‘hellos’ so we can actually talk about the animal. Published today, Aardonyx was described by a team led by Adam Yates of Dracovenator fame. The beast in question is a new sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Early Jurassic of South Africa and has a few rather neat things to tell us about the evolution of sauropods. As ever I don’t want to simply rehash the paper as I’m sure a number of bloggers will cover most of the things going on and I’m not sure it serves a huge purpose for everyone to say the same things! There’ll be plenty of discussion I’m sure online, so I’ll try to be specific.

Continue reading ‘Say hello to Aardonyx’

Tremble ye mighty referees and authors

Possibly. Anyway, I’ve now been formally taken on as one of the associate editors of the palaeontological journal ‘Historical Biology’ (my thanks to Gareth Dyke for his invitation to join the board). Having preached much about peer review, reviewing and writing papers and even the editorial process I hope that I can put this all into practice. This might put more people off than it encourages, but those of you writing palaeontological papers, (perhaps as part of the PPC?) an at least consider HB as your target journal.

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Dragons of the Air

IMGP2431My PhD student Ross Elgin has made an appearance on the Musings from time to time, most notably with his guest post on pterosaur head crests (from his paper that was part of the Wellnhofer volume – still available people!). Now however Ross has launched is own blog too in order to help put his work and that of the ‘Pterosaur Flight Dynamics Group’ based in Karlsruhe into the spotlight.

For those who love their pterosaurs therefore, I suggest you head on over to Dragons of the Air where the first posts are already up, with more to follow, plus of course a number of pages on the research group too. Shamefully this means that I can’t get him to write any more guest posts for me, but on the upside, there’ll be more pterosaur goodness for everyone.  In order to kick things off in as an appropriate manner as possible, have a nice picture of a Tapejara in all its magnificence as can be found hanging from the ceiling in the main hall of the Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe.

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Behold the (possibly) mighty Deinocheirus

There is a tradition in archosaur palaeontology to refer to things we don’t know much about as ‘enigmatic’, and while an appropriate term much of the time, it is annoyingly overused. Basically if something is interesting and very incomplete it is left as ‘enigmatic’ which is often a euphemism for “I’m going to speculate wildly because there is no good evidence to contradict me” or “I’m not going to say anything about it at all”. Deinocheirus, in the public eye at least, sits firmly in the former camp and one can see why.

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Recovered from Late Cretaceous rocks the specimen consists of just a partial pair of arms. Very, very large arms to be sure, and certainly a theropod but after that things get murky. Most researchers seem happy with the idea that these likely belonged to some form of giant ornithomimid it has previously suggested to belong to a theirizinosaur. As a result of that lack of information (a pair of partial arms, described quite sometime ago, and in Russian as I recall) Deinocheirus seems to have entered into popular palaeo folklore as the great unknown theropod, thought I would have thought something like Gigantoraptor and the presence of other giant therizinosaurs would have left it without much potential glamour even if a complete one ever turned up. Still, it IS rarely figured and I have Max Langer to thank for this image from Warsaw (though it’s not clear if this is the original or a cast).

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More online resources

So it turns out that I have been put on yet another list of ‘blogs for X’, in this case a list of “100 excellent blogs for science teachers“. A number of other famous / infamous palaeobloggers are on there too, but the whole thing has quite a few good looking sites that are probably worthy of perusal if you have not seen them before.

Also while I’m on the subject of science communication, the evergreen (well, mostly orange) Ask A Biologist is still going strong three and half years in and 2100 questions later. Thanks to a bit of funding grubbing we also now have significant funds to revamp the whole site and that process is now well underway – expect a relaunch next year. We are as ever keen to recruit new academics to our ranks and to advertise our presence as widely as possible so do please link to us and send our address to any people you know who are keen on biology and science.

