The 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.

In 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.

In keeping with its traditions of botanical as well as zoological collections, the animals are housed in a series of enclosures that run around the edge of the zoo leaving a very large open lawn in the centre. Many trees and plants are labelled and important historical plants are protected, even when integrated with animal enclosures.

The zoo contains all that one might expect from a modern city zoo – an aquarium, reptile house, invertebrate collection and aviaries as well as numerous mammals. The zoo has always been forward thinking leading to such innovations as a walk through ‘aviary’ for fruitbats, and a similar open-plan enclosure for lemurs. Of special merit is the marine section of a large aviary containing numerous Antarctic seabirds and penguins which is joined to a section of sealions. The visitors can walk through the whole set up and then double back underneath with various windows and underwater tunnels to revisit the enclosures again from a new angle.

For those who like their zoos modern but with history and small but rich then this is a perfect day out and indeed was recently enjoyed by a big group of SVP-ers after the meeting.

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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.

For those who have missed out, the sauropods are those giant saurischian dinosaurs that have long necks and tails and four massive legs (like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus), but before them came the ‘prosauropods’ (or if you want to be a bit more technical: non-sauropodan sauropodomorphs) a paraphyletic group of animals which are superficially similar – giant herbivores with little heads and big necks and tails, but importantly were largely bipedal. Since the first dinosaurs and their ancestors were bipeds, it should be obvious that at some point some of the sauropodomorphs eventually changed from being bipeds to quadrupeds, and since *all* sauropods are quadrupeds then this happened sometime in the ‘prosauropod’ group.

Aardonyx is important as it can tell us a fair bit about this transition from biped to quadruped. There is a long and ongoing debate about which prosauropods (I’ll drop the ‘ s for now) were or were not bipeds. This largely centers around their ability to rotate the arm (or otherwise) so that they could place the palm of the hand flat on the ground (as with the often incorrectly reconstructed theropods). If not then it would seem unlikely that they were walking on all fours, despite their often large size (some exceed 10 m in length). However to make matters more interesting, there a very young prosauropods known that appear to be only able to walk on all fours suggesting that some may have switched from being a quadruped when first hatching and at some point becoming a bipedal adult.

So into this debate steps Aardonyx. What can it tell us about this shift from supposedly bipedal prosauropods to quadrupedal sauropods? The phylogenetic position of Aardonyx is very close to the sauropods and critically is the prosauropod closest to the sauropods which is still fully capable of bipedality, with the fully quadrupedal Melanosaurus being the only prosauropod more derived than Aardonyx and lying outside the Sauropoda. In other words, based on the phylogeny alone, one might expect that Aardonyx might show some adaptations towards being able to move as a quadruped like its more derived relatives, and not just as a biped as with many of the more basal ones.

And this is what we see – Aardonyx lacks any of the major specialisations for quadrupedality seen in the more derived taxa implying it was bipedal (as do some other characteristics). However, the forearm and the femur were modified such that they hold an intermediate position between more basal and more derived taxa implying that Aardonyx represents something of an intermediate between the taxa below and above it (phylogenetically speaking) and was perhaps on the way to quadrupedality with a slower gait and the occasional use of all four limbs for walking. This gives us a good idea of what may have caused the shift and how it first occured.

Finally I must say thank to Adam for sending me the paper early and all these pictures to use, and of course congratulations to him and his team on this interesting research. Adam already has his own post up about the animal over on his blog if you want more juicy detaily.

Incidentally in case you were wondering, the name does not relate to aardvarks or digging, just that the bones and especially the claws were embedded in exceptionally hard rocks that were hard to prepare.

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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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My 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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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.

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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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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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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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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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:

Science is important, but good science is imperative!

Good science is really important for our society. Issues from health care to education, from how we feed our population to how we move around the globe, from satellite TV to global warming, all depend on scientific research. We cannot pick and choose the science that we like and reject that which we do not.

As an evolutionary developmental biologist, I am concerned about this trend. This month is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” but the critical scientific message of this work is being eroded from the public consciousness. I teach a variety of biology courses related to evolution, development and zoology at SUNY Oswego. Evolutionary science is the key to understanding biology as a whole discipline.

“The Origin” was published in London in 1859, and for the first time in human history we had the opportunity to explain the world using a method not outlined by religion and to ask questions and derive a naturalistic explanation. Whether you are a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu or member of any other religion, science will get you the same answer to your question. Science is a tool, but it must be used properly.

