hate-filled rants

When books die. And owls. I don't mean "when owls die"... I just mean: owls. As in: this article is mostly about owls.

tetrapodzoology — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 06:35:00 +0000

When books die. And owls. I don't mean "when owls die"... I just mean: owls. As in: this article is mostly about owls.

There's something they don't tell you about freelance writing. It's about all the fails: the many, many projects that get pitched, worked on and made into proper presentations that then get sent to book fairs, interested companies and so on, but ultimately explode on the launch pad, or die a slow, lingering death. I don't know if it's that I'm especially unlucky, or if it's that I've pitched an unusually high number of books, or if it's that I've genuinely worked on a high number of projects that were never destined to succeed but, whatever, I've now worked on loads of failed book projects. It's not all bad, by the way - you still get paid for the time and work you've put in.

Anyway, the reason we're here is that one of those (so far) unsuccessful book projects is a big one on the evolutionary history and diversity of birds. To give you some idea how far down the line this project went, check out the various screen captures. I can't mention company names or whatever, but things on this one have definitely failed and I'm still interested in seeing the project through to publication (and, no, I am not putting the book out there and then trying to sell it - I have learnt from bitter, bitter, bitter experience that this idea just doesn't work out, at least not without starving and losing your home through total loss of income). If you can help, or are interested, you know where to find me.

Long-time readers will know that, thanks to various other failed book projects, I have tons of un-used text sitting around on all manner of zoological subjects. When time and inclination allows, I sometimes update and recycle bits of said text for Tet Zoo. As you read this, I'm away from my desk and out in the field, and as I didn't have time to generate much novel Tet Zoo content, I decided on a whim to recycle stuff from the bird book. Given that I wrote briefly about owls the other day, I decided to use the owl text (updated a little, and with references). Enjoy.

Introducing owls

Few groups of birds are as strongly associated with mythology, legend and superstition as the mostly nocturnal, predatory owls, properly called the strigiforms. Owls are well known for their exceptional eyesight and hearing, and for being equipped with a unique plumage that allows near-silent flight. Although owls as a group exhibit relatively little variation in shape or behaviour, the approximately 225 living species have adapted to virtually every conceivable habitat, from temperate woodlands and tropical forests to tundras, deserts, grasslands, and marshes. There are some excellent books on owl diversity: my three favourites are Wink et al.'s prohibitively expensive Owls of the World (second edition), John Burton's 1973, err, Owls of the World and Michael Everett's 1977 A Natural History of Owls.

A number of specializations seen throughout the body make owls among the most distinctive of birds. They combine a peculiar skull and facial anatomy with extraordinary eyes and ears, unusual feathers, and highly modified legs and feet. Their sensory abilities are phenomenal. Their enormous eyes are directed forward and a substantial part of their field of vision - corresponding to 50-70Â° - overlaps, enabling excellent depth perception. The exceptional ability to rotate the head is well known and improves an owl's ability to locate and pinpoint prey.

Owl eyeballs are tubular rather than spherical, and the ring of bones embedded within the eyeball - the sclerotic ring - is shaped like a turret and is immovably fixed to the edges of the eye socket. This tubular shape means that both the cornea and lens can be as big as possible relative to the retina, the light-sensitive region at the back of the eye. The owl retina is proportionally large and covered with a particularly high number of light-sensitive cells (as many as 56,000 per square mm in the Tawny owl Strix aluco).

Owls have a large number of feathers for their size (10,000 in the Long-eared owl Asio otus), and their feathers are also soft and downy compared to those of other birds. Soft fringes that run along the rear edges of the wing feathers enable near-silent flight: these should be visible in the photos below [the bottom one is by Kersti and is from wikipedia].

A disk of stiff feathers - known as the facial disk - is thought to help channel sounds towards the enormous, slit-shaped ear openings, in much the same way as the ear flaps of mammals help to 'collect' sound.

Asymmetrical ears

Owl ears are comparatively huge (though hidden by feathering) and unique in often being asymmetrically positioned: one is higher up on the side of the head than the other. In some owls, such as eagle owls and the Strix wood owls, it's the positions of the fleshy, external parts of the ears that are asymmetrical. In others, such as some Asio and Pseudoscops species, the external parts of the ears are asymmetrical in shape, though not in position, while in others, such as the Tawny owl, it's the skin folds around the external ears that are asymmetrical (Norberg 1977). In yet others, including the Great grey owl Strix nebulosa and Tengmalm's owl Aegolius funereus, the bony surroundings of the ears themselves are asymmetrical [see Tengmalm's owl skull shown below, from Norberg (2002)]. Some owls lack ear asymmetry and have normal, symmetrical ears (Norberg 1977). [Adjacent diagrams, from Norberg (2002), show how peculiar owl ears look when you move the feathers and both the preaural and postaural flaps. Yes, owls have fleshy flaps around their ear openings.]

Because the asymmetrical owls differ so much in their anatomy, and because they're not all close relatives, it appears that ear asymmetry has evolved on as many as seven separate occasions within owls (Norberg 2002). This is extraordinary given that asymmetrical ears are not present in any other group of birds so far as we know (though they were apparently present in troodontids).

It seems that asymmetrical ears allow an improved ability to pinpoint the sources of sounds. Some owls have become such masters at locating the distance to and elevation of any sound that they can even capture prey in total darkness.

Ear tufts - nothing to do with the real ears - have evolved repeatedly among owls. Their function is uncertain. While they might help break up the owl's outline and hence contribute to camouflage, they also seem to function in communication, and an owl's moods and intentions can often be predicted by the disposition of its tufts (for previous discussion of this topic, see the article Why do some owls have ear tufts?).

Two kinds of owl

Living owls can be divided into two groups: barn owls (Tytonidae) and the typical owls, also known as the true or strigid owls (Strigidae). Various efforts to resolve owl phylogeny have been published, mostly using molecular techniques (Wink & Heidrich 1999, Wink et al. 2004, 2008) (a phylogenetic study of owls based on morphological characters - a 1967 PhD project produced by N. L. Ford - has often been mentioned in the literature but remains unpublished).

Barn owls have longer, narrower skulls and longer legs than strigid owls; the claw on their third toe is comblike and functions in grooming and their facial disk is heart-shaped. There are approximately 15 barn owl species, though several others from the Caribbean and Mediterranean (some of which were much larger than the living kinds) became extinct in recent centuries. The best-known barn owl - the Common barn owl Tyto alba [shown here, image by Luc Viatour, from wikipedia] - is the most widespread owl species and one of the most widely distributed of all birds: it inhabits Europe, Africa, tropical Asia, Australasia, and the Americas.

Strigids have mostly rounded facial disks (nicely shown here in a captive Great grey owl) and broader skulls than barn owls. This is the most diverse owl clade: it includes the Australasian boobooks, hawk-owls, and laughing owls, the little owls, pygmy owls and their relatives, the small, cryptic scops and screech owls, the tropical and temperate spectacled owls, eared owls and wood owls, and the large eagle owls and their relatives.

The smallest strigids (there are several contenders for this title, with the best known being the Elf owl Micrathene whitneyi of the United States and Mexico) weigh less than 50 g and are about 12 cm long. In contrast, the largest (the Eurasian eagle owl Bubo bubo) reaches 70 cm in length, 4 kg in mass, and has a wingspan of 1.5 m.

Death by owl

Unlike hawks and falcons, owls do not kill with their hooked bills but typically rely on their very powerful, large-clawed feet. Owl toes are shorter and more robust than those of most other predatory birds, and their talons are all similar in length (Shufeldt 1900, Fowler et al. 2009) [adjacent image, from Shufeldt (1900), shows pedes of Tyto (l) and Bubo (r)]. The fourth toe can be directed backward so that both digits I and IV can oppose II and III: this type of foot is known as facultatively zygodactyl or semizygodactyl. Owls also have a relatively short, stout tarsometatarsus, and special bones called sesamoids help improve their ability to exert force through their toes and to resist stresses in the bones and muscles. These features mean that owls have a greater grip strength compared to other birds. After grabbing a prey animal, they squeeze it to death (Fowler et al. 2009). The prey animal is then usually swallowed whole, and the less digestible parts - such as fur, feathers, wing cases and bones - are later ejected from the mouth as sausage-shaped pellets. One or two pellets are usually produced within each 24-hour period.

The majority of owls prey on small mammals, but small birds, large insects, frogs, and earthworms are also common prey. Large species (like some of the eagle owls) may kill hares, hawks, falcons, and other owls, and eagle owls may even have a significant impact on populations of other predatory birds. Some owl species prey on bats, frogs, crabs, and fish. Owls are not limited to nocturnal hunting. Many species hunt either during the day or night, while others - a good example is the Hawk owl Surnia ulula of the Northern Hemisphere - mostly hunt in daylight.

Diverse lifestyles

In keeping with their favored woodland or forest habitat, owls frequently have barred or spotted plumage and most are patterned in various shades of brown. Nocturnal owls usually spend the daytime roosting out of sight, hidden close to tree trunks and in shade. They need to be cryptically coloured to avoid predators, but also to hide from small birds; on finding roosting owls, these will mob them and thereby reveal the predator's location to other animals. Some owl species have eyelike markings on the backs of their heads: these may help intimidate would-be attackers or mobbers.

Owls are not all woodland birds. Members of several lineages have adapted to life in open habitats. Deserts are inhabited by some eagle owls and by Elf owls. The widespread Short-eared owl Asio flammeus - found across Eurasia and the Americas - is a well known denizen of treeless moors and grasslands. The Burrowing owl Athene cunicularia of North, Central, and South America is a strongly terrestrial species that frequents grasslands and both roosts and nests in holes in the ground. One of the most distinctive open-habitat owls is the striking Snowy owl Bubo scandiacus [shown here] of the Northern Hemisphere. Genetic studies have shown that this large predator of lemmings and other mammals is a specialized member of the eagle owl lineage. Not only has it evolved a distinctive white plumage (flecked with black spots in the female), it has also strongly reduced the size of its ear tufts.

Owls are, quite rightly, generally assumed to be predators of terrestrial prey. However, owls belonging to two lineages have become specialized aquatic feeders. As suggested by their name, these fishing owls - the Asian Ketupa species and African Scotopelia species - either gaff prey from the water surface while in flight or wade into shallow water to seize their prey.

Unlike other strigid owls, fishing owls have unfeathered feet. Sharp spicules on the undersides of their toes help them to hold fish. Their facial disks are poorly developed. The need to have silent flight is no longer a concern, so their feathers lack the special fringes that provide other owls with such quiet wings. Unlike most other owls, fishing owls will sometimes feed on carrion.

All fishing owls are closely related to eagle owls (the Bubo species), and debate continues as to whether they should be included within Bubo (Wink & Heidrich 1999, Wink et al. 2004, 2008) or kept separate (at his bird taxonomy site, John Boyd suggests that it might prove most useful to recognise four clades within the eagle owl-fishing owl clade: Bubo sensu stricto, Nyctaetus, Scotopelia and Ketupa) [Adjacent image shows Greyish eagle owl B. cinerascens]. The Asian fishing owls look very Bubo-like while Scotopelia has a characteristic shaggy plumage, lacks ear tufts, and hence looks rather different. These differences imply that the similarities present between the two fishing owl evolved independently.

The fossil record

Owls have a good fossil record: as shown by the graph below - from Kurochkin & Dyke (2011) - the rate of discovery of new taxa increased markedly during the 1970s and 80s but slowed down round about 2000. This unusually good fossil record is partly due to the fact that owls often use caves as roost sites, but it's also explained by the fact that owl bones are particularly distinctive when compared with those of other birds. The oldest fossil owls are from the Paleocene, and a large number of archaic owls are known from the Eocene and Oligocene of the Northern Hemisphere (Mayr 2009). Some of these fossil owls are superficially similar to barn owls and have sometimes been regarded as ancient members of this group. However, it's possible that the features resulting in these suggestions are merely primitive characteristics that were widespread across all early owls but became lost or modified by strigids.

Modern owl lineages were definitely in existence by the Miocene. A number of fossil owls were particularly remarkable. During the Pleistocene, the Caribbean was home to several very large owls that had relatively stout legs. The largest of these - Ornimegalonyx - apparently had a standing height of more than a metre and may have had reduced flight abilities [sadly, there weren't 6-foot-tall Cretaceous super-owls, like the one shown here. See Myth of the six-foot super-owl]. Until recently, Hawaii was inhabited by the peculiar Grallistrix species, sometimes called the stilt-owls. These had particularly long legs and seem to have been dedicated predators of small birds.

For previous articles on owls, please see...

Refs - -

Fowler, D. W., Freedman, E. A. & Scannella, J. B. 2009. Predatory functional morphology in raptors: interdigital variation in talon size is related to prey restraint and immobilisation technique. PLoS ONE 4(11): e7999. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007999

Kurochkin, E. N. & Dyke, G. J. 2011. The first fossil owls (Aves: Strigiformes) from the Paleogene of Asia and a review of the fossil record of Strigiformes. Paleontological Journal 45, 445-458.

Mayr, G. 2009. Paleogene Fossil Birds. Berlin: Springer.

Norberg, R. (1977). Occurrence and Independent Evolution of Bilateral Ear Asymmetry in Owls and Implications on Owl Taxonomy Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280 (973), 375-408 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.1977.0116

- . 2002. Independent evolution of outer ear asymmetry among give owl lineages; morphology, function and selection. In Newton, I., Kavanagh, R., Olsen, J. & Taylor, I (eds.) Ecology and Conservation of Owls: Proceedings of the Owls 2000 Conference. CSIRO Publishing (Collingwood, Victoria, Aus.), pp. 329-342.

Shufeldt, R. W. 1900. On the osteology of the Striges. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 39, 665-722.

Wink, M. & Heidrich, P. 1999. Molecular evolution and systematics of the owls (Strigiformes). In KÃ¶nig, C. Weick, F. & & Becking, J.-H. (eds) Owls, a Guide to Owls of the World. Pica Press, Mountfield (E. Sussex, UK), pp. 39-57.

- ., Heidrich, P., Sauer-GÃ¼rth, H., Elsayed, A.-A. & Gonzalez, J. 2008. Molecular phylogeny and systematics of owls (Strigiformes). In KÃ¶nig, C. & Weick, F. (eds) Owls of the World (second edition). Christopher Helm (London), pp 42-63.

- ., Sauer-GÃ¼rth, H. & Fuchs, M. 2004. Phylogenetic relationships in owls based on nucleotide sequences of mitochondrial and nuclear marker genes. In Chancellor, R. D. & Meyburg, B.-U. (eds) Raptors Worldwide. WWGB/MME, pp. 517-526.

tetrapodzoology Mon, 06/20/2011 - 02:35

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Tet Zoo 5th birthday extravaganza, part II

tetrapodzoology — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 09:29:00 +0000

Tet Zoo 5th birthday extravaganza, part II

Welcome to part II of my musings on the 2010 blogging year. You'll need to have read the first part to make sense of it. The article you're reading now is extraordinarily long and I'd normally break up a piece of this length into two, three or even more separate articles. This year I want to get the birthday stuff out of the way as quickly as possible, however, so bear with me. Hey, you don't HAVE to read any of it. And so, off we go...