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Science by press release

Hot on the heels of my post the other day, this is a subject that has been raised before by many and is a multi-layered thing as there are lots of ways of giving the public the impression that there is a solid bit of science when in fact it is not there. This is obviously problematic as a pattern since those scientists who refuse to play such games (as they all should) can easily risk losing an argument before they know they are in one (and as far as I”m concerned public opinion and education are really important and should be engaged) or can plod through the mechanics of thrashing a poor paper in the literature to an unenthusiastic response from the media while the other side continue to champion their cause.

There are two main ways of doing this and both are in evidence if you compare actual research papers with media stories:

1. Bring out a paper and then use the press release to refer to things that are not in the paper. This can be wildly tangential or actually quite closely related but allows you to mention stuff that does not actually feature in the paper as part of your new study and of course you can take pot shots at other researchers / hypotheses with no-one to question you. Easy!

2. Base your press release around some unpublished work be it something that’s in review (or even rejected),  or a nice abstract. Since no-one knows what the as yet published paper actually *says* and there’s no data attached to the abstract you can say what you like and no-one can take you to task on it. Brilliant!

While both of these have (sadly) tried and tested histories, another possibility has now reared its head. Longtime Musings commenter Jerry Harris pointed me towards a paper on dinosaurs in the journal ‘Medical Hypotheses’ this week. Now I should point out that I have not read the paper in question and I am not specifically targeting it for criticism, merely using it as an example of what could happen. Medical Hypotheses as a journal is NOT peer-reviewed so basically things get published there with a certain and general lack of quality control over the content and style of the papers they publish, something that has allowed some highly-questionable-at-best-and-downright-terrible-at-worst papers to be published there (which is not a good start).

However, given that it seems that journalists are quite happy to publish all manner of questionable things that scientists say in interviews when exploiting the science-by-press-release loophole (and even distort the actual good science and quotes researchers do provide), it seems to me worryingly possible that the next thing for dishonest researchers to do will be to cram papers into this journal or those like it. They can then pretend they have a fully published and ‘proper’ paper and then go to town on the press front. Similarly as I noted yesterday this can act as a forum for people to splurge out hypotheses just to have them in print with their name on in an attempt to gain credit for ideas or concepts with some supposed credibility and support and dodgy taxonomists can slide in lots of new names in an archived library source.

In short, be wary. While this practice has gone on before, and thankfully remains rare, this is a possible avenue of future problems. Journalists must be more careful and actually read the papers they are quoting from – if the researchers are trying to play games then don’t let them. If the paper is ‘actually’ only an abstract, is in some non-reviewed or unrecognised journal then pick another source for your article, or speak to a few other researchers and find out what is going on. And finally, on a related note, since it is apparent that a dinosaur paper can get into Medical Hypotheses, I can’t wait for a paper on thorassic surgery to appear in Paleobiology. It seems only fair after all, or rather – why on Earth did they even take this? Has a journal ever published a paper with less in common with the journal’s official title?

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One last thing on science and the public

Since this has rather turned into science communication, allow me to present a little counter-point to yesterday’s essay by Neil Gostling. Namely this effort from the frankly often extreme and much derided UK daily, the Daily Mail. Read it if you dare / can and worry that, while this might be reactionary nonsense over the current uproar in the UK over the sacking of David Nutt, it was still written and one would assume actively liked by a serious number of readers of a National newspaper.

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Guest post: Now is not the time to sell science short

I seem to have drifted into ’science communication’ week rather by chance so this gives me an opportunity to put up this piece my my old friend and developmental biologist Neil Gostling that he recently had published in his ‘local’ newspaper in the US. Here it is in full, but you can read the original and the associated comments here:

Continue reading ‘Guest post: Now is not the time to sell science short’

A concern with internet discussions and academic honesty

In many ways this post is a continuation of the recent one on open access. This post is not intended as a criticism of online discussions (though there are some things that I think are more genuinely problematic) but merely an observation of a problem that is novel thanks to the internet and will I suspect cause problems for people in the future. Thus its discussion (ironically on the internet) and bringing the concept to light and into the glare of a public forum is I think a good thing.