In recent years, there has been an increase in attempts to conflate science with religion. This starts with the claim that science and religion are compatible because there are religious scientists. This is true, and I know some religious scientists, However, they do not use their religious beliefs to carry out their scientific explorations. If they did, it would ultimately lead to concepts like intelligent design creationism. That is dangerous because it seeks to undermine the importance of the scientific method.

In the run up to “The Origin”’s anniversary, I have been trying to gauge the public perception of science and, in particular, evolution. Some element of the mood was seen on the Sept. 16 letters page of The Post-Standard. There was a very polite and well-written letter suggesting that scientists really should stop going on about evolution. The argument went along these lines:

The idea that God created the universe and life within it is “simple.” Evolution is difficult, and, when confronted with possible explanations, we should take the simpler, or simplest, argument. We should use a philosophical ‘tool’ called Occam’s razor.

Unfortunately this is a false premise.

Named after the 14th century English Franciscan friar who first posited the principle, Occam’s razor, in the original Latin, states: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, and translates roughly to “Entities must not be multiplied beyond that which is necessary,” or, “Keep things simple.” This is true if you have two competing ideas; the simpler is statistically the better option. But you must compare apples with apples, and not with oranges. Religion is an apple to the orange of science: science is different from religion, and “‘Occam” cannot be invoked to compare the two.

Science does not require a belief system. We use the hypotheticodeductive system. This sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. This is how it works:

We start by making observations. From this we ask a question. We then generate a hypothesis (this is the part of the sequence that many would call a “theory” in everyday language). We then perform an empirical test. This is essential. Science is only science when it is testable, and most importantly when the hypothesis is falsifiable (if the hypothesis cannot be falsified — for example, “God did it,” it is outside the realm of science).

Finally, conclusions are drawn from the results. If the hypothesis is falsified, then we reject it and ask different questions. However, if the hypothesis is not falsified, and the experiment supports the hypothesis, it stands- until the next question is asked anyway.

If the hypothesis is supported by many experiments, it may gain the status of theory (in the scientific sense). We don’t stop testing it, but it may enter into the scientific world as close to a fact as science ever claims to have. In the case of evolution, we have asked questions and tested the hypothesis over and over and over again for 150 years. Darwin himself made careful observations for more than 25 years before he eventually published the nearly 500-page “abstract” that we know as “On The Origin of Species.” The ideas that Darwin had in the mid-19th century have changed in minute details, as we have developed an understanding of DNA and genes totally unknown in Darwin’s world, but the substance remains. Evolution by natural selection is a scientific theory right up there with Newton’s theory of gravity (yes, gravitation is “just” a theory, too, but a scientific one).

So, how and why is it that I claim that it is good science that will allow us to live in today’s world with all of the comforts that we enjoy and benefits that we experience?

The theory of gravity needs to be understood, as well as it can be, for planes to get off of the ground and defy an otherwise insurmountable force. Newtonian physics keeps the plane in the sky and allows your car to run. We enjoy high-speed Internet connections by relying on the best optical physics research and development that we have. No problems here, because our beliefs are not challenged and we like all of these things.

What about medicine? A report last month, on nearly every network I saw, claimed that 50 percent of all children born in developed countries today could expect to live to be 100 years old. This is great news! We all want inexpensive and effective drugs to treat disease so we can have long and healthy lives.

However, with an understanding of evolution and natural selection, we can see how and why we now have bacterial infections like MRSA, immune to all but the very strongest antibiotics. If only we had thought about it before we used penicillin for a cold or the flu! We set the ball rolling ourselves for selecting immune bacteria, and we failed to get rid of our flu to boot!

People need beliefs. However, as a growing population on a tiny planet, we need to do good science and let the results of supported science take us wherever they lead. Understanding the nature of science is imperative for us to benefit from the outcomes of research in all areas that make our lives easier. Understanding evolution will allow us to make sure that medical breakthroughs remain helpful. If we do not, then we risk actually selecting for dangerous pathogens, immune to our drugs.

Science if done properly can provide us with benefits that our own grandparents would find astonishing. However, we cannot pick and choose what we like. I think the final word on biology has to be given to the great American biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, who said, “Nothing in biology makes sense unless considered in the light of evolution”.

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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.

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.