One of the bigger Tet Zoo-relevant issues of the year was the publication in September of Tetrapod Zoology Book One (Naish 2010a). Already I've seen several reviews (one in-press for a technical journal, the others on amazon or on blogs like Catalogue of Organisms and Geomythologica). All agree in being generally positive about the volume (which is great), but all also agree in noting that the book's chapters often include comments that - while they look fine on a blog - don't really work in a book. Also noted by reviewers is that the inclusion of chapters seems random (that's because it was) and that a phylogenetic structure would be preferable.

These points have been very much noted: if subsequent volumes appear (and this very much depends on whether the first one has sold enough copies to make the effort worth my time) I'm definitely going to arrange the text in phylogenetic fashion. Which is good, as it provides strong incentive to finish such things as the series of articles on anurans.

September is always my busiest month

Moving on, the new Spanish carcharodontosaurian allosauroid Concavenator was also published in September: nothing to do with me, but of great personal interest since I feel that Concavenator's morphology (it's known from a near-complete, articulated skeleton) vindicates one of my apparently stupid ideas about Becklespinax (this being that the animal had a mini-sail restricted to the posterior part of the back and sacrum: see the reconstruction in Naish & Martill (2007)).

I attended the 58th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge in September. It's always a real pleasure to see the brilliant collection at the university's zoology museum [the adjacent small Okapi was photographed there]. The meeting was made all the more 'special' by the fact that several of the presentations were very much germane/direct responses to work I've been involved in. Don Henderson's take on the flight ability and size of Quetzalcoatlus (Henderson 2010) - he regards the animal as weighing over 500 kg and of being incapable of flight - is of course highly relevant to the Witton & Naish (2008) 'terrestrial stalker' hypothesis (a response to Don's conclusions appeared as part of Witton & Habib's (2010) paper on giant pterosaurs). And Kent Stevens and John Martin both gave talks that were responses to the Taylor et al. (2009) sauropod neck posture work. I didn't speak at the meeting, but a Cretaceous maniraptoran specimen discussed by Steve Sweetman has since been written up by the two of us and is due to be published soon. It's only a single bone, but it's still remarkable. I'll say why when the paper is out. [Composite image below: Martillites (and Bob Nicholls) at SVPCA 2010 (l-to-r: J. Liston, L. Steel, B. Nicholls, M. P. Taylor and D. Naish), a misty Cornish scene, and longhorn cattle, photographed at Came Down (yes, really), Dorset, in August]

September also saw publication of the paper (co-written with Gareth Dyke, Mike Benton and Erika Posmosanu) on the birds and pterosaurs of the Cretaceous rocks of Cornet, Romania (Dyke et al. 2010). Involvement in this project was great, in part because I've been asking Mike and Gareth about the material since the early 1990s, and also because the Cornet assemblage includes... an azhdarchid. And now that we're back on pterosaurs, also in September came news on a much-anticipated new volume about pterosaurs... though exactly when it'll appear is somewhat, err, uncertain. Charles Paxton, Michael Woodley and I also learnt in that month that we'd been successful in pitching our 'Cryptozoology: science or pseudoscience?' symposium to the ZSL. The meeting will happen on July 12th 2011 and I'll advertise it properly some time soon.

Later in 2010, I started the series on pockets, pouches and sacs (go here for list of the articles published so far), I mused a lot about Caperea (the pygmy right whale), and I wrote some stuff about iguanodontian ornithopods for the Scientific American blog. In October I went to a London cinema screening of the Inside Nature's Giants giant squid episode and got to meet Joy Reidenberg. The photo below shows Norman the Gambian pouched rat Cricetomys gambianus with his co-star James McKay, photographed at the Live 'n' Deadly roadshow, in November.

More on books

Quite some months of 2010 (and 2009) were spent editing, proof-reading and sorting out the Geological Society's multi-authored volume Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective (the book was co-edited with Eric Buffetaut, Dick Moody and Dave Martill). As is usual for big books like this, a few problems arose and caused delays. Anyway, the book was published in November and included my articles on early ideas about dinosaur pneumaticity (Naish 2010b) and (co-authored with Dick Moody) a biography of Alan Charig (Moody & Naish 2010). So, four books got published in 2010 - not bad at all. But things could have been better...

As you'll know if you follow my stuff, for a few years now I've eked out a living from freelance authoring, consultancy and editing. While work came in constantly during 2010, the global economic situation hit the world of freelance writing and publishing pretty hard. Three major projects scheduled for the latter months of the year all failed for economic reasons, and several people I was due to work with lost their jobs and essentially went off the grid. At the time of writing I'm manically busy with several concurrent, independent book projects, but this doesn't necessarily mean that things are picking up. Fingers crossed for the future. I really do need some sort of ~~improved~~ financial security, but who doesn't.

I spent some of the last months of 2010 working hard on two large review manuscripts for a book, one on Lower Cretaceous theropods and one (with Steve Salisbury) on Lower Cretaceous crocodilians. Many people in academia know that publishing chapters in multi-authored books is actually a really bad idea: you're working hard on something that won't get an impact factor, it takes months of your time away from publications that will get you an impact factor, and its publication will often be delayed by months or even years by other authors. Alas, I never got this advice when doing my PhD and ended up spending literally years of PhD time writing chapters for books. Oh well, water under the bridge and all that.

I don't just write books, I work as a book consultant as well. I don't talk about these projects: partly because they're written by other people, and partly because the books concerned are written for children and hence aren't of direct interest to the majority of Tet Zoo readers. Among those that appeared in 2010 was Dorling Kindersley's Dinosaurs Eye to Eye, by John Woodward. I really dislike the cover [shown above, at left], but I acted too late to get anything done about it. But don't let the cover put you off the book as a whole: Peter Minister's CG dinosaurs and pterosaurs are very good. Among my favourite spreads is the one where a Therizinosaurus is claw-striking a tarbosaur, splattering blood everywhere. It's also shown above (Â© DK/Peter Minister) - note that the Therizinosaurus possesses both vaned feathers and those spiny structures known for Beipiaosaurus. And from The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs and Some Little Ones Too (written by Alex Frith) - - ooh, look - another azhdarchid! (the artist kinda screwed up on the whole pteroid region).

Having mentioned Usborne, another project I acted as consultant for - a series of dinosaur fact cards - has just been published. It took a lot of work to get the art looking good, but I really like the results - here are some of the feathery theropods and, oh no, ANOTHER azhdarchid.

Regular readers will know that I wrote a large popular book on dinosaurs - The Great Dinosaur Discoveries - in 2009. I've received surprisingly little feedback on this volume and have a possibly unrealistic concern that it might have sunk without trace: a shame, as I tried to do something that hasn't been done much before (that is, look at the evolution of knowledge about dinosaurs, rather than the evolution of dinosaurs themselves). My understanding is that the publishers (A & C Black in the UK) had/have plans to translate the book into several different languages. I know that editions in at least a few non-English languages appeared in 2010 (and/or 2009), but it's hard to know as publishers are notoriously bad at keeping authors informed on this sort of thing.

Why blogging = perpetual burning frustration

Blogging at Tet Zoo is hugely rewarding and I love doing it. I also love a lot (but not all) of the stuff I've done in the past, and (at the risk of sounding grotesquely arrogant) I would rather read my own stuff than much of the other material out there in the blogosphere. That sounds bad/makes me sound like a douche, but it shouldn't: after all, I blog for me, and if others enjoy it too - well, that's an added bonus. I know that at least a few other people seem to be reading Tet Zoo: some time during the last few months of 2010, Tet Zoo ver 2 received its 6 millionth hit. By January 2010, Tet Zoo ver 2 had received 4 million hits, and my calculator reveals that this all translates to 2 million hits over the course of 2010. That can't be bad. [Adjacent image shows Sunbittern Eurypyga helias, the stuffed Qatar goat mascot William of Windsor (or Billy) of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and what I think are Brecon buff geese].

But running Tet Zoo is also a bit of a negative experience, and whenever I think about it I am mostly dominated by feelings of frustration. Why? Because's there so much to do, and so little chance to do it. I can say without exaggeration that there are currently about 200 incomplete Tet Zoo articles here in my files, and many more ideas in my head. I just do not have the time to be as productive, and to get through as much material, as I'd like to.

Remember that I would do so much more if I could, and I'm still in quest of that wealthy sponsor or benefactor.

During 2010 you might have noticed that I ran several series of articles devoted to explorations of particular topics, like babirusas, matamatas, bird hands, gekkotans and mammalian 'sacs, pouches and pockets'. Understand that I hardly ever start out with the intention of producing a series of articles on any given topic - quite the contrary - it's just that there's so much to say that things quickly get out of hand. And, because other things get in the way, virtually all of these series remain unfinished, and for this reason I've tried to refrain from starting any more. Gekkotans: still unfinished, with pygopodids and a phylogenetic overview awaiting publication. Matamatas: still unfinished, with fossil species and a discussion of alleged giantism awaiting publication. Bird hands: still unfinished, with text on solitaires, ibises and a few others awaiting publication. Toads: still very much unfinished, with African, Asian and 'ver 2' South American groups awaiting publication. Don't get me started on temnospondyls. Most distressing of all, the series on anuran diversity that I started in 2007 is still incomplete.

Pepsipocalyse 2010, belatedly

There's one big thing I haven't mentioned in these 5th birthday articles, nor in fact at all, and this is the near-meltdown of and mass exodus from the ScienceBlogs network as a result of summer's Pepsipocalyse event (hat-tip to Ed Yong for that term, though sorry if anyone else used it beforehand). Herewith my few thoughts on what happened. The fact that quite a few ScienceBlogs bloggers were so pissed off that they felt the need to quit ScienceBlogs almost immediately put me in a difficult position - should I show solidarity and leave as well, or wait it out and risk seeming cowardly or even unconcerned? In the end I decided to wait it out, a decision mitigated in part by the fact that it wasn't obvious to me how events would affect Tet Zoo's credibility. I can see, however, that this would definitely be more of a concern to some bloggers than others, and I can also appreciate that things would be different if the planned Pepsi blog had set up home here. [Below: zombie Triceratops!].

As many have already said, the Pepsi thing wasn't the only reason for the exodus - for some bloggers it was merely the last straw. I don't want to say much more than that about the status and health of ScienceBlogs: from a purely selfish point of view, I don't think that leaving the network would have been to my advantage. As for why I didn't comment on any of the stuff when it happened... I'm here to write about tetrapod zoology: something I do for fun in my so-called 'spare' time. I'm sorry, but I honestly just don't have enough interest in other stuff to spend time writing about it. Call me narrow-minded or blinkered if you want. Again, I will apologise for not caring enough about the non-Tet Zoo stuff.

A brief rant about Mesozoic archosaurs on the blogosphere

Because I'm supposed to be a dinosaur specialist, people often want me to blog about new dinosaur (and pterosaur) discoveries [adjacent image: Pinacosaurus mephistocephalus at Brussels]. Let me say again that I like Mesozoic archosaurs more than anyone, and I spend a large proportion of my time thinking and reading about them. But - when it comes to blogging - Mesozoic archosaurs drive me insane, to the extent where I sometimes deliberately avoid mentioning them. Why? Because so many other people cover the same stuff before I can get to it. This isn't anyone's 'fault' (and other bloggers should, of course, blog about whatever it is they want to blog about), it's merely a reflection of how sexy archosaurs are. The fact that it bothers me says more about my personal psychoses than anything else.

But I don't see the value in covering something that 10, 20 or 30 other bloggers have covered as well. I often get sent advance copies of neat new papers on Mesozoic animals with an invitation to blog about them. When I then learn that this same material has been sent out to just about everybody else in the world of scientific blogging, I lose the motivation to cover it. Again, I really apologise if this sounds arrogant, but I'm being honest.

So I feel better writing about obscure lizards and snakes, little rodents and toads [adjacent image: a Common toad Bufo bufo I encountered in August]: at least no-one else is saying everything worth saying about them as soon as it's published. These subjects don't quite pull in the same numbers of visitors, however, and getting hold of images I can use is often a problem. As always, cryptozoology remains a big draw on Tet Zoo. The Big Trout Lake monster coverage in May generated a lot of interest, as did the (totally inconclusive) look at the Ozenkadnook tiger photo in August.

An aim I've had at Tet Zoo since 2008 has been to provide adequate coverage of modern amphibians. In part this is because this fascinating tetrapod group requires representation proportional to its size and diversity, but it's also reflective of the fact that the global amphibian crisis warrants extensive coverage. This issue hasn't gone away, of course, and remains of critical concern (even though it's been thought since 2009 that some anurans are developing immunity to Bd (= Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, the chytrid fungus that is spreading, infecting and killing amphibians). In the end, Tet Zoo was quieter on amphibians during 2010 than it should have been - other subjects just got in the way. I wrote about amphiumas in May and Old World giant salamanders in November, and the toads series continued. As it will. For years.

A load of personal stuff that you shouldn't read if you're only here for the hardcore zoology

My honest plan at the start of the year was to attend exactly zero conferences and meetings; I think I say this most years. In the end I only went to two or three international meetings. A particularly neat little research trip involved a visit to Brussels where Gareth Dyke and I got to work on something amazing (with Pascal Godefroit and FranÃ§ois EscuilliÃ©). Hopefully I'll be able to talk about it soon. And on the subject of technical projects currently in progress, 2010 proved to be an extraordinarily productive year. If things go to plan, some major things I've been involved in will be discussed here later in 2011. The history of birds, more on pterosaurs, Mesozoic dinosaur palaeobiology, Wealden theropods, new plesiosaurs, and oh those ichthyosaurs...

Two major, unconnected media projects (one of which involved working together with C. M. Kosemen) both died in 2010, but will hopefully get picked up in the future. I really wish I could talk about them. During May I was filmed for a documentary on the Montauk monster (it should be screened some time this year). Throughout the year I spoke with BBC researchers about a big Mesozoic-themed project, but I'm sure most people involved in the world of Mesozoic palaeontology did likewise.

I didn't get to travel much in 2010, though I did move around the UK quite a bit. I also stayed happy in terms of wildlife fixes by visiting a lot of zoos and other collections, and by getting out and looking at a lot of stuff in the field. I went bat-watching in August, and also pursued (sometimes successfully) Water voles Arvicola amphibius, grebes, waders, tadpoles, newts, leaf warblers, longhorn cattle [see photo above], Bohemian waxwings Bombycilla garrulus, those Great bustards and, ha ha, White-tailed eagles. A Wood pigeon Columba palumbus fell down inside the second of our house's chimneys in August - I wonder if it was the same bird that fell down the first chimney in 2007? The dark areas on the sides of its face show where I had to wash dust out of its eyes.

Oh, I helped dissect a crocodile (that reminds me, I still have to write it up for Tet Zoo) and I got hold of one of the most amazing zoological specimens I've ever seen (I'll be showing pictures of it within the next week or so). The skulls of swans, kestrels and squirrels became added to my collection of dead things [part of the Tet Zoo skull collection is shown near the top]. [I seem to have looked at quite a few xenarthrans in 2010 (all in captivity). Three different Giant anteaters Myrmecophaga tridactyla are shown in the composite below.]

Sadly, our pet cat, Tigger Mamum-Ra, had to be euthanised in October following a rapid and catastrophic decline in health. Tone and I had owned her since July 1998 when, desperate for attention and in poor condition, she followed us home from the cinema one night. We never found out whether she was lost or had been deliberately abandoned, but she was a great family pet. She was one of those extraordinarily friendly, talkative cats. She was also physically large, and with particularly big upper canine teeth.