I try to be as honest academically as possible which means that even if I have come up with an idea however small, and completely independently, if I am aware of this when writing a paper, I want to cite the other researcher who also noted this point. However, time was when the only discussion of most scientific concepts was done formally in the literature, or at conference meetings, or occasionally face to face. In other words it was limited to a fairly formal situation, engaged in only by academics, and only occurred to a limited degree.

Now thanks to the internet, there are hundreds of people conversing daily on blog comment threads, on message boards, on archived mailing lists and more. Lots and lots of ideas are being bandied about constantly, but all kinds of people and, importantly, these are archived and accessible online.

Therefore the question arises of how do act if I want to be scrupulously academically honest and make sure I’m giving someone else credit for an idea we both have had? (I’m talking here specifically about independent ideas, not using someone else’s ideas as a springboard for more research when a) you already know about it and b) it’s therefore easy and obvious thing to acknowledge).

I think it unreasonable to trawl through all those message boards and go looking for every comment anyone ever made to see what they said about ceratopsian horn function say. It’s practically impossible (even with online searches) and impractical in general. As much as anything it is obviously open to rampant abuse as you can fill every board with as much unfounded speculation as you like in great detail covering every possible angle and then claim you ‘thought of it first’ if anyone ever publishes any idea or general concept that overlaps with one of yours. But I am worried that this kind of thing may come to pass, not necessarily the dishonest approach of deliberately seeding ideas, but that of ‘accidental’ appropriation of ideas.

I would, I think understandably, be annoyed if I wrote a comment on a prominent site about say pterosaur flight and then saw words to that effect appear uncredited in a paper. But of course in their own way these comments are like conference abstracts, in that they are difficult to cite effectively or confidently. They are not reviewed, their documentation is uncertain (not all of this stuff is archived, some will disappear from the net etc.) and it’s often not clear in offhand comments and discussions if people making remarks are quoting other people, or even other papers when they put forward an idea, or if this is pure conjecture or based on any evidence (unpublished or otherwise).

In short, while genuine intellectual theft of ideas is and will remain rare, my concern is that some people will get upset that their ideas have been ‘stolen’. It could be hard if not impossible for someone to prove that they hadn’t read some comment or post online somewhere prominent. Back when scientific communities were smaller and communication was more limited and formal this pretty much could not be a problem, and while I’m not aware of any specific cases of this, I cannot help but suspect it’s only a matter of time. It is, I think, too easy to dismiss online discussions as un-citeable as this prevents credit from being given in cases where people have genuinely provided information or ideas that stimulated research. In any case unlike abstracts or papers, such ideas can really be cited regardless of a paper trail as personal communications from the person concerned (though these themselves are a little more uncertain now with the influx of extra people into the discussion).

I’ll leave things, there but as before this is something I think worthy of discussion since it is another aspect of modern science that needs to be adjusted to by a great many people quickly.

The effect of the media

Clearly I discuss the media on here a lot, and in general they don’t come out of it too well when it comes to science reporting. But the important thing is that it really does matter – the media has a marked and measurable effect on people’s perceptions of reality. Here (in PLoS 1, so free to read) a new study shows that even medical students can be lured into thinking some diseases are worse than others simply based on how much attention they get in the press:

“Undergraduate psychology and medical students were asked to rate the severity, future prevalence and disease status of both frequently reported diseases (e.g. avian flu) and infrequently reported diseases (e.g. yellow fever). Participants considered diseases that occur frequently in the media to be more serious, and have higher disease status than those that infrequently occur in the media, even when the low media frequency conditions were considered objectively ‘worse’ by a separate group of participants.”

The media IS important and it DOES have a real effect on how people react to science and so it IS critical that we engage with the media to help them do a better job and even make them do a better job.

 

The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perceptions of Illness
Meredith E. Young, Geoffrey R. Norman, and Karin R. Humphreys

PLoS ONE. 2008; 3(12): e3875.

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A snowy Monolophosaurus

Having covered the ‘arctic’ dinosaurs of Japan in January, the first snowfall of Beijing saw a very cold looking Monolophosaurus outside the IVPP so I braved the weather to take this.

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