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

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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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It occurred to me the other evening that the human memory can serve as quite a good analogy for the fossil record. While I have before covered some of the issues of bias in the fossil record, this might serve as something a little easier to think about since it’s based on something we all experience. Anyway, I’ll launch in and see how far I get before the whole edifice breaks down…

So the analogy – the personal memory of humans is like the fossil record. We can start with this instant, now, being the present (which conveniently it is). You can remember pretty much everything that happened in the last two minutes (I would hope) with great accuracy and also great detail. Your memory of this morning should be pretty good too, but perhaps not as detailed. Yesterday, not so hot, two weeks ago – getting tricky, six months ago – ah. In other words, the further back in time you try to remember the less detailed and comprehensive your memories will be. Your memory is constantly being added to at the front end as time passes and degrading behind the present and things sink into the past.

However, despite this, like the fossil record there are still lots of memories going a long way back. You can probably recall quite a few things from say 2004 with some detail, even if they are odd and incidental. What’s more there are still a few things you can recall with incredible clarity from even a very long time ago (I have a couple of crystal clear memories of some incidents when I was only 3 or 4 which I can describe in detail) and patches of a few days or weeks where you can remember a lot interspersed with years of little recollection.

Like the fossil record there are all kinds of little bits of information that could be teased out over time and things that link together and make sense in the context of others. Similarly, the absence of even big stretches of time in your memory does not mean things were not happening – you might not see a friend for several years but you know he was around in 1999 and 2006 so he was still alive in the meantime, even if you have no record of it. And just because you only knew him from the age of 11-18 at school does not mean that he was only alive between those times – he was around before then and afterwards.

At this point this start to get tenuous, but overall I think this paints and handy and useful little picture of the rock record of life on Earth and how we can should consider it.

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My colleagues Mike Taylor and Andy Farke among others have done an admirable job of promoting the concept of open access in palaeontology, both for data and for the actual research papers that academics produce. However, while this is on the whole a very good thing, it has I believe (in conjunction with other phenomena) produced problems from the frontline scientists whom it is supposed to help.

While what I am about to write may be seen as a complaint it should not be – it is an observation. It is for me currently problematic, but that does not mean that I do not support open access (I do) or that this is a huge issue (it isn’t) or that on balance open access is a bad thing (not true either). With change comes problems, some foreseen and others not, and most if not all ultimately overcome or sidestepped to the general satisfaction of most so this is not something I expect to be a long-term issue. Here I simply want to illustrate a couple of problems that I have not seen commented on or discussed before. So with this in mind, what’s the problem?

The issue is one of the critical mass of literature that is now landing on the desks (or these days, hard-drives) of palaeontologists. Now I admit that since I dabble in quite a range of areas (theropods, sauropods, pterosaurs, body size, flight, evolution, ecology and so on) I’m probably at the wrong end of this and if I just stuck to reading so, only the pterosaur and cladistics literature to keep up with systematics and new pterosaurs it’d be fine. However, I don’t, and in any case there are still subjects just as ‘narrow’ as pterosaur phylogenies that produce far more papers (we’ve quite possibly had more tyrannosaurs alone this year than pterosaurs, certainly more phylogenies) so it’s not necessarily a fair comparison.

When I was finishing up my BSc which was only just 10 years ago I would go along to the library every week or two and flick through the issues of a couple of dozen journals that the library had the were relevant to my interests and the courses I had taken. It took a few minutes (and in the Biology department at Bristol where I was based we had a bigger selection than many others I knew of in other universities). If I was starting to read research on a new field then I could get to a pretty advanced (for its time) online catalogue system and search the catalogues of both my own university and that of a number of others in the area and try to identify specific papers (from the title and keywords alone, and of papers only going back to around 1980) that might be worth a look and then try to get them via an expensive and not especially fast loan.

In other words, if I wanted say, to see what literature was out there on lion behaviour I might be lucky and find a few in the library and then be able to loan out a couple more that may or may not have been useful.  It could take days to get them all and I might be left with half a dozen papers. It would not be great, but it might well be sufficient for the purpose intended. If I wanted more than this, then I could read what I have and start trying to track down the records of those papers cited in the ones I had that looked important. I could also trace some keywords and titles in vast volumes that listed them and find new papers from there. Even an expert with a big collection of papers would probably struggle to have an especially complete collection of papers on so specific a subject, especially rare and historical ones, or those published outside of western Europe and North America.