Anyway, I think that just about sums it all up. It only remains to once again say thank you to all my readers, and especially to my community of brilliant and thoughtful commenters. Thanks for continuing to read and visit Tet Zoo. As I've said, a lot is due to happen in 2011 - it should be an exciting year - and there is still absolutely tons of stuff that needs to be covered here. Here's to five years of Tet Zoo.

For previous Tet Zoo birthday articles see...

Refs - -

Dyke, G., Benton, M., Posmosanu, E., & Naish, D. 2010. Early Cretaceous (Berriasian) birds and pterosaurs from the Cornet bauxite mine, Romania. Palaeontology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2010.00997.x

Henderson, D. M. 2010. Pterosaur body mass estimates from three-dimensional mathematical slicing. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 30, 768-785.

Moody, R. T. J. & Naish, D. 2010. Alan Jack Charig (1927-1997): an overview of his academic accomplishments and role in the world of fossil reptile research. In Moody, R. T. J., Buffetaut, E., Naish, D. & Martill, D. M. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 343, pp. 89-109.

Naish, D. 2010a. Tetrapod Zoology Book One. CFZ Press, Bideford.

- . 2010b. Pneumaticity, the early years: Wealden Supergroup dinosaurs and the hypothesis of saurischian pneumaticity. In Moody, R. T. J., Buffetaut, E., Naish, D. &Martill, D. M. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 343, 229-236.

- . & Martill, D. 2007. Dinosaurs of Great Britain and the role of the Geological Society of London in their discovery: basal Dinosauria and Saurischia. Journal of the Geological Society 164, 493-510.

Taylor, M. P., Wedel, M. J. & Naish, D. 2009. Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54, 213-220.

Witton, M. P. & Habib, M. B. 2010. On the size and flight diversity of giant pterosaurs, the use of birds as pterosaur analogues and comments on pterosaur flightlessness. PLoS ONE 5(11): e13982. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013982

- . & Naish, D. 2008. A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology. PLoS ONE 3 (5): e2271. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002271

tetrapodzoology Sun, 01/23/2011 - 04:29

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Why I hate Darwin's beard

tetrapodzoology — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 04:09:00 +0000

Why I hate Darwin's beard

My recent brief mention of Thomas Huxley (in connection with the Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective volume) reminded me to look anew at this Tet Zoo ver 1 post from 2006...

Here's a little known fact. Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), the most important biologist of all time, did not spend his entire life as an old man. I despise stereotypes, especially those that are totally erroneous, and whenever I see a picture of 'old man Darwin' I wonder: why is it that so many of our most important scientists are consistently portrayed as old men? Don't get me wrong, I have nothing in particular against old men (or beards), it's just that this tradition is annoying and misleading, and perpetuated by a society that seems to want scientists to be oddballs that operate on the fringes of society.

Darwin is the ultimate example of this sort of thing: ask people what Darwin looked like and (of those who know who Darwin is) I reckon 99% or more will describe an aged, bald-headed individual with a bushy beard, photographed in black and white and wearing a suit. Of course this is the way in which Darwin is virtually always depicted, in part because photography only became widespread in the 1850s (and by the 1860s Darwin was indeed balding and bearded), and perhaps in part because it's only by this stage of his life that he could be regarded as well known. But the obvious point worth making - and drumming home whenever it's appropriate - is that Darwin didn't spend his entire life as an old man of 70 years of age. It's correct that he was still actively involved in research at this age (in 1879 he finished a work on climbing plants, and in 1881 he published work on the ecological importance of earthworms), but it's neither accurate, fair nor appropriate to imagine him doing all of his important work at this stage in his life.

Quite the opposite: in fact most of the stuff that Darwin is best known for happened when he was disgustingly young (I'm in my thi - - fourth decade* and already feel angry and bitter about the absurd brevity of life). Darwin was on The Beagle between late December 1831 and October 1836. In 1832 he visited Patagonia and collected the remains of glyptodonts, megatheres and toxodonts. In 1833 he arrived at the Falkland Islands, where he met and 'collected' specimens of the now extinct Falkland Island fox or Warrah Dusicyon australis (image at left by John Keulemans), and in September 1835 The Beagle reached the Galapagos Islands. All of this happened when Darwin was between the ages of 22 and 27, with his narrative of the expedition being published in 1839, when he was just 30 (Desmond & James 1991). He was a young man when all of this happened.

* Many, many thanks to the good friends who reminded me how old I really am. I was young once.

We know that Darwin had been seriously entertaining ideas about transmutation, or evolution, since the mid 1830s. But he felt forced to publish his best known work, On the Origin of Species By Natural Selection (Darwin 1859), earlier than he would have liked because he learnt in 1858 that Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) had essentially come up with the same ideas regarding natural selection. Origin was therefore published in 1859 (in fact it was published in November 1859, while Darwin was deliberately avoiding things by being on holiday at Ilkley Spa in Yorkshire), and at this time Darwin was 51. Still he had no beard: the image at left shows him at this age.

In fact Darwin didn't grow that beard until early 1866 when he was 56, and he may have done so in a deliberate effort to disguise himself. This must have been successful: Darwin became close friends with Joseph Hooker (1817-1911) after they met in 1839 (later, in 1846, Hooker became Darwin's right-hand-man as regards botanical issues), yet Hooker failed to recognise the now-bearded Darwin at a Royal Society meeting of April 1866.

So, it's no big deal, but I sooo wish that Darwin, and all those other great scientists, weren't stereotyped so much. Images of the young, pre-bearded Darwin do exist, and given that he was between the ages of 22 and 51 when all of the things he is famous for happened, I have to wonder why we don't see such images more often. We would all do our field some good if we stopped perpetuating stereotypes that have negative connotations. Think of this next time you think of Darwin.

PS - this old article, which I haven't updated, is not included in Tetrapod Zoology Book One, but many others of the 2006 articles are.

Refs - -

Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. John Murray, London.

Desmond, A. & James, M. 1991. Darwin. Penguin, London.

tetrapodzoology Tue, 12/07/2010 - 23:09

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As it happens, we were having a domestic natter about this only the other day (more interesting than discussing decorating, soft furnishings or whatever). This must be what happens when geeks marry :)

Darren:

a society that seems to want scientists to be oddballs that operate on the fringes of society

You know, as much as I agree with the general point you're making in this article, I must confess that I find Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory amusing precisely because he's an oddball who operates on the fringes of society...

---

Desmond, A. & James, M. 1991. Darwin. Penguin, London.

It is - still - the best Darwin biography out there, period.

Well Dartian, Sheldon is supposed to be amusing. I think we'd prefer it if the stereotype scientist outside comedy shows were not.

But when he was famous and old it was both the fashion to have beards and there was more photography. So it is a coincidence of fame, age, fashion, and technology.

Moom: yes, but see above. We don't HAVE to depict him this way when there are other, widely available, more chronologically relevant portraits.

Young Darwin looks kind of handsome and very nerdy. I wish they did use that portrait; although it is from farther back in time, he looks easier for modern young scientists to relate to.

Photography may be a reason for Darwin, but not for many others. For example, there are many photos of Einstein from the years when he worked on Relativity, but still he is best known as the Old Man with Funny Hair.

Luckily his Wikipedia article tries to avoid that stereotype.

stormen_per:

Sheldon is supposed to be amusing.

I didn't mention TBBT because I think it portrays scientists in a bad way; to the contrary, TBBT is actually quite respectful of science and scientists. That show is one of the most genuinely pro-scientific that I've seen. (Besides, Sheldon is really not that different from some real-life scientists I've met. Exaggerated, yes; qualitatively different, not so much.)

I think we'd prefer it if the stereotype scientist outside comedy shows were not.

Consider Indiana Jones, Hollywood's attempt at creating a non-stereotypical scientist-y leading character. The movies are great entertainment, but their portrayal of 'science' is piss-poor at best. And one could make a reasonable case that all the Indiana Jones movies - except maybe the fourth one - are, in fact, explicitly anti-scientific. (Anyone who would experience IRL the supernatural things that Indy does in the movies would give up on science and turn to religion.)

a society that seems to want scientists to be oddballs that operate on the fringes of society

Let me see -- old bearded man who is primarily a mental entity, outside the normal social and economic order...

What icon does that make me recall...

It'll come to me --- what could this image be reaching for, whose interest would it be in....

Oh, and Darren:

I'm in my thi - - fourth decade* and already feel angry and bitter about the absurd brevity of life

When he was at about the same age as you were when you originally wrote that, Julius Caesar read about the life of Alexander the Great. He is supposed to have wept when he learned that Alexander had already conquered the (known) world by the age of thirty-two...

@Dartian: not Caesar--Alexander the Great himself supposedly wept when there were no more worlds to conquer.
On the main topic: my favorite pre-beard image is the pencil sketch of Darwin as a modern-day grad student in Cambrige, complete with casual shirt and jeans. It was originally in Darlington's book on evolution, but I reprinted in on p. 86 of my 2007 Evolution book. Darwin's Beagle voyage might be considered equivalent to a modern field-based Ph.D. project. As Darlington notes, today Darwin wouldn't get in to grad school because of deficiencies in math and languages...

Although I totally understand the point Darren is making with this article I personally don't have many misgivings with the portrait of an older Darwin. In many cultures the image of an old man actually adds more credence to an idea, conveying a sense of experience and introspection normally not associated with younger people.

Finally, keep in mind one thing, old age is the longest stage in a person's life. You only spend roughly over a decade as a child, not even ten years as an adolescent, and only some twenty years at the prime of adulthood. After that lays the long twenty or thirty years of seniority before the final rest (in some long-lived individuals old age can actually be longer than all other three stages added up). This means the added bulk of a person's experiences on Earth nowadays will probably take place when white hairs already dot the hairdo.

It isn't only scientists. The composer Brahms is another who is usually shown as an old man with a beard, although his three piano sonatas (for instance) were all composed before he was 21.

Why we need more imagery of the Young Darwin:

http://thedispersalofdarwin.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/we-need-more-image…

Why I hate Darwin

Quotemined that for you.

I'd named Einstein as the exemplar of this phenomenon, but yes, it's unfortunate. I've actually heard kids remark, upon meeting a youngish scientist, that they'd thought all scientists were old.

The fringe of one society is the nucleus of another.
Darren, don't you think its time you grew a beard?
Hey all you oddballs, straighten up!

The younger Darwin image is a painting. The only photographs of Darwin that I've been able to find are of the elderly man. I think the general modern preference is use a photograph as opposed to an illustration to represent an individual.

Frankly, I think the notion of some sort of conspiracy or trend to portray scientists as bearded weirdos is nonsense. The bearded Darwin image is more memorable and interesting. It's iconic because it has the characteristics of an iconic image. Einstein riding a bicycle and sticking out his tongue are iconic too because they're memorable and evocative.

Kind of like this one:

http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/Darren-Naish-caricature-Mar-201…

I rather like the way Darwin is depicted in that wonderful movie, The Fall.

http://cdn.buzznet.com/assets/users16/muveebuzz/default/leo-bill-darwin…

It's not that surprising that the young Darwin is always painted, because the very first photograph of a person ever taken (by accident) was in 1839.

Speaking as a beardy, I resent the implication that I'm an oddball who operates on the fringes of society. Hair grows quite naturally on my face. I choose to leave it there, rather than stand in front of a mirror each morning, hacking it off with a naked blade. What sort of weirdo would choose to do a thing like that?

Besides, chicks love a beard.

I recently finished reading Darwin's voyage of the Beagle. I was so inspired and jealous, and realized... he was the same age as I am now when he started that trip!
I started grad school this semester, so I'm on my way to hopefully doing something important for science... it is so encouraging to have scientists depicted as young vibrant people.

I have seen that portrait of young Darwin about as much as I've seen the bearded photo. Maybe scientists are more likely to use it in lectures because they feel similarly?

Bankers don't help things; they prefer beards or other complicated features because it helps to make forgery more difficult. So old beardy Darwin gets on the ten pound note, while long-haired Elizabeth Fry is on the fiver, and Elgar rocks his moustache on the twenty.

But isn't the point that people (well, some people) want to see Darwin as a sort of scientific patriarch, gazing down benignly but critically on his "children"? So they favour images which remind them of Abraham or Plato and such.

Silly, obviously, but comprehensible, at least to an earlier generation.

@Donald Prothero: The story is that Caesar wept when he realized how much Alexander had achieved, and he himself (now as old as Alexander was at his death) had achieved so little.

Leo Bill's version from The Fall was already pointed out. (He has a pet monkey named Wallace whose ideas he keeps stealing!) There's also Paul Bettany's version from Creation (which I have yet to see).

The only other film I can think of offhand with Charles Darwin as a character is Young Einstein, but that's the old, bearded version. (But surely showing Albert Einstein as a young Tasmanian is compensation enough?)

why is it that so many of our most important scientists are consistently portrayed as old men?

I blame the equation of age with wisdom and authority (and wisdom and authority with men, and men identified with the presence of facial hair).

So, how old is Darwin in the painting at the top? Men go bald at different ages, and it looks to me as if Darwin's forehead is already pretty high in the painting!
--
(B.T.W.: I don't remember a source, but there was a bit of sociological research publicized a few years ago: undergraduates apparently think of lectures by bearded lecturers as vaguer than those by cleanshaven: as if perceived physical fuzziness suggests mental fuzziness! As a bearded academic, I was appalled.)

Young ginger Darwin really does look like Paul Bettany.

Maybe most portraits show Darwin with a beard because those mutton-chops look funny.

I'm trying to think of another movie with a scientist leading character. *off to TVTropes*

Well, there is Contact, the Ghostbusters (for certain values of science), the guy in The Time Machine, and the heroes of several b-movie disaster flicks. Science protagonists are not as uncommon on television though--and like everyone else on television they tend to be young and attractive.

Gah, how could I forget Spock? There's a sciencey protagonist (and one with an actual cultural impact, unlike most of the examples mentioned above)

I for one vote for anything that makes beards look bad-ass (and frankly, I envy Darwin his beard).

Wow!!!!

so many comments... i cant finish reading them all!!

I'm not going to add any contributions to this article... only one little detail that i must point out just for the record:

Why "Falklands" and not "Malvinas"??

I'm sorry... when Darwin visited theese islands there where just resently being occupied by the englishs... we (Argentina) already existed as an independent country for 20 years and England usurped those islands that where part of our territory...

well... sorry for my non-cientific contribution (and my english misspellings)

I know... here is my contribution... we call D. austalis "Zorrito malvinero"... there you have another name to quote!

Those pictures look shopped to me. Besides, everyone knows that no real scientist was ever young.

William:

The story is that Caesar wept when he realized how much Alexander had achieved, and he himself (now as old as Alexander was at his death) had achieved so little.

That's right; both Alexander and Caesar supposedly wept, though for slightly different reasons (IIRC, Plutarch is the source of both of those claims).

Mike:

The only other film I can think of offhand with Charles Darwin as a character is Young Einstein, but that's the old, bearded version.

There is the 1972 movie The Darwin Adventure, starring Nicholas Clay as Darwin; it follows Darwin's life from the start of the Beagle voyage to the aftermath of the publication of the Origin. (I haven't seen the movie myself, alas, but from what I've heard, Captain Fitzroy - played by Ian Richardson - is its main 'villain'.)

Adam:

how could I forget Spock? There's a sciencey protagonist

Spock isn't supposed to be human, though, so he probably shouldn't count in this discussion.

Willy: because the modern, recognised name is the Falkland Islands, and the people of the islands themselves are in favour of British rule, which has been in place legally since 1690. Argentinians really should worry about real political issues (such as the corruption endemic in your civil service) rather than a 200-year-old territory dispute. Distractions like this, similar to the gay marriage disputes in the US, keep people from noticing the more important issues in their everyday lives.