Now I can go straight to Google Scholar and access thousands, if not tens of thousands, of articles of interest almost instantly. Sure you have to hunt though those you don’t want or need and download a bunch of rubbish or find critical papers are not accessible but the time saved (all that photocopying!) and range of material is enormous. Even things you can’t access at once are easy enough to ask for. You can track down almost any researcher in minutes and e-mail them asking for their papers when you might have had to send a transatlantic letter to a researcher (you hoped was not in the field and had not moved) and wait for a response. I’d guess that from scratch I could get 100 papers on tyrannosaurs today if I tried, and a fair few more if I e-mailed around and asked, when it might have taken me weeks or months before and cost a fair bit of money in loans and paper to get 20. I can also get historical manuscripts, whole books, extra notes and commentary, translated articles of non-English journals, whole masters and doctorate theses and more. Tons of foreign language papers (and even English language ones) I never knew even existed 10 years ago are now available online and with them, thousands of new articles. All of this is, of course, good. But it’s hard not to look at this wealth of information and not see a few problems with it.

First of all, for the uninitiated or inexperienced, it’s far harder to find the really good stuff. It takes time to work out what are good papers and which are not, good and bad journals and good and bad authors. If you only had access to 20 papers, it was easy enough to skim them and pick the half dozen that should form the basis of your next generation of reading and research – when you start with 200 that instantly becomes much, much harder. Similarly it’s easy to get blinded into thinking that what you have is enough – you might be able to download and read 100 papers, but without the half dozen key ones that really stand as vital in the field, all that superficial stuff many just not be good enough. Now of course this need not be too bad – the experienced researcher knows a good paper when he sees one, even for a field he has never looked at before, and journals like Nature and TREE have always been great reads, and you should soon spot an obvious gap in your collection if people keep referring to a paper you don’t have. However, I do think this is still an issue for some whereby quantity is confused with quality or quality can be masked by quantity.

Secondly and more importantly this availability seems increasingly to be viewed as a necessity and not a bonus. I see authors trying to cram a reference to every damned paper on a subject into a manuscript in either some unnecessary one-upmanship contest with the rest of the world, or desperately trying to give themselves credibility for simply having read 25 papers on a subject. Perhaps there are other reasons, but I can’t figure them out. Worse, this is sometimes used as stick by some referees and editors (and others)  to beat authors with. You can cite four or five papers to support and argument and then get criticised for leaving out one 1964 Brazilian article on the subject, or accused of plagiarising an idea because you had not read / cited that 1964 Brazilian paper.

This is silly.

Yes, I well appreciate that as a researcher you have a duty to know the field in which you are writing. You must read and understand and take in a significant fraction of the most critical papers on a subject and to do otherwise is a disservice to your own work and that of others. But that does not mean you should try to track down every reference that has ever related to a field and read it and cite it. There has to be a balance. I simply cannot stop to read *every* paper on theropod morphology on the off chance that I have been pre-empted on a point I wish to make, or to note the two exceptions that occur, or document every time someone else has said it before. It could take literally months in places to read the literature on a subject that might refer to one otherwise minor point in a paper. No one would ever get any work done, or would be forced to specialise enormously so that you just had one incredibly minor area to work on and could keep on top of the new papers.

In short, we need to strike some kind of balance, or perhaps rather come to accept a new status quo. There is an absolute shedload of data out there that is now accessible and did not used to be and this is a very good thing indeed. However, it is beyond the practical means of researchers to be expected to read every single paper that has ever been published in their field, or even to read everything published each year (depending of course, on quite what your field is). Things will be missed and mistakes will be made, just as they always have, but I think the sheer volume of material now available and increased communication between researchers makes it appear much worse than it is. It used to be seen as a faux pas if you missed a 70’s Nature paper on something, now it’s seen as problematic if you miss a foreign language paper published 70 years ago and the two are not the same. Good researchers and good referees will I’m sure help make this situation easier, but in the meantime I suspect things will be testing for some.

Many thanks to Darren Tanke today for loaning me this photograph of a Gorgosaurus, one of a number of tyrannosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of North America. This is a great photo as it really shows off one outstanding feature of tyrannosaurs (and indeed theropods in general) namely the fact that the teeth and jaws of these animals do not meet together as they do for humans (and other mammals, and lots of other things). Instead, the  lower jaw slots inside the upper one so that the teeth move past each other rather than coming together.

However you almost never see this. In mounted skeletons the jaws are inevitably open to give a dramatic gape and this is mimicked in a huge amount of palaeoartworks. Even in scientific drawings the jaw is typically half open to show the anatomy of the mandible, or missing entirely. As a result, this is very rarely illustrated and thus I imagine appreciated by many people. So here you have it, the tyrannosaur overbite, with the teeth of the upper jaw being clearly visible as they overlie the mandible. Incidentally this is not an extreme version, I know of (but sadly have not seen) a Ceratosaurus where the teeth in the upper jaw are so long that they finish below the bottom edge of the mandible when the jaws are shut! Toothy.

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Due to his ongoing battle with the internet, Adam Yates has moved his Dracovenator blog to here. So update your links and if you are not already, get reading his excellent blog.

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A long time ago in the dim and distant past on here I wrote about fossil chimeras and mounting skeletons and have since written about fake fossils of various kinds. In these I rather breezed over some of the different ways that fossils can be produced for display and it seems worth going over in a little greater detail and roughly defining a few terms to make things easier for people to understand and distinguish between the various things out there.

Increasingly, genuine fossils of large animals are not on display in museums. These are expensive and valuable artefacts and scientists need to access them, and the museums need to protect them. Big dinosaur mounts that tower into the air made up of original fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old are therefore rare. They are hard to examine, and difficult to keep clean and if they ever fell over…. However, even the most complete of big dinosaur mounts are often not as they seem and can be completed using a number of different techniques.

Here then are the ways that you can complete your dinosaur fossil:

1. Original material. While these are becoming rarer, there are a significant number of mounted skeletons being produced composed mostly or entirely of original fossil material. Since there are pretty much no *totally* complete dinosaur skeletons in 3-D, the odd part of another specimen may be used to fill in the gaps, effectively creating a chimera.

2. Repaired material. Even if you do have a complete specimen, the odds are there are a few chunks missing – a humerus with the end gone, teeth lost from the jaws, or the neural spines broken from a few vertebrae. These can still be used with the missing parts repaired and completed from plaster or a similar material.

3. Casts. You can of curse simply make a direct physical copy of the bones of your specimen and mount them, or from another specimen to fill in the gaps and these are casts. Most big specimens nowadays are casts of real specimens supplemented by sculptures of missing bits.

4. Sculptures. Finally, you can simply model the missing pieces from scratch and make them to fit the gaps and what you know of the existing anatomy or from close relatives. Sculptured bones run the full length from inept plasticine-like creations that look only vaguely like bones right through to superb ones that can even look better (since they have no breaks or distortions) than the originals.

A selection of casts and sculptures of dinosaur claws and various teeth.

Telling these different ‘bones’ apart is not normally too difficult with a little practice (though across a darkened dinosaur hall it’s not always easy). Typically original material looks organic in a way that even casts do not – natural swells and breaks and just the texture of the bones will look ‘right’. Repairs to original material are often crude, but in any case the instant change in texture and colour between a sculpted piece of plaster and the bone itself should be clear. Sculptures (whether as repairs or as whole replacement bones) often have little texture on their surface beyond a few scratches or dimples and are often a give away as their surface is so smooth. Finally casts often loose a little of the detailed surface texture of the originals from which they are copied but can usually be distinguished by their colours. Real bones generally have a range of colours (if minor) to them when casts are typically made using coloured resin or are pained after production and so are a uniform colour.

That’s quite probably more than enough of casts and sculptures, but this should serve as a guide to what is, and is not, real in museums and how to tell them apart and why this can be important.

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This post is in response to this current report. For once I’m not targeting the journalism, but the actual point of the survey. It’s an assessment of the public’s opinion on the teaching of non-evolution-based ‘theories’ (as everyone insists on calling them for no obvious reason, despite a lack of evidence that would make them barely viable as hypotheses) as part of science in the UK.

Right, here’s the rub. I don’t care what the public thinks here. They are not to be trusted. Look, yes of course you must consult parents / the public on general themes in education (do they want their kids to have more or less physical education, should history be focused on the recent past or great times in history and so on) and I’m all in favour of public education and dialogue, but in this case the point is absolutely and utterly irrelevant.

Let’s pick something comparable:

When you are ill do you a) seek a doctor (i.e. professional in the medical establishment) or b) take a straw poll of the nearest 1000 people to you and do what they say?

When your car breaks down do you a) call out a professional mechanic or b) take a straw poll of the nearest 1000 people to you and do what they say?

When your sink backs up and overflows do you a) call out a reputable plumber to attend the problem or b) take a straw poll of the nearest 1000 people to you and do what they say?