In any case, this is a discussion about facial hair, not facetious claims...

I'd say that one reason scientists are seen as old is the amount of time it takes for your ideas to become established and accepted. By the time someone thought to do a really good portrait of them, they were in their 70s. This problem has naturally solved itself with the advent of widespread home camera use, as well as author portraits in books. The modern image of a working scientist, I would say, is in their thirties, perhaps older for a male and younger for a female, athletic and fairly good-looking, if given to shyness and distraction. Of course, this is mostly because Hollywood likes pretty people, but that's no reason not to be glad of the image change.

Spock isn't supposed to be human, though, so he probably shouldn't count in this discussion.

Actually, bringing Spock into this discussion is relevant: the brilliant science officer doesn't have a beard, but his evil Mirror Universe counterpart does! ;-)

Luciano:

the brilliant science officer

I'm not that well versed in the Star Trek universe; does Spock ever actually do any science?

Recent Tet Zoo articles have been attacked a lot by spam commenters (perhaps not obvious, as I delete them as soon as I notice) - I wonder if this a ScienceBlogs-wide thing, or is it just that I've written particularly attractive articles lately?

On the other hand, since Darwin is one of the most popular cultural symbols of the idea of evolution (and by extension of skepticism, rationalism, religious freethought, and even science itself) it's quite interesting that he would be best known by a feature that he was more-or-less forced to assume in an attempt to disguise himself from troublemakers.

Darren, you wrote in the original post:

he may have done so in a deliberate effort to disguise himself

Where does that idea come from? By 1866, Darwin was virtually a recluse who rarely left Down House - would he really have felt that he needed such an elaborate disguise? (Besides, that 'disguise' certainly doesn't seem to have fooled the contemporary caricature artists at Punch magazine and elsewhere.)

Quite a few biographical sources say that Darwin grew the beard "to prevent people from recognizing him": that quote comes from AboutDarwin.com, though I confess that I forget where I read it originally.

Quite a few biographical sources say that Darwin grew the beard "to prevent people from recognizing him": that quote comes from AboutDarwin.com, though I confess that I forget where I read it originally.

OK, thanks. The explanation that I have heard - though I, too, have forgotten the original source - was that Darwin just let his beard grow during one of his frequent bouts of illness, and that he liked his new looks so much that he didn't bother to shave it off anymore. (It is mainly because of Darwin's highly sedentary habits that I am sceptical of the suggestion that the need for a disguise was a primary concern for him; by that point in his life, Darwin's chronic ill-health made any and every trip away from home a major undertaking.)

Yeah, it's likely that his choosing to grow the beard was due to failing health as well. The full text from AboutDarwin.com is...

In January 1866 he grew a large flowing unkempt gray-white beard, perhaps to hide the ravages of health problems, or to prevent people from recognizing him. His plan worked, for while attending a meeting of the Royal Society on 27 April hardly anyone recognized him, even his closest friend, Joseph Hooker!

And - last word, perhaps - despite all the 'pro-beard' arguments given above, I still say that it is misleading to deliberately portray 'old man Darwin' all the time. I say again: the key work we typically have in mind was done years prior to this stage of his life, and 'old man Darwin' portraits/photos are far from the only ones available.

Yes, we should condemn the movie Young Einstein.

Remember Tasmanian Devil there (especially it's feeding signs)?

For plenty of nice illustrations of young, pre-beard Charles, I can thoroughly recommend Manning and Granstrom's 'What Mr Darwin Saw' which is a super introduction to evolutionary theory for enquiring small children.
A few of the pages are visible on Amazon Look-Inside. Commendably, it doesn't even put old beardy Darwin on the cover.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Darwin-Saw-Mick-Manning/dp/1845079701

There's also a dark-haired image of him at 33, with his son William, which for some reason is seldom used.

http://www.worldisround.com/articles/29426/photo68.html

Darren, spam on my humble blog has increased at least sevenfold in the last couple of months. Much of it seems to be Polish or Russian and a lot from "SEO" sites. I suspect that someone new has gone into the business big-time.

I'd like e-mail to be taxed or charged by ISPs at 1¢ per hundred. The normal user wouldn't notice it but the spammer would suddenly find their business unprofitable.

I realize that wouldn't do much for blog spam but suppose your ISP billed their ISP 1/10 cent for each comment submitted, and their ISP billed it to the account holder. Same effect--unless your account got hijacked and billed for someone else's spam. Hmmm. I'm sure someone else was using my e-mail address to send spam a few years ago.

The apparent dark hair in the photo linked by Monado (#47) is in striking contrast to the blond hair in the painting: moral is, I suppose, that trying to judge the color of an animal's pelage from a photo (particularly, perhaps, an old photo) is a mug's game.
--
Notably high forehead in the photo: Darwin evidently started going bald younger than many men.

Oddly enough, when I think of Charles Darwin, it's always of the young man in the first image you posted. That's when the exciting stuff happened. I almost never think of him as the old geezer with the beard.

Stop the press! The young Charles Darwin did have a beard! Temporarily, anyway. That information comes from his son, Francis Darwin, who wrote (c. 1884) in his preliminary draft of 'Reminiscences of My Father's Everyday Life' that:

'When [on] the Beagle he grew his beard which was nearly black and long enough to project well beyond his hand when he seized it in his hand.'

The full text can be found on The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online site (specifically, here).

Obviously, this information entirely invalidates the point Darren was making... ;)

OK, I want to commission a survey of male biologists (or maybe just zoologists)with the following questions:
Q1) Which of these 2 pictures of Charles Darwin would you choose for the cover of a book about Darwin and why?
Q2) In what year were you born?
Q3) Do you have a beard?
Q4) (depending on answer to Q3): why/why not?
Q5) Do you think a beard can say something about someone's biological career?

"Darwin is the ultimate example of this sort of thing: ask people what Darwin looked like and (of those who know who Darwin is) I reckon 99% or more will describe an aged, bald-headed individual with a bushy beard, photographed in black and white and wearing a suit. "
To me, this doesn't suggest an oddball so much as a combination of Yahweh and Ralph Richardson from Time Bandits.

On another forum I use one of the pics of Darwin as an old man with a long beard and a hat. His stern look suits either as a contrast when I'm being what I can only desperately hope passes for witty or as reinforcement when I'm correcting someone who has had the temerity to be wrong on the internet.

I might try out that Darwin as a young man, though, just for variety.

I've looked at Darwin Year 2009 exhibits at length, and most of the time you could guarantee that at least two items were present: a copy of Darwin's room at Down and loads of bearded Darwins (or even a bust) looking at you. While historically inaccurate, the reasons for this are understandable. First of all, Darwin has become an icon, so to stray too much from the established image (as the bearded sage) would alienate visitors (museum marketeers tell me); secondly, Darwin's theory is still contentious among many, particularly within the lay audience many of these exhibits are aimed at. To associate Darwin's image with other established images of such associated traits as wisdom, age and erudition makes sense.

What is really puzzling is how apparently we deem ourselves (or museum people deem their audience) unable to cope with a more diversified picture of important historical figures: the same thing is going on with (just to name three random examples) Otto von Bismarck, Abraham Lincoln, or Queen Victoria.

To associate Darwin's image with other established images of such associated traits as wisdom, age and erudition makes sense.

What about the associated traits of evidence and parsimony?

I see the same issue is also being considered here. Which has a rather different take on it.

To be honest he's got a nice big bushy beard on the ten pound note so maybe that's where the stereotype comes from? :)

[Beagle diary] December 18, 1832, Tierra del Fuego:

"They received us with less distrust & brought with them their timid children. â They noticed York Minster (who accompanied us) in the same manner as Jemmy, & told him he ought to shave, & yet he has not 20 hairs in his face, whilst we all wear our untrimmed beards"

"WE"

I read this blog pretty often, based just on the titles that I find at ScienceBlogs, and I am consistently pleased with the writing quality that I find here.

[from Darren: I assume this is spam. Url deleted].

A scientist is QUOTE MINED on a Discovery dinosaur documentary

tetrapodzoology — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:34:00 +0000

A scientist is QUOTE MINED on a Discovery dinosaur documentary

You're being interviewed for a TV documentary, and that documentary will focus on your special area of expertise. For the purposes of this article, let's pretend that you're an expert on sauropod dinosaurs. While being interviewed, you're asked about the possible function of a peculiar and enigmatic structure: the cavernous expansion present in the sauropod sacral region. As everyone knows, the idea that the sacral expansion might have functioned as a sort of 'second brain' was once mooted in the literature, and - because it was a fun idea that jived well with the well-known fact that sauropods have small brains - it became rapidly absorbed into the popular literature.

The 'second brain' idea is crap, though there is the caveat that the spinal cords of all animals are involved in motion control that occurs somewhat independently of the brain. Sacral expansions just like those of sauropods are also seen in birds. They're nothing to do with 'second brains'; rather, an organ called the glycogen body is housed here (astonishingly, we're still not exactly sure what the glycogen body is for, though it's likely something to do with energy storage). So, you're being interviewed about all of this and, naturally, you mention in passing that the 'second brain' idea used to be trotted out. But, like the good scientist you are, you go on to say that this is incorrect. You then go on to talk about glycogen bodies and so on. You did a good job.

But then you see your interview - very much pared down and condensed of course - screened on TV. National TV, on a big network. It will be seen by millions and is going to be one of the biggest bits of exposure you'll ever get in your entire life. It should be good. But no, horror of horrors. All the stuff about glycogen bodies, about the fact that sauropods are not unusual or unique with respect to their sacral expansions and so on, has been edited away... and, unbelievably, there you are stating the 'second brain' thing as if it's a fact that you're endorsing!!! Yes, to your horror, you have been QUOTE MINED. You know, the sort of shit creationists pull.

This was not a bad dream. It really happened.

Well, exactly this has just happened to my friend and colleague Mathew Wedel of the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California [not 'Matthew Wedel', as it says in the documentary concerned] [Matt shown here]. Yes, believe it or don't, Matt was quote mined for a new TV documentary, and is shown saying of the sauropod sacral expansion: "This was sort of like a second brain to help control the back half of the body". As you may know by now, this appeared in an episode of the new Discovery series Clash of the Dinosaurs (produced by London-based company Dangerous Ltd.; the working title of the series was Dino Body).

Understandably, Matt is furious and is asking for advice on what to do next. He contacted everyone at Dangerous. Their head of research responded by citing Matt's interview transcript. Sure enough, Matt states very clearly therein that the 'second brain' idea is an old, inaccurate hypothesis, and it's painfully clear that Matt's statement was warped by the exclusion of the surrounding caveats and explanations that he provided. This is all documented in Matt's article here at SV-POW! [the composite diagram that Matt sent to Dangerous is reproduced below]. The researcher at Dangerous implied in his response to Matt that the editing fairly reflected Matt's statement, but it obviously doesn't and what we have here is a serious breach of trust. When scientists are interviewed for TV (or, indeed, when anyone is interviewed for TV), they have to assume that their statements will not be portrayed out of context.

So, what to do? Errors of this magnitude really shouldn't make it into a documentary in the first place (how did this happen? Someone with scientific expertise should have vetted the final script), but once they are there they need to be edited out. Matt is checking the legal small-print to see what can be done. But this also makes it clear that it's time to request higher standards: we, as both the scientific community and as consumers of scientific documentary products, need to make some noise and get changes implemented. Some people are suggested that we (as in, those of us involved in palaeontological science) boycott the company (Dangerous Ltd.) and network (Discovery) concerned, or even boycott involvement in all science documentaries until things are sorted out. One suggestion is that we need to draft a set of basic principles that all media must adhere to before using palaeontologists (or biologists in general, or scientists in general) in a documentary. Of course, some media companies - notably the BBC - do have good guidelines on accurate and ethical treatment of parties, and are publicly liable when screw-ups are made (they have to issue an apology should such occur) [Sauroposeidon head from Clash of the Dinosaurs shown below].

Like everyone else in the UK, I haven't seen Clash of the Dinosaurs, so can't comment on it, but what's been said by people who have seen it doesn't leave me feeling too optimistic. Apparently there are a few anatomical violations (I don't recall seeing these in the CG models I vetted), and ideas about palaeobehaviour that started out as reasonable bits of speculation (e.g., it's possible that hadrosaurs could have generated, and detected, infrasonic sounds) became supercharged and modified during production (e.g., hadrosaurs could discharge infrasonic noises as WEAPONS, and were capable of stun-gunning an attacking theropod!). The series makers might say that they relied on the opinions of experts for this sort of stuff, and that ideas such as this one really were generated by specific experts. All I will say is that not all experts are created equal. The mis-pronunciation of some names doesn't exactly bring credibility to the series (the narrator consistently says 'Para-saw-ROFF-a-lus' for Parasaurolophus).

This is really unfortunate as, like so many people involved in the making of the series (I advised on the life appearances of the creatures, and also provided some anatomical and behavioural information), I honestly got the sincere impression from the makers that they were interested in the science, in accuracy, and in an honest portrayal of where we're at with Mesozoic archosaur biology. It was not going to be another Walking With Dinosaurs (that is, a speculative story-telling exercise). Things evidently well down-hill at some stage, though exactly when and how this happened is not clear.

Read Matt's articles here and here. Things really need to change, and now is the time.

tetrapodzoology Thu, 12/17/2009 - 01:34

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I just watched this episode two nights ago. I didn't realize that this was the Mathew Wedel of TetZoo fame. I was somewhat surprised to hear the 2nd brain theory being mentioned, but I'm no expert. I will say that I had no doubt while watching that that Dr. Wedel was saying that Sauroposeidon had a structure that acted as a second brain and controlled the tail and hind legs. You can not tell that he is explaining an old theory that has been discredited.

I remember buying a set of software for my very young kids, many years ago, and I distinctly recall hearing "Para-saw-ROFF-a-lus". It was one of my son's favorites. I have to admit, I can't hear it any other way at present, at least not without it sounding odd. Could you please post a proper pronunciation?

And thanks for both lessons.

The best way to thump/teach the production company may be to make the errors impact upon the people who commissioned the programme - the Discovery Channel. Emails and letters that explain how poor programming like this undermines Discovery's core values, stated here:

"Discovery's leadership is dedicated to upholding the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct, and to fulfilling the original mission spelled out by Chairman and Founder John Hendricks in 1982: 'To satisfy curiosity and make a difference in people's lives by providing the highest quality content, services and products that entertain, engage and enlighten.'"

Anon (if that is your real name): it's 'pa-ra-saw-ro-LOAF-us', or something like that.

I've only been able to see the clips available on hulu.com, but I did manage to catch the mispronunciation of parasaurolophus...which I had to replay to make sure that I didn't hear it wrong. Unfortunate. The graphics themselves were pretty cool, if a little heavy on the "combat". I know it makes for more impressive TV, but why must every documentary about dinosaurs include a prerequisite "battle to the death" between T-Rex and Triceratops? It's always the same, T-Rex attacking a Triceratops, Hadrosaurs mating, Sauropods migrating. Why not show a couple of Amargasaurs necking like giraffes? Styracosaurs scavenging bones for the calcium? If the push is to potray them as living, breathing animals, then stop making them into one dimensional cartoons.

This sort of thing is why, when I was presented with a disclaimer which more or less stated "We will do what we want with film of you, and you have no comeback or choice in the matter" by a film crew at the Weird Weekend, I turned down said contract flat. The lesson that should have been learned long ago by everyone in the world is this: if you sign a contract, you are signing up to what is written on that paper, NOT what the film makers say they're going to interpret it as; read the contract and if it sounds outrageous tell the person offering it to revise it.

Okay, now that is just shoddy...well, everything. The first two Clash of the Dinosaur episodes (namely, the two last Sunday) didn't seem bad, per se, but they weren't overall good. Of course, it was probably a huge improvement over the shoddy science of Jurassic Fight Club (Raptors using hand signals to coordinate their hunts? What the heck?).

There does need to be some fact checking on a lot of these documentaries. This isn't the first time a reconstruction of a dinosaur has gone wrong. There's the Walking with Dinosaurs T-rex, and the Magyarosaurus on Dinosaur Planet could actually be seen chewing its cud.

After hearing the "second brain" comment while watching that episode, I had to check my calendar. I thought I was in second grade and it was the 70s again! Back then they were peddling that theory for stegosaurs, if I recall.

The mispronunciation of Parasaurolophus made it sound like a Sesame Street character.

I watched (all?) the episodes and they were basically a rehash of each other in every episode. Graphically, they constantly reused scenes, over, and over again. Tinted, flipped, slowed down, close up, far away. It was frustrating. I know CG isn't cheap, but still. I couldn't tell the shows apart.

There was no new information presented. Only (as you pointed out) old, or inaccurate information.

In the words of Maxwell Smart, "Missed it by THAT much."

For this and many other reasons, I'm GLAD not to be working on dinosaurs! TV documentaries rarely bother with prehistoric mammals, so we don't get our work butchered as often as those of dino-workers. I've been in a lot of those on mammals, and most have been OK, even though they push you to speculate about color and behavior and lots of other unknowable stuff, and don't want to know the "why". My worst experience was with "Paleoworld" when they did an episode on fossil rhinos. They INSISTED on putting in their Triceratops robot because it had horns! Never mind that the horns are not homologous, the animals bore no relationship, etc.--they just HAD to put dinos in somehow. I spent an entire week filming with the BBC film crew and could NOT get them to remove it. And nearly all my footage ended up on the cutting room floor except for 3 minutes with the indricothere in Gering, NE. Instead, after I flew home, they filmed Mike Voorhies' "Rhino Pompeii" and all that footage replaced mine. Oh, well...

Clash of the Dinosaurs could be a great series, but it's a shame that this happened. Perhaps someone in the editorial staff thought the second brain theory would make a wonderful story, or perhaps someone in the editing room had learned this theory as a child and thought it was still true. I remember reading it in children's books, but I would hardly consider them to be definitive scientific works.

I've known lots of experts to be knocked out of documentaries, simply because their evidence doesn't fit nicely with the narrative framework. Sometimes, they are very good at bringing in scientists who disagree with the theory. I saw a really good program on Homo florensis that really did an excellent job of bringing in different sides. It actually makes for a good narrative and is an accurate portrayal of the science (and what scientists actually do for a living-- fight each other).

However, in this case, none of this applies. They just slapped in what has already been proven totally false.

I'm no paleontologist but I do love dinosaurs and it's shows like this that make me cringe in horror. I couldn't finish watching the first episode because I was getting so worked-up that my fiancÃ©e made me change the channel. They used the same (crappily animated) clips over and over again, dwelled upon the same (specious) ideas, and (of course!) focused on T-Rex and Triceratops.

Like one anonymous submitter says, the show was (marginally) better than Jurassic Fight Club (which featured only 1 fight with dinosaurs from the Jurasssic, if memory serves me correctly) but I couldn't believe that they wrangled some big names in paleontology (Mathew Wedel, Bob Bakker, etc.) into appearing. Despite the fact that they're as jazzed about dinosaurs as me, I wouldn't let my children watch this for fear of the poor science involved.

If the esteemed Lord Geekington doesn't beat me to it, I'll put this post in the Readers' Picks this evening. This scandal needs as much publicity as possible. The only reason I don't sound like I'm foaming at the mouth is because I read the first SV-POW! article yesterday and already aired my (ehem) concerns there.

Anon, the name ends in -lophus, not in -pholus.

Tom Holtz calls the infrasonic superhero beast from that show "ParasauROFLus".

and what scientists actually do for a living-- fight each other

Heh. =8-)

Sorry David! I didn't know my title came with esteem... nice.

its likely that a good number of the people involved in
and responsible for this...production...have blogs of their
own. If the basic info is up at the IMDB, they shouldn't
be too hard to track down.

I'm no scientist myself, but I'm at a loss to understand
why distortion is somehow more "Entertaining" than the
reality. (They were dinosaurs!! for pete's sake, how much more amazing do they have to be?)

I remember reading it in children's books, but I would hardly consider them to be definitive scientific works.
Some of them are real treasure-troves of the bizarre. Last year, I read one (published in 1999) I believe, that among other things claimed that the Titanosauria was a "small and obscure group" and that troodonts were ornithischians.

My blockquote fu is weak. The first paragraph there is by retrieverman.

I saw this special myself (which, btw, I found melodramatic and sensationalistic.) I had heard the "second brain" theory in regards to Stegosaurus debunked long ago, so it was strange to hear it brought up again in regards to sauropods, and I had no idea that the makers of this program were doing something so unscrupulous as quote mining. This kind of tactic is reprehensible enough when it's done by people you expect it from, like creationists. It's even worse when it's done by those who are supposed to be informing the public, not misleading them.

The thing I don't understand about all this, is why do they bother getting scientific consultants in at all? And in this particular case, a lot of them, if they're just going to say what they want, and reconstruct how they like? I seems like a colossal waste of money and time to me.

By the way, there are plenty of other, less egregious problems in CotD, which have been dwarfed (understandably) by the quote-mining and the infrasound attack of ParasauROFLus. These include propalinal jaw motion in Tyrannosaurus; no nuchal crest (and indeed highly reduced occipital region) of the same; the anterior end of the bill of hadrosaurs moving dorsoventrally as if they were fleshy lips; and so on.

If a company gets a bad rep for misusing contributions, people should avoid it. Or perhaps there should be a sliding scale of fees: responsible users like the BBC get low rates, while Penn and Teller should pay five figures.

On sound as a weapon: I keep coming across the idea that Apatosaurus could use its tail as a whip to generate a very loud crack (perhaps as a sexual display). This is nonsense, right? Physical intuition suggests that an animal that attempted this would lose the end of it's tail.

Coming from the legal field, my fear is that whatever release Matt signed included permission for them to mangle whatever he said. However, it's still unethical and technically slander, so I think legal action should be pursued.

I'm sorry for you and your friend that this happened, but also i think you really should not be so naieve. I have some experience with the media (politician) and i always used to think that journalists were genuine truth finders, fact reporters, defenders of democracy, human rights and freedom. Well, i was naieve to. They are dumb assholes interested only in sales, status, controversy, making a name for themselves. Never trust em.......for they are, well, human....

By the way, there are plenty of other, less egregious problems in CotD

Yeah. For instance the picture at the top of this page, which reflects the widespread* assumption that every biped is a professional wrestler. The right leg of that tyrannosaur is sprawled at least as far as possible, and the left one is simply twisted out of its hip joint, with the medial (inner) side facing cranially (forwards). The broken hip joint must hurt. Also, the neck could be too straight, and the teeth are too short...

* Or anyway pervasive and very conspicuous in Jurassic Fight Club.

It is not the first time Discovery did it. Once they asked scientists studying wolves to film a documentary. They cut scenes of catching a wolf for radiocollaring into a kind of horror about scientists torturing poor animals. Britons will be pleased to hear, that BBC usually behaves fair to naturalists.

But, budding celebs, media distorting your words is rather a rule than exception. It happened to me, too.
One practical tip is to count. For example: "There are two things about this theory. It says that sauropods, for one, had a second brain in the hips. Second thing is that it is not serious and disproved".
Second practical tip is to use third person: "Other scientists supposed sauropods to have second brains in their hips. It was disproved."
Third thing is to avoid talking about anything which you don't agree with. Four word sentences. In this case, comment on something different in sauropod anatomy.
If you think it over in advance, no media person can cut a fragment and make it mean something different without breaking the grammar and making viewers aware that it was a bad cut.

This is truly a terrible thing. Makes one wonder how many other docs have done quote mining to make things the way they want... or they think the public wants...

Uh, in which way is the walking with dinosaurs T. rex inaccurate?

Sorry to hear that, if I ever get interviewed on something important I will sign a non-butchering contract.

Hmm - if the company is in England, he can threaten to sue under the Libel laws. Look at the trouble that has caused Simon Singh (and many others). A bit extreme, but maybe they'd be afraid enough to correct the lies. If they lied about that small bit, what else have they lied about?

I haven't seen any of them, but you really mean the "infrasonic weapon" thing was not a joke? They actually put that in? WTF?

Sorry for the third post, but that infrasound thing...all I can think about is Gamera vs Gaos. (the creature with two throats that could vibrate like a tuning fork and generate the destructive ray - IIRC)

A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down into the region of your glycogen body...it's entertainment. The fact that they pretend it's a documentary ignores its purpose and the process that guides its editing. Furthermore it's the same degree of verisimilitude which guides the generally public which thinks of itself as relatively well informed when it comes to everything from foreign policy to the meme of "heat absorbtion by gasses in the atmoshpere" because it's seen "a documentary on tv". All things considered I'd bet the bong is less of a menace to mental competence than the bood tube even when it's at its supposed best.
Blogs like yours Darren stand in stark contrast to the tripe we get served via televison production and for that we can thank our lucky stars. cheers

Normally, I'd expect a production company to screw these things up on the basis of a bit of ignorance along with their desire to make their documentary sound "sexy", but this is frigging idiotic! Definitely worth some kind of complaint to Discovery, the possibility of it becoming more general knowledge that they distort and outright make things up in their documentaries might make them think twice about a repeat.

Good advice too Jerzy, making sure your words are chosen in such a way as to prevent convincing editing.

"Tom Holtz calls the infrasonic superhero beast from that show "ParasauROFLus"."

That, I believe, is what we call in the biz a stealth pun.

@David, yea I thought the neck looked a little too straight for me. Also, I would be interested to know how the goanna-like throat of this T-rex compares to previous depictions, such as the lithe Gregory Paul theropods...although it seems plausible that something that takes ginormous bites and doesn't chew would have a giant throat to move those bites to its stomach.

I was also puzzled by the casually inserted statements about an infrasound weapon "scrambling brains" (huh, how does that work, when you can't even hear it unless you are specially adapted), about a T-Rex jaw dislocating like a snake's, and the sauropod "second brain"- I was like, Really? I thought that was a myth...but I was otherwise impressed by how they included the latest science on pterosaur flight and behavior (VTOL ground stalkers) and the info on the counterintuitive r-selected reproductive strategy of giant sauropods.

The endlessly recycled CGI was a little hard to take, and I thought the way they animated the theropod movement was not good- the bowed legs looked weird, and prolly anatomically impossible as David points out...plus that smaller theropod should have easily outrun Spinosaurus..and also I think baby dinos would be much more spry than they were depicted as, particularly since the sauropods have no means of defense but running.

Experience is what we get just after we needed it most. I hope that your friend goes into the next battle determined not to give the editors anywhere to go wrong. Next time, DO NOT mention the outmoded theory. Go straight to, "there was an enlargement that housed the glycogen body, which may have something to do with energy storage and use." Or whatever.

You can try asking for a correction at the beginning of the next show in the series.

This does suck balls big time.

A suggestion? Demand the right to independently record everything you say either with a side-camera or an audiotape recorder. Also transcripts provided. Then smack them up on a webpage with hyperlinks to the Home page of the documentary movie/series being produced. Otherwise, no deal.

In this age of the internet, there is absolutely no reason why this cannot be done. A standard commercial or screen pop-up should show at least six times for every hour of screening showing the main links to full interviews and transcripts.

This could be expanded across the paleontology field (heck other science fields). You don't really care if say David Peters gets an interview, no matter how controversial he is, as long as he follows the same standard as the rest of you.

What are the documentary producers going to do? Out-source everything to India or China? How many Indian and Chinese or wherever scientists are going to be willing to play that role in the face of their peers here in the West? How long before every paleontological paper makes a stink? Mainstream papers? I bet it will take less than a few months before the kids alone start saying "this stinks".

There has been a lot of scientific scandals brewing lately, Aeto-gate and Climate-gate comes to mind. To me, the biggest scandal is ScienceJournalism-gate; something that the majority of scientists have absolutely no editorial control over. If scientists are ever to reach the public at large, they _must_ be given the right to represent themselves in documentaries by means of prominent ads to get people to such information quickly and freely.

You aren't saying libel if you have clear evidence by way of independent transcripts/videos that you were quote-mined or completely misrepresented. Frack the whining of the producers. Stand firm and don't give in.

Paleontology is one of the most mind-blowing and joyful sciences around. It is the study of extinct organisms with real practical applications to the modern world in the form of the study of past ecologies among other subjects. It is the story of where we came from on this Big Blue Marble and just possibly, it might help us understand the story of where we are going.

Breaking news:

It seems The Discovery Channel will be re-editing the programme: http://svpow.wordpress.com/

I've been working with media / creative types for some time now, and as far as I can see, there are some people in the sector who are sufficiently ignorant and arrogant to be indistinguishable from evil. Much of the time, people are judged not according to their knowledge or abilities, but by how "cool" they are. A shame. I hope they realize their mistake soon!

[from Darren: filtered as spam, hence delay!]

a T-Rex jaw dislocating like a snake's

Even snake jaws don't dislocate. There are several extra joints, and the left and the right lower jaw are not really connected, but the joints don't dislocate.

There has been a lot of scientific scandals brewing lately, Aeto-gate and Climate-gate comes to mind.

You mean Climategategate â the scandalous quote-mining of stolen e-mails and their gross misinterpretation by people who don't understand what they're reading! There are several ScienceBlogs waiting for you. Three relevant posts are in the right sidebar right now: one, two, three. Follow the links in them and in the comments on them.

As a former documentary editor, I can tell you, here's the real problem: Neither the producers of this show, nor the network, are in business to sell science; they sell advertising time. So, needless to say, they don't have nearly the same interest in absolute accuracy or up-to-date scientific information as you scientists.

If you want to change this situation and prevent it from happening, you folks will have to learn how to be media savvy. Don't act like "a good scientist", act like a savvy media professional, which, if you are on television, you should be. Otherwise, yes, you are totally at the mercy of people who might quote mine you because they believe it will makes their product better or flashier or sexier or better. I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying it's reality.

They don't really understand the subject and aren't really that upset if it doesn't meet the standards of YOUR business, because their product, flawed as it may be, sells ad time, which is what THEIR business is all about.

Bitch and moan and plot fantasies of the world's scientists pulling a John Galt on the Discovery Channel all you want, but until YOU scientists become media savvy, it will continue because you're opening the door to it happening.

This is a perfect example: what was Wedel doing talking about second brains at all? Why was he giving them the footage? You can't be quote mined if you don't say the words. I understand the "scientist" and "teacher" in him wanted to expand and explore upon this idea and give a full and complete picture of the subject, yadda, yadda, yadda. But as a media person, when the camera is rolling, he needs to me smart. Give the producer the background information off camera, before the interview. When the camera is rolling, he should have said, every time the issue arose in the interview: "There was old ideas about it being a hind brain. It's been long shown to be false." That is the only way to be accurate. You don't say anything more about the hind brain idea than those two sentences, so there is nothing to "mine." Media savvy. (Hell, combine it will a dismissive look and an expression like you smelt some bad cheese, and that footage will NEVER be used.)

Understand that the producers and editors are looking for egaging sound bites and good beats. Give it to them, but make them good, accurate and up-to-date ones. They aren't looking for a lecture, and they're not looking to learn about the subject. They're making a television program and you must always, ALWAYS, be aware of that fact, first and foremost.

This is basic media awareness that everyone going on television should master. The only way to protect yourself from being quote mined, is to not say anything that can be mined. But if you are pithy, engaging and enthusiastic about the things that are true and up-to-date, that's the footage that will be used.

"Bitch and moan and plot fantasies of the world's scientists pulling a John Galt on the Discovery Channel all you want, but until YOU scientists become media savvy, it will continue because you're opening the door to it happening."

Well, while there's undoubtedly sense spoken here, the tone's pretty grim. Personally, I would prefer to live in a world where people demanded more of their media, regardless of its commercial basis. Of course, demanding honesty from commercial concerns will continue to be useless without concerted effort. Hmmm... let's overthrow the (fourth e)state, shall we?

It's obviously true that scientists need to be more media savvy. But the entire responsibility for dealing with breaches of trust cannot and should not be put on the scientist, any more than it is solely "up to the woman to avoid rape." The media also need to be held accountable when they pull this kind of stunt, with the understanding that they are lying about what someone has said, damaging his/her reputation, and potentially f***ing over his or her career. shrugging and saying, "well, media just act that way, deal with it", is just a milder way of saying "well, boys will be boys" -- no longer a valid excuse, nor should it be.

Scientists as a group should not be singled out for their media savvy, or lack thereof. Everyone, and every group (however defined) needs to be more media savvy.

And the group that needs it the most? The media.

There's a whole lot that could be said about this subject, as it has much wider implications. It would be nice to think all production companies apply equal scientific rigor, but you you have to know and understand the "business" of documentary production if you want it to benefit you as a scientist. These people are producing a product and being paid for it, you need to treat it as such. You want them to quote the best material, then make it sound compelling, passionate and easily digestible. You don't have to sacrifice accuracy in order to be a good speaker, as all the best speakers understand.

If you understand that the producer is often playing a game with you, wanting you to provide them with the desired quote to fit the script, then you can ensure you don't fall into any traps. The hardest gotcha to avoid, however, is introducing any ambiguity into your statements. These can be easily directed in the desired direction using a narrator: "What Dr X is really saying here is ..."

I don't think it's the scientist's fault if his quote gets mined; however we DO all need to be more media-saavy and less naive... the media isn't your friend. And even for celebrities that everyone seems to envy and idolize, the media isn't their friend either... they're looking for a quick buck and often have no qualms about stepping on some people to do it.

Basically to prevent this, you have to be legally saavy and have good business sense, negotiate aggressively so that any compromise will NOT be a near-total concession to the corporation. Be a thorn so they will not think of stepping on you. But at the same time, offer them your best so long as they are smart enough to take it - you have to market your understanding of dinosaur FACT to outshine all the BS fiction the production team may have up their sleeve. They have to be told "do you want to end up with a crap program that just bores the hell out of viewers with second brains and other rehashed fairy tales, or do you want to shock and amaze them with real live, dynamic, social, thinking dinosaurs?

The media is ALL about shock value. Same with hollywood. That's why Jurassic Park did so well - the raptors were intelligent and could LEARN, thus making them far more unpredictable and dangerous than any classic movie monster. The shock value was unbelievable for its time! That's what we need - solid science that it MORE interesting than the bogus myths of the producer's script. Fast T.rexes that HUNTED their prey. Sauropods that cared for their eggs and at least BURIED them properly. Sauropods that defend themselves against any predator big or small. Ceratopsians that can gallop. Heck, this stuff is way more real than what's on TV now, and it's a hell of a lot MORE INTERESTING and frankly a lot scarier.

THAT is how you sell science to the media.

Speaking of errors, what's up with the Sauroposeidon pic? It looks like they put the nostrils at the end of the snout instead of the forehead (is there any researcher still arguing for the latter?), but they didn't fill things in with a convincing bladder structure.
But, to keep things in perspective, at least it's not "gagged-up" lizards.

Interesting. My latest comment, which will be 43, hasn't yet made it through moderation, but is listed in the left sidebar! Signs and wonders.

I think the only solution to this problem involves interviewees participating on the condition that they will be sent the final edit before it airs and that they can retract their participation at any time up until the air date. I don't think there is anything we can do about documentary film makers saying stupid, made-up shit, but it would give them incentive to be intellectually honest if their "requisite expert cred" was contingent on the "experts" being satisfied with the product they are going to be forever associated with.

This here is exactly why most experienced scientists HATE talking to journalists; they realise that film-makers and reporters come with their stories attached to their brains, and that the scientist is merely a tool for a soundbyte or two that supports preconceived notions. At least most of the time. I think there needs to be some form of accountability to knowledge. It is easy to find facts to report on one side of an issue (as in a documentary), or two "conflicting" sides, like journalists feel compelled to do. But journalists are accustomed to dealing with the subjective, where there are no real right answers. What about the objective, scientifically-agreed state of knowledge, i.e. what we know almost for certain, what is still uncertain, and the predominant theories that can explain some of what is still uncertain. Reporting on the state of actual, peer-reviewed consensus, until better information comes in, is the only responsible thing to do, whether it is one-sided, two-sided or seven-sided. Subjectivity may make programs like Clash of the Dinosaurs possible, but it does not make anything they say about the way things actually were, true.

My latest comment, which will be 43

No, it's 39, and it's there... perhaps the sidebar records the time of approval. It had three links in it, and sometimes (!!!) that's too much.

"Even snake jaws don't dislocate. There are several extra joints, and the left and the right lower jaw are not really connected, but the joints don't dislocate."

True. But the number of people who really still beleive in this myth (snakes dislocating their jaws) is mind-boggling. I would argue that this is among the most persistent and widely-held biology-related myths in existence today.

"Speaking of errors, what's up with the Sauroposeidon pic? It looks like they put the nostrils at the end of the snout instead of the forehead (is there any researcher still arguing for the latter?)"

Me. And fellow researcher/paleoartist Nima Sassani. Can't think of anybody else.

So what is so wrong with Walking With Dinosaurs? I was under the impression it was pretty good?

well, for those of us who aren't macrofaunal specialists, the non-dislocating snake jaw might be a one of those colloquial shorthands that turns out to be not really accurate...I will have to pay attention now to how many nature documentaries, if any, use that phrase

-David

Thank you for that (working) link :-)

I understand your point here, but the damage is done. I'm not interested in debating the science, the larger politics or what not. I _am_ interested in one single, damning e-mail. That would be this one from Mann to Jones, March 2003.

"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the âpeer-reviewed literatureâ. Obviously, they found a solution to thatâtake over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering âClimate Researchâ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial boardâ¦What do others think?â

âI will be emailing the journal to tell them Iâm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.ââIt results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. Iâve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!â

I'm having a very hard time trying to consider this as a 'misrepresentation'. To me, it is a blatant and craven statement and apparently successful attempt to tell other researchers, "get in line, or else".

The entire journal was a failure of peer review because the editor left manuscripts full of errors through, demonstrable errors that would have been caught had there been any serious peer review. The entire editorial board resigned when this came out a few months later. Submitting manuscripts to such a journal is nothing but a waste.

What surprises me is that you apparently don't read any ScienceBlogs other than this one. Posts which explained this very issue, and numerous others, have been in the "Top 5 Most Active", "Readers' Picks" and "Editor's Picks" for the entire last month, if not longer!

It's not one link, it's three. Each of the words "one", "two", and "three" in comment 39 is a link.

actually, david, 1 and 2 don't work

"Scientists need to be media savvy?"
Yes, but I think that media people need get a bit intelligence-savvy too!

AD: Broken links in comment 39 now fixed.

I don't find this at all surprising. Discovery and History channels will do anything to improve ratings and pander to their audiences. I love the idea of allowing the masses to understand science without having to sift through journals, but let's keep the facts factual.

It sounds as though the basic message we're being given is "they aren't interested in truth, or in your reputation, only in making something that sounds good." To the extent that's true, why on Earth should a scientist give such "documentary"-makers his or her time and knowledge, free, at the risk of being quote-mined, used to spread amusing lies (when the filmmaker knows it's false, it's a lie), and having his or her reputation harmed?

That is, yes if you are going to do this, be media-savvy, but media-savvy here sounds like learning self-defense skills. Knowing how to disarm an attacker, or divert an attack, is useful, but it's not a good reason to wade into a fight.

Neil @41: It may sound grim, because, in some ways, commercial media IS grim. If there is a solution, it is in aggressively supporting public, non-commercial television, even if only as an example to temper the commercial impulses in commercial media. Which means that any US scientist who is interested in this issue should work to elect politicians who are for full funding of the arts and outlets like PBS.

"Personally, I would prefer to live in a world where people demanded more of their media, regardless of its commercial basis." I would prefer to live in world where the climate in New Jersey was the same as that of Hawaii, but the world is what it is. The reason that people don't demand more of their media is because so many people actually love, love, love crappy television. The sad reality is that insanely larger numbers of viewers in the US would rather watch "Survivor" or "Dancing With The Stars" than "NOVA." The commercial media reacts accordingly.

========

Luna the Cat @42: I think the key point is that this is not a question of "breaching trust," as this is not a relationship of trust, but of business. If the scientist has the misguided notion that the producer will act according to the interest of the scientist over what the producer believes makes for good television â that he can trust the producer â then the scientist is kidding him or herself. The scientist has to understand that the producer absolutely does not have the same interest, and often has a diametrically opposed interest, and the scientist must take responsibility accordingly.

Again, I'm not saying this is right, nor am I excusing the behavior. All I'm just saying that if a scientist doesn't want to get quote mined, he or she needs to understand what is going on.

Further, your rape analogy is inaccurate; a more apt analogy would be a home buyer completely trusting a home seller to set a "fair" price given the condition of the home and doing no independent inspection on his or her own, and later complaining that he got ripped off by the seller. Scientist are, too often, the buyers.

========

Volcanoman @48
"I think the only solution to this problem involves interviewees participating on the condition that they will be sent the final edit before it airs and that they can retract their participation at any time up until the air date."

This is nice fantasy, but if you really think that any producer is going to agree to let the meat (i.e., the talking heads; i.e., you folks) have final approval, you are absolutely nuts. If you insist on this, all you will do is open up a niche for other scientists who are willing to appear without this condition (and there are always other scientists out there...). They'll get the exposure, you won't, the show will sell ad time and the world will keep going round and round...

========

Vicki @60:

"To the extent that's true, why on Earth should a scientist give such 'documentary'-makers his or her time and knowledge, free, at the risk of being quote-mined, used to spread amusing lies (when the filmmaker knows it's false, it's a lie), and having his or her reputation harmed?"

I presume there are personal and professional reasons for doing so, including spreading the scientist's love for field; inspiring the next generation of scientists; and, frankly, getting some face time with the same people who would be somewhat likely to purchase, say, a general interest book on the subject of the documentary.

"...media-savvy here sounds like learning self-defense skills. Knowing how to disarm an attacker, or divert an attack, is useful, but it's not a good reason to wade into a fight."

Yes, it is EXACTLY what it is: self-defense skills. But as for whether you want to get into the fight: that is a question only you can answer. Most don't and there is nothing wrong with that. But if you do, you should have the skills to do it right and not to get burned.

In my experience, it is not realistic to be given opportunity to see and change the finished product. This is often finished in a hurry, by a team of people ignorant about the subject (from graphic designer to a chief science editor who is specialist in eg. engineering or history).

Solution for you is to ban the most careless teams, and be careful with the rest.

Best solution: don't fight media at all. Think out your own story compatible with the expected profile and sell it. Give them the story YOU want, and in most cases they will be extremely happy to buy it, because it saved them time of inventing one own.

Discovery wants gory stories? OK. Could sauropods rip theropods with these little claws on their forelegs? Could elongated neck vertebrae of Amargasaurus act like a row of oryx horns? What force could generate a Diplodocus, if it swung its neck at a rival at the full speed?

Zoology is very good, because it has an endless supply of lovable animals caring for their cute babies, and predators and prey fighting each other. Whenever I talked to media, I picked No. 1 for woman, No. 2 for a man, and it was a success. The problem was to make a story extremely simple, so the ignorant mediaperson couldn't mess it.

Thank you for fixing the links Darren.

Oops, sorry the links didn't work. I somehow didn't notice.

and there are always other scientists out there...

Actually, I'm not sure about that. There aren't that many scientists in the first place, you see.

Yes, there are always people like the self-proclaimed Dinosaur George, but sooner or later nobody will take them seriously anymore.

[from Darren: delayed by spam-filter, sorry]

Forgot to make explicit that George Blasing would have loved to become a scientist, but some asshole talked him out of it, so that now he talks about science without ever having done any. Link found by Matt Wedel on SV-POW!.

WTF. Does every comment that contains a link get held for moderation now!?! I was trying to make and document the assertion that George Blasing would have loved to become a scientist, but some asshole talked him out of it, so now he talks about science without ever having done any.

Test â don't let this through if it gets held.

Test passed. So maybe I can try again...

[from Darren: nope, this one was 'reported as spam'!!]

I tried again, and it got held again. Completely illogical. I'd start complaining about SixApart, except that other people's experience shows this is completely useless. Grmbf.

"Actually, I'm not sure about that. There aren't that many scientists in the first place, you see."

My point is not that there is an infinite number of scientists. Rather, if the top tier folks boycott video production, then the producers will look at second tier talent. They will eventually find someone who is trying to make a name for himself and looking to get some exposure. Academics might laugh that this person is no expert, but the audience won't know and won't care. If they think about it at all, they will think, "If this guy is good enough to get on TV, he's good enough."

"Yes, there are always people like the self-proclaimed Dinosaur George, but sooner or later nobody will take them seriously anymore."

I think you overestimate the intelligence and knowledge of the viewing audience. Even if a person is a laughingstock to professionals and academics, appearing on television, itself, gives someone an air of authority among the average television viewer. If there is no one else appearing on these shows, then people like Dinosaur George become the voice of authority to an awful lot of viewers.

After all, they're on TV.

If you think I'm exaggerating, consider that Rush Limbaugh, whose qualifications extend no further than being able to talk in front of a microphone, and whose ideas are demonstrably insane, is considered to be a major force in conservative politics solely because his media presence has given him an air of authority among the people who listen to his program. If a large part of the American people still take Limbaugh seriously, do you really think they will suddenly reject George Blasing because "serious" academics find him to be a joke? Hell, in the US, being shunned by elite, pointed-headed intellectuals in the academic world is in some ways a net plus, not a detriment.

David M., I'm having the same experience- there seems no rhyme nor reason to holds for comments- length, href attributes, etc. don't seem to follow a predictable pattern- I posted a comment re. Redstarts here on Tetra (short paragraph plus two attachements: an article an a photo) and it was referred to moderation (still not posted) and I cut-and-pasted the exact same comment to Grrl's Scientsist Interrupted also here on scienceblogs and it posted immediately (although one with zero attachments didn't!) so it is either down to the settings individual bloggers set or a SEED issue...

I haven't noticed any consistency in what gets spam-filtered and what doesn't. Some comments with two or three links make it through, others don't. It's nothing to do with the settings, and I certainly haven't ever tinkered with any of the spam settings (though I have banned a list of spammers and offensive lunatics).

Thanks Darren, I'm not giving you a hard time at all, it's just frustrating when in the midst of 'dialogiue' with other commenters- Phrayngula was great, then terrible, now fine again; Laelaps seems to refer everything; Grrl's was great, now really difficult...

Test: This is David M.'s link using a redirector.

OK, that worked.

Now trying the one, two links that got my comment dumped into moderation last month...

Huh, interesting. Sb seems to like tinyurl. Who knew?

Something different:

Trying David M's three links from #39 as internal URLs: one, two, three.

Looks like that worked as well. If a link is to some scienceblog posting, you can leave off the "http://scienceblogs.com" (just be sure to begin your URL with a "/").

I had been looking forward to this special but honestly, now I'm even more disenchanted with the kind of thing Discovery cannel is putting out these days.

I am very sad for Mathew Wedel and for how science is being presented to those of us that care, but are not in the field, per se. Discovery channel seems to be getting worse rather than better when it comes to packaging real scientific information. :(

I've not read through all the comments yet but I thought I give my 2 cents as someone with a keen interest in these areas but lacking in the grad-level education (in this area).

Again, if I am making no sense right now - I blame the egg nog. ;)

En mi opiniÃ³n, los dinosaurios se convirtieron en posos petroleros o se extinguieron al rodar aparatosamente sobre la superficie de la tierra al presentarse el fenÃ³meno fÃsico que hizo detener el giro rotacional de nuestro planeta a finales del cretÃ¡ceo. Esto sucediÃ³ cuando el nÃºcleo de un pequeÃ±o planeta que orbitaba entre venus y la tierra, se estrellÃ³ tangencialmente en el golfo de Mexico. El encuentro de la velocidad de rotaciÃ³n del planeta contra la velocidad de esta mole de hierro, hizo que la tierra detubiera la rotacion, inclinando el eje rotacional y elongando la orbita de la tierra. Puedo comprobar estos episodios de los cuales consecuentemente se desprenden otros fenÃ³menos que no han sido estudiados por el hombre. atte. jordano: cientÃfico colombiano a espera de una respuesta.

¡¡ Viva Velikovsky !!

Thq u Daren fr setting d links

The pain of not getting cited: oversight, laziness, or malice?

tetrapodzoology — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:21:00 +0000

The pain of not getting cited: oversight, laziness, or malice?

Those of us who publish technical research papers like to see our work cited by our colleagues. Indeed, it's integral to one's success as a researcher (whatever 'success' means) that others cite your work, in whatever context. You might not like to see the publication of a stinging attack that demolishes your cherished hypothesis and shows how your approach and data analysis (and maybe overall philosophy, intellect and ability to write) are flawed, but the fact is that someone has at least read, and is citing, your work... and that's still a sort of success. These days - sad to say - the 'impact factor' of your work (that is, the amount of times it gets cited and how quickly said research takes to win citations) is seen as an important measure of how 'good' your science is. Speaking as someone who works in a field where century-old monographs are still among the most-cited and most important works, where the accruing of tiny bits of data can sometimes (years later) enable someone to piece together evidence for a high-impact gee-whiz bit of science, and where 'high-impact' papers are all but useless and frequently contain hardly any information, I think we can question the notion that 'impact factor culture' helps our science... However, I'll avoid that can of worms for the time being.

So, when you see a publication that's very relevant to your own research, and find yourself not getting cited (or, perhaps, horrendously and obviously under-cited), what do you do? I have no idea, and - other than making sure that the offending party are aware of said research - I'm not sure what you can do, so I'm not about to provide an answer. Instead I'm going to ask a question: why do some authors or research groups fail to cite research that looks especially relevant? Having suffered from ~~five~~ ~~six~~ a few, separate recent cases of this sort of thing I think I have some answers.

Genuine oversight

Authors do sometimes honestly fail to become aware of key papers. I was surprised when an author failed to cite a very relevant paper (by me) - one of only about three ever published on the subject in question. When asked about the oversight he apologised and said "would have cited your paper had I known about it". My fault for publishing in an obscure journal with no online presence, perhaps. In another case the author was embarrassed as the paper he'd missed was essentially identical in layout, theme and conclusions to his own (and for complex reasons that I can't discuss without giving too much away, there was no suspicion of plagiarism or malice or anything like that). Alas, none of us are omniscient, and even the most-informed, most cleverest and best-read person may still not be aware of every single paper and article relevant to their field of special interest. However, using such things as google and personal communication with other workers, one can generally get up to speed and ensure that nothing crucial has been missed. Furthermore, the excuse of oversight is becoming less believable/forgivable as pdf archives and online resources have become available, and as online communication and discussion have improved in general [adjacent: azhdarchid pterosaurs, by Mark Witton, not at all relevant to anything discussed here, and especially not to the 'Acts of laziness' section below].

Acts of laziness

Another conclusion I have reached is that some authors are just lazy. I was surprised to see that two recent papers on a given subject both failed to cite another, very relevant paper on that same given subject that was high-impact, open access, and had high visibility thanks to extensive coverage in the media and on blogs and discussion boards. I presume in these cases that the authors were lazy, and didn't bother to read around on the subject. Not much we can do about that, though you'd expect that the reviewers or editors would have brought the attention of the authors to the missing citation in question. See below for more on 'editor apathy'.

Choosing not to give credit

Sometimes, things are a little less innocuous and I feel confident that authors deliberately choose not to cite relevant works, specifically because they don't want to give credit to them. Let's make one thing clear: there's no need to cite all 171 published papers on the mechanics of alethinophidian snake feeding (or whatever); you can get by with citing the three recent, comprehensive reviews of the subject. But if you're publishing a conclusion that matches that of a previous study, it seems only right to cite that study, rather than pretend that it doesn't exist. Of course, if you disagree with the conclusions (often because the article in question is, in your opinion, poor and best ignored): that's different, and it's not what I'm talking about. I am specifically referring to cases where authors agree with, or even endorse, statements made by other authors [adjacent image: a dead cat on a railway].

Editor apathy

So, what to do about personal animosity and acts of malice? It's well known that, within many fields of science, there are warring factions, and there are definitely some researchers and research groups that deliberately ignore the publications of other authors and research groups. There are also personal vendettas and so on. In such cases, one might argue that editors and reviewers should make an effort to get the offending party to at least credit the work of their 'opponents': given that editors and reviewers should (in theory) be familiar with the field in question, they certainly can't use the excuse that they're unaware of these areas of animosity. In my work as an editor I've occasionally suggested to group x that they cite the work of group y, and they've usually done so once the request has been made. Maybe more of this sort of thing should occur, and when it doesn't happen do we have editor apathy or ignorance? If 'editor apathy' IS a problem - what the hell are those people doing working as editors? Not sure what to do about this - suggestions?

It would be nice if we didn't have to worry about the constant quest for citations. But we do. Like I said at the start, it does, unfortunately, make a difference as goes employability and 'research impact' assessment and so on. Failing to cite the appropriate work of your colleagues is also just not fair. Standard technical papers (i.e., not those destined for Nature, Science or PNAS) are not so constrained in length that a handful of extra references in the bibliography, or a few extra citations in the body of the text, make any difference, so - unless a good argument can be made that paper x was ignored because there's something fundamentally wrong with it (this explains what Alan Feduccia recently termed 'censorship by lack of citation') - working scientists have an ethical obligation to accurately reflect the state of knowledge in their field [adjacent image: elephants].

tetrapodzoology Sat, 09/12/2009 - 04:21

Tags

hate-filled rants

Darren,

You can try to post on Dinosaur mailing list, to make paleontologic community more aware of your work.

But, honestly, you would do more good to the word to became science popularizer.

You can also publish evil criticisms of important papers appearing, claiming outrageous alternative explanations. In fact this forces everybody to include you in the debate. Example is the anthropologist who claims that Homo floresiensis is a microcephalic human, and ornithologist who argues that a video of ivory-billed woodpecker is pileated woodpecker.

cheers,

don't forget reference limits. Some journals force you to use a limited number of references, so even if work is relevant it might not have space to get cited. For my 2c, like 'data not shown', this is ridiculous in the online age.

...good to the World, of course!

Speaking as somebody who just left the academic career: You seem like a sane person from the blog, and academia is not a place for you.

I interact a lot with two somewhat separate fields and find that this is generally *relatively* less of a problem with paleontologists, who tend to be quite literate (I did say tend!).

It seems more of a problem with biomechanists/engineers, who tend to dislike reading papers and often only read from a few journals at best. In addition, they tend to be shocked by papers that are >10 pages long, and very likely to ignore them.

Quite a few colleagues have said to me "I don't read the literature" and tell their students to practice likewise. I find that... naughty.

As an editor too, I have seen papers rejected/withdrawn because authors were unwilling to cover the literature more broadly. Naughty again!

Speaking as a librarian, I have often been disappointed to be told by researchers that they are not interested in learning about better ways or alternative places to search for articles, saying that they can find what they need and they don't need to find everything.

Perhaps the apparent ease of online searching tools means that people are overconfident in the breadth of their literature awareness.

I once wrote a report on a new theory I had formulated on a certain deformed skull that was claimed to be of alien origin. The theory was simple plausible and completely explained all the 'anomalies' of the skull through natural processes rather than having to resort to anything weird at all. However the fellow who popularised the theory of the skull's alien origins skull did not agree with my theory. Something which he is perfectly within his rights to do of course as it is still only a theory, despite being the most likely explanation. One of the things he tried to pull me up on was that I had, in his opinion given a completely inaccurate account of where the skull was found.

This account was actually a quote of his account of the discovery, I had even sited it but my editor had chopped the corresponding reference off the bottom of the page by accident.

Great post, Darren. A few observations...

An old mentor of mine suggested to always personally send a copy of your paper to the main researcher(s) of each paper in your reference list (with certain exceptions, e.g. perhaps a citation of a widely used method) to make sure they are aware of your paper. This was obviously more important in the days before electronic publishing, but given the copious output today, it's still a good idea.

Researchers definitely get lazy and some apparently do not carefully or widely follow the literature, probably because it is time consuming. Reviewing the weekly pour-in of eTOCs of all the journals within one's direct field plus the eTOCs of all the journals outside of one's direct field but with relevance can be very time consuming.

I think approaching other researchers and ensuring they know about your paper is key. If they don't cite it next time, well then maybe they're really lazy or just jerks or just clueless! One way to 'catch' researchers before they write the paper is to attend lots of conferences, if possible, and ensure that anyone that is doing research related to yours knows about your stuff.

Finally, a common reviewer comment in my experience is to "shorten the reference list, this is not a review etc". Personally, I like to be thorough (but not oppressively so!) and end up with long citation lists but others are more of the 'find one paper, preferably a review, and be done with it'.

Perhaps I missed it, but I think that you forgot the case of the paper (authored by another) which reviews all of your publications on a subject and is henceforth cited by everyone rather than the original papers that you published.

I really appreciate this post, Darren. You touch on an important, but often ignored aspect of publishing and citing that is really prevalent. I have several friends that have been the victim of this, particularly the "choosing not to give credit" part. I think it is terrible and something that can be very demoralizing. I wish people would not do that, especially because they are usually people with plenty of power, funding, and support, that don't need to keep undermining the work of others in less powerful positions. I can only suppose that they got there by suppressing others in their weird, insecure ways.

I got involved with PalArch for many reasons, including this, especially when becoming aware that these sorts of politics and editor apathy are sometimes (but certainly not always) found in even journals like JVP. There are plenty of great editors out there, especially at JVP, but not all make an effort to learn about those politics to try to push people to cite broadly enough.

Perhaps more annoying, as a scientist, is when people avoid citing papers that contradict or duplicate the findings they are attempting to promote as uniquely their own. I guess they are trying not to let others "steal their thunder" or question their results, but I think they are just demonstrating a selfishness and dishonesty that scientists should avoid at all costs. It only strengthens the work if an author leaves the reader aware of doubts and future questions to ask. If, at the end, we felt like all answers were figured out, what more is left to do? The need some have for being conclusive and certain in the meaning of their results is just contradictory to the purpose of science, and incredibly sad.

If I may interject on a completely different note, if it's not too late, but the poster on your screen... text on top of background images is a pet peeve of mine... :(

As soon as a paper of his appears, my thesis supervisor, Michel Laurin, always sends a pdf of it to about 20 people. If one of them then fails to cite him, chances are good it's deliberate (...as happened recently). And when he's asked to peer-review a paper, he lists missing citations in his review...

You can also publish evil criticisms of important papers appearing, claiming outrageous alternative explanations. In fact this forces everybody to include you in the debate. [An] Example is the anthropologist who claims that Homo floresiensis is a microcephalic human, and [the] ornithologist who argues that a video of [an] ivory-billed woodpecker is [a] pileated woodpecker.

And the vertebrate paleontologist who claims that Tyrannosaurus was a scavenger.

the poster on your screen... text on top of background images is a pet peeve of mine... :(

What's up with it?

I just thought I'd chime in and agree that it's aggravating.

A paper earlier this year basically repeated something I had already published, only in less detail, and claimed it was the first time it had been done. What made it even more aggravating was that they did cite a paper (that I was also an author on) that referred back to heavily my original paper.

To add insult to injury, they published a second paper that does present new and interesting results - the annoying thing is that I suggested the exact experiment in the paper they apparently haven't read.

My problem is I'm not sure what the appropriate way to deal with this is. I ended up sending them an email with my original paper and another very relevant paper that I feel they should have cited. I did not mention anything about citations. Instead, I said that I liked their research, and I suggested that those two papers might be helpful in moving it forward.

What's up with it?

Putting text on top of background images without anything to easily segregate them from each other visually makes it difficult to read the text. It should never be a struggle to read text on a poster. That's all I'm saying.

i've read a few review articles which level scathing criticism at authors who commit the omissions MRW (#12) describes. review articles focused on methodology are particularly suited for "setting the record straight".

All kinds of shit happens. When I published my very first paper, condensed from an undergraduate honors thesis, I was mortified to receive in the mail a copy of a well-known (though decades-old) review, from its author, with several pages indicated in RED that I had failed to cite (no cover letter, just the annotated reprint).
Of course, I had cited it in my thesis, but cut out the citation in the trimming process. I explained and apologized; he dumped all of his reprints on me; all ended well.

There's another effect that's possibly as significant as antagonism in leading to neglect of relevant publications. It happens when you read a paper on a subject you're working on (that itself may fail to cite your own prior work, but that's not what counts here) and you actually agree with most of what they say (so there's nothing critical to take issue with in response) but you find it frustrating and annoying that they didn't go one step further and discuss the point you're most interested in. When these conditions are met and as long as the data presented in the paper are not actually critical to your own case (you already got that far without it, thanks very much) I've noticed it's easy to simply forget it exists, even though it's relevant and supportive of your own views. Papers that cite and challenge your own work are far more salient than ones that disappoint (however slightly) without disagreeing.
So being aware of such psychological foibles, when you see such a case, rather than worrying whether there is malice involved (is it ever possible to accurately identify motive? - does it mean anything?) or blaming oneself for failure to promote ones own ideas and publications, just put it down to a sholarship FAIL. There's enough FAIL for authors and editors to have some each, and nobody's immune.
Then there are cases where malice and dishonesty can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, and conform to a recurrent pattern in an individual. Avoid!! Warn!! (But you could be mistaken...)

Good post...this is one of those things that is very worth blogging about simply because there is so little open discussion of it anywhere else.

I agree, it is horribly frustrating when you see papers come out which don't cite your relevant work, especially when you know for certain the authors are aware of your work because you went to the trouble of sending them reprints/PDFs. Fortunately or not, in my experience, the crappier the scientific ethics, the crappier the science, so these people are digging their own graves even as they're slighting us.

Not entirely off topic: I assume that the elephant phylogeny shown at the bottom of your post is no longer a going concern now that Mammuthus primigenius has been found to nest among extant elephants. A whole post on elephant and mammoth phylogeny would be most interesting, since you've got so much spare time to play with these days. ;-)

I'm wondering about personal bias in assessment of papers' importance. I say this because we all have personal favorites among our publications. I am astonished that one of my papers, which I regarded as a relative light-weight has been cited more than 6 times as often as the one that I considered my magnum opus. In this case, the difference is due to the papers' degree of focus: the light-weight has a fairly wide set of applications, whereas the MO is rather more specialized. But in either case, I am happy to see any of my work get noticed.

As for citing 'all' relevant papers; this is usually neither possible nor necessary. In my experience, citing a few papers to support assertions is sufficient. In this, I tended to cite papers by colleagues, or (yes) reviews.

On another tack: after the magnum opus was accepted, the journal editor sent me several of his own papers that dealt tangentially (in my assessment) with my subject. My reaction was pleasure: the editor is demonstrating interest in my work and helping to broaden my understanding! But after reading this post, I am wondering whether he was hinting that I should have cited his papers.

I think my point here is that all research fields are composed of numerous partially overlapping subfields that also overlap with numerous other fields. Keeping track of all "related" publications is simply not possible.

I assume that the elephant phylogeny shown at the bottom of your post is no longer a going concern now that Mammuthus primigenius has been found to nest among extant elephants.

Mammuthus is indeed part of Elephantidae. Were you confused by Mammutidae (basalmost in the tree), typified by Mammut americanum, the American mastodon?

(Didn't know Mammutidae was that far away from Elephantidae. Increases the pity of it being extinct.)

I agree that their is a serious lack off conscientious when it comes to literature surveys at the moment. I also agree that its getting worse. The literature search should be a major part of research as it allows your data to be view in its correct context and helps to demonstrate where to go next. There is simply no excuse for not citing key historical papers or rival hypotheses when there are tools such as Google Scholar available.

A major set of offenders are those that publish molecular data and refer to fossil data by citing text books rather than the original work. Often these text books can be as much as 10 or 15 years out of date and worse still may not even contain information that support the statements that they are cited after.

I've had this experience too. About 15 years ago I wrote a paper on the ecological distribution and evolutionary origins of polymorphism in a major group of colonial invertebrates and got it published in one of the top-ranked journals in eveolutionary biology. Imagine my surprise about 5 years later when another author published a general review of the evolution of polymorphism in colonial inverts and didn't cite my paper at all. I couldn't believe it. Even if the other author thought everything I'd said was hogwash, I couldn't see how it could just be ignored.

There seems to be no accounting for taste in citation frequency. The two papers I've published (including the above one) that I consider to be my most original and interesting work seem to have gone completely unnoticed, whereas stuff I consider much more routine and mundane have been cited far more often. I comfort myself with the thought that History will vindicate me, and I'll one day be regarded as the Gregor Mendel of my era. (Yeah, right!!)

Great topic Darren!! I always thought that the right way of doing research and writing about your results/hypothesis was to get (and cite) as many relevant publications as possible (that's how I was taught). Apparently some people don't think that way. This should not be as hard to do now as it was in the age before internet. I have seen a paper I co-authored not been cited or go unnoticed, it kind of sucks (and hurts), specially when it is even available as a free PDF.

I was cited once. Paid a fifteen dollar fine.

Great post. Yes indeed, often papers go uncited as an intentional act of malice toward the author of the paper. Even I am guilty of it, as I know I would never cite anything by Tracy L. Ford, due to the fact that he is a dispicable, unpleasent human being who treats me like crap in emails simply because I disagree with him on an issue of dinosaur anatomy. Most of his articles are badly written junk anyway, and fall right into the catagory of "the article in question is, in your opinion, poor and best ignored".

The two papers I've published (including the above one) that I consider to be my most original and interesting work seem to have gone completely unnoticed, whereas stuff I consider much more routine and mundane have been cited far more often.

Same experience here. There definitively is no correlation (in my case) between the importance of the work, as perceive it, and the citations. My most important work went totally unnoticed when considering citations alone.

In some instances, there was a long delay (say 2 years) before work that I found somewhat important go some citations.

But maybe it is idiotic to think that citations are a measure of worth. I certainly don't have much faith in that.

Ah, this is EXACTLY why I decided to not become a scientist.

This really isnt that uncommon, I'm not a scientist and I already know how hard all these rivalries are.
Here in Australia, to anyone interested in science and the media, it's painfully obvious.

For example, it's become very clear that the Ediacaran fauna is not the paradox we initially thought. Ideas of communal algae or "dead ends" dont hold up anymore. The truth is, it's just the first step in complex life, leading up the the "Cambrian Explosion". Why doesnt this get more widely acknowledged? Because reams of scientists who have never handled or examined the fossils just plain ignore the new science going on.

At least we can cite ourselves. And one another.

I have to admit I've lost all respect for Paul Sereno since the fiasco. Has there been any positive development since then, that hasn't been explained in print?

"I have to admit I've lost all respect for Paul Sereno since the fiasco."

Being a total ignoranamus here, which fiasco would that be?

I assume the Aerosteon mess is being referred to: check the October 2008 archives of Tet Zoo (post title "Unhappy with Aerosteon") and SV-POW.

Oh, yeah, I remember that. Thanks.

"adjacent: azhdarchid pterosaurs, by Mark Witton, not at all relevant to anything discussed here, and especially not to the 'Acts of laziness' section below"

So, it won't be related to a recent paper discussing azhdarchid neck arthrology that ignored a comprehensive, totally open-access, widely publicised and critically acclaimed overview of azhdarchid functional morphology, then. Tell you what, if I were one of the authors of the latter study, I'd be really ticked off, and especially since their paper dominates the first page of Google hits for 'azhdarchid' and appears on the second page of a Google Scholar search for the same thing. Maybe the authors were too ambiguous with their title: "A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology": not clear at all, really.

I would say that most cases where someone has been under-cited in my field are attributable to reference limits. I know many journals that want a substantial body of work and context of the field, as well as building on what previous studies have found, but they only want 30 references. I think we can all agree that in the online era, this is completely ridiculous, and something that clearly needs to be fixed, especially as citations of your work ARE taken as evidence of how good it is. But when I don't get cited, I just chalk it up to reference limits.

Ah, but Mark, you are neglecting to consider the ironclad rule that any paper which has been widely covered in the popular media need not -- indeed, must not -- be cited, because doing so might encourage its authors, and others, to seek publicity and attention for their future work.

I have a hard-working colleague who produces a lot of solid grey literature. He's never done me any harm and I've never met him. Yet still the mere sight of his name in print raises my hackles. The thing is, I look for references to my own work. And if I don't find any in the reference lists of new journal papers and monographs, I can still be pretty damn sure to find this guy's name in place of mine -- because his surname begins with the same three letters as mine!

I would definitely drop people a note before or after they publish, whenever I became aware of them, to say that they might find something useful in my paper (attached or linked). People are busy... they simply might not have found your paper or thought of you at the right moment. Also, do post occasionally in whatever discussion lists are most active and respected. Aim for once or twice a week with something cogent, not just "Me, too!" although deserved congratulations are always in order.

Find your local science writers' or science editors' or technical writers' association and offer them a talk on the finer points of communicating in your field. They will talk you up to other scientists that they run across in any related work or ask you about new discovers. In fact, team up with someone to help them write about the finer points of tetrapods in popular science articles, crediting you and your work of course. Scientific American didn't advertise military jets because they thought the average reader would buy one; they were raising the awareness of their expertise with the reading, science-oriented public.

Average payback time on these activities may be around 18 months; but the positive ripples can benefit you for years. So keep doing them or similar activities.

You know, science would be a lot better if it weren't run by humans. People can't get over shit, and it bleeds into their work, which is supposed to be unbiased. We need more vulcans, ultimately.

Systematic Biology, Acta Palaeontologica Polonica and Contributions to Zoology don't impose reference limits (pers. obs.). Evolutionary Biology does for "Brief Commentaries", which is not surprising; I don't know about other papers.

APP and Cont. Zool. are free online... <nudge> <nudge>

Copeia limits references per citation string to 3. This can be hard!

Off topic, but does anyone here have any remarks about this "snake with foot"?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6187320/Snake-with-foot-found…

Holy SHIT!

Eat it creationists, EAT IT!

Move along, nothing to see here. Or rather, a snake that had an unfortunate accident while eating what appears to be a toad (certainly an anuran of some kind). If we ever get the results of the 'autopsy', the limb will be shown to belong to the large prey item inside, not to the snake outside. Topological relations are not necessarily constant at important life events!

On that snake, that's begging for a caption.

"Atavism, I has it."

John Scanlon:

I'm sorry, but no. The "limb" clearly has the same patterning as the rest of the snake, unless that bulge is the body wall bunching up. Also, I doubt that an anuran could thrash it's way out of a snake's stomach.

'clearly has the same patterning' - no, not really, though the actual transition from snake to frog skin is lost in the pixels.
'that bulge' has the scale-level pattern of the snake on part but not all of it; the bulge is where the frog's body protrudes between the snake's ribs (having torn through the intercostal musculature), and only some of it is visible through the tear in the snake's skin (which appears to be horizontal, between the second and third scale row above the ventrals).

That's the left forelimb of the frog, which lies belly-up inside the snake; you can see the bulge of its eye to the lower right (yes! really!), and bends in the snake's body at the frog's hip and knee joints.

It is a very large prey item relative to the snake, and many frogs that indulge in male-male combat have sharp (sometimes lethal) spurs on the hand, and nearly all male frogs in breeding condition have some kind of cornified structure there to help in amplexus. However, there is no reason to assume the frog ruptured the snake's body wall all by itself, though these things certainly do happen (google image search for "Python Alligator Everglades" or something like that).
The part of the news story that can be readily believed is "she grabbed a shoe and beat the snake to death". POP!!

However, there is no reason to assume the frog ruptured the snake's body wall all by itself, though these things certainly do happen (google image search for "Python Alligator Everglades" or something like that).

No, that Burmese python probably collided with a speedboat that ripped it open. These sorts of snakes do kill their prey before eating it.

@ Nathan Myers

Ah, but Mark, you are neglecting to consider the ironclad rule that any paper which has been widely covered in the popular media need not -- indeed, must not -- be cited

A paper (I think it was the NY Times) did a pretty convincing analysis showing that papers they covered got more citations. They made a strong case for causality based on comparison to a period when they continued to select papers to write about but did not actually publish the articles.

"No, that Burmese python probably collided with a speedboat that ripped it open."

I heard it was done in by another, bigger alligator. But either way, it certainly didn't "explode" from its huge meal like the media has claimed.

And about that "snake with foot", how could it be the protruding foot of anuran meal when the foot has talons (or it does according to the news story, we can't actually tell from the photo) and the snake was climbing the wall of the woman's house with it?

Mammuthus is indeed part of Elephantidae. Were you confused by Mammutidae (basalmost in the tree), typified by Mammut americanum, the American mastodon?

Dammit. Yes, you are correct. I will diminish, and go into the West.

Darren, who's hand is that? Seeing as that's your office, it could be almost anyone, Mark Witton maybe?

Sorry to hijack the thread, but you know, SIWOTI.

In one case it's me: David M's probably right about the speedboat, because hey, it's Amerika. The pythons I know would never start swallowing something that was still breathing, and with crocodilians' limited lactate tolerance it probably wouldn't have even one big 'thrash' left in it by the time it was swallowed. But frogs are very often swallowed alive by colubroid snakes, so I think it's plausible a large breeding male could do this to the small colubroid snake (I don't know the species, it looks a bit like Oligodon but might be something else).

The 'talons' are just the four strong fingers of a ground frog or toad hand, like you can see here. According to the story the woman who killed the snake saw it as she woke up, probably without much ambient light, and I imagine it was pretty clumsy and noisy, but I do not think we should take her word for it that the snake was actually using the hand to climb. As I suggested above, most likely the limb did not protrude until she split the snake open.

Hey, I took a close look because nobody would like to see an atavistic snake foot more than I would. So far we only have 'femur+claw' in extant pythons and boas, and several Cretaceous fossils with femur, tib+fib, tarsals and few or no (preserved) phalanges. An atavistic hindlimb would probably be located in the pelvic (cloacal) region, not the middle of the body. I'd like to be proved wrong, but I don't see it happening in this case.

crocodilians' limited lactate tolerance

I've read they can tolerate insanely high lactate levels in the blood, but still sometimes exceed those limits.

Thank you, everyone, for your answers.

I agree with John Scanlon; that snake definitely looks like it's just swallowed a large prey item, and the limb looks like it belongs to a frog or a toad. 'Prey rupture' seems to be the most parsimonious explanation (assuming, of course, that the image is genuine).

Perhaps the specific identity of both the snake and the anuran could be pinned down? The Telegraph says that this incident took place in 'Suining, southwest China'. That would be in Sichuan province, to be more precise. Are there any Tet Zoo readers who are familiar with the herp fauna of Sichuan? John suggested that the snake could be a one of the kukri snakes Oligodon sp. - does anyone know which one? As for the anuran, casual googling suggests that various 'brown frog' species*, e.g., Rana chensinensis, are common in that general area. These frogs can be quite variable in colouration.

* I.e., Rana sensu stricto.

Wow, talk about thread drift.

Tim Morris (comment 50) asks...

Darren, who's hand is that? Seeing as that's your office, it could be almost anyone, Mark Witton maybe?

Yup, Mark 'zero state' Witton.

Darren, are you saying that's Mark Witton's hand protruding from the snake's stomach?

Oh sorry, wrong sub-thread. :)

Darren, by clicking on the 'category' at the top of this post it appears that this is only your fourth "hate-filled rant" on this site.
Surely this must be some kind of record for scienceblogs?

What about a "But Real Research Is So Boring" category? That has been our justification for not citing any references over the last three years.

Why are books so bloody expensive?

tetrapodzoology — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:35:00 +0000

Why are books so bloody expensive?

I have to say I really hate it when I see a blog post with an interesting title that concerns a complicated subject, only to find - on going to all that trouble of moving my fingers, clicking on the link, and waiting all of three or so seconds for the page to load - that the author has played the dumbass, and has instead reeled you in with a whole one line of text, or a picture, or something equally lame. Yes, I really, really hate that.

On an unrelated subject, do books really have to be so ~ucking expensive? I mean, seriously, who sets the prices? I'm going through a phase of buying reptile and amphibian field guides. It's ok if the books are less than about Â£20 ($32 US, â¬23), but if they're more than this, and if you're on an, err, limited budget, forget it.

Take Alan Channing and Kim Howell's Amphibians of East Africa, for example. Invaluable, but you can't get it for less than about $50 US (or Â£30 or so). And what about Frank Glaw and Miguel Vences's A Field Guide to the Amphibians and Reptiles of Madagascar: well, you either