You may be seeing a pattern here. And it is this – not everyone in the world knows everything about everything. In fact when you consdier the truly stupendous and vast amount of knowldge in the world (whether it be about fixing spark plus, the Roman occupation of France, the second series of ‘The A-team’ or quantum physics) most people know next to nothing about anything. To get around this issue for things that are complex and matter we have a system of telling apart who does know something and who does not, like, for example internationally recognised qualifications like degrees and doctorates. You know who real doctors are as they hold MD degrees and are members of professional bodies.

Recognised and qualified experts in science are called scientists and those in the narrower field of biology are called biologists. It should therefore be obvious that the people who get to decide what is and is not good science and good biology should be the biologists. Joe Public should not get a look in anymore than he should be allowed to take out your appendix (unless he’s a doctor) or fix the plumbing (unless he’s a plumber).

The odd thing is people do know this – they go to doctors when they are ill, call out mechanics to fix their car, fly in planes with pilots, get architects to design houses and so on. They clearly at some level do know what they are and are not qualified to talk about (despite this evidence) but people need to think rationally about this. Don’t even think of taking a poll on something like this, the question is irrelevant and the people asked are in the main not skilled or qualified to give an accurate answer. It might tell you a little which way the wind is blowing, but its actual effect or outcome is meaningless. Ask the biologists what should be taught. Ask the teachers how. Don’t ask the public.

Now, before you sink your teeth in to reply (assuming you are going to contradict me) please first read these two posts: on academic authority and this on scientific dialogue and do also note that this is somewhat deliberately provocative – it’s deliberately exaggerated for effect. I’m still right though, obviously…

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Yesterday evening I came across this article in the Guardian newspaper (well, their online version) on the trials of an HIV vaccine. The article is exceptionally clear and spells out what was done and why, and why the results are ambivalent. IT avoids jargon, but does explain some tricky concepts well. Overall it’s great, and the Guardian should be praised for publishing it.

But. There’s another issue here – this wasn’t written by journalists. It was written by a team from the British Medical Journal. Now the Guardian is still doing the right thing by giving people access to well written, informative and expert views on a tricky subject. My problem, perhaps inevitably with this, is that well, isn’t that what they employ the journalists to do? The best thing in the paper on science is not written by their own journalists. Oh.

Now as I have said before, I think that the Guardian has the best science section going in a major UK newspaper and anyone who gives Ben Goldace a platform is onto something good. But surely they can do better than this? There is another article on the same subject in the same section here, and it is less clear and certainly more emotive with stronger language (‘hope dashed’) and soem contradictions with the BMJ version. It’s certainly better than many I have seen, but still not great. I’ve long maintained that a great many researchers are great communicators (or at least capable of great communication) in addition to my regular potshots at many mainstream ’science’ journalists and this I think rather proves my point.

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There are a great deal of technical words in science that people often dismiss as jargon, but as I have said (perhaps even more than once or twice) science writing is about brevity and clarity and technical terms are useful when properly defined. In stead of writing ‘that odd situation where the middle metatarsal of a foot is compressed proximally’ you can talk about arctometatarsals for example.

And with that horribly contrived introduction and definition under our belts we can move on. Arctometatarsals (sometimes referred to as ‘the arctometatarsalian condition’) are indeed as I described an unusual feature of some theropods whereby the central metatarsal of the three that the animal stands on (and thus number III) is constricted and covered by the flanking bones such that they splay out at the base. (For those who have missed out the metatarsals are the bones on the foot between the ankle and the toes – in humans at least the majority of the foot, though since theropods walk on their toes only, the metatarsal effectively add to the length of the leg).

You can see a nice example of an arctometatarsal here on this not great photo of Tarbosaurus and I’ve done my best to badly ink in the outlines of the other two bones in red. It should be clear that at the bottom of the middle metatarsal appears the same as the others but further up is appears to shrink and disappear behind the others. In fact is disappears *between* the others – it’s not behind them, but stuck between them. In some cases it can flare out a little at the other end, but usually it is reduced to a very fine splint of bone at the upper end.

This condition has actually evolved a number of times and is present in tyrannosaurs, the wonderfully weird alvarezsaurs (of which much more soon I hope), ornithomimosaurs, troodontids and even a couple of oviraptorosaurs. Among the more derived theropods it is then quite common and worth looking out for. Its exact function is not really known, but has been thought to correlate with running (and with the exception of the giant tyrannosaurs these animals are all good runners).

So there you have it – the arctometatarsal. It’s amazing just how much information you can cram into one word really – long live technical terms.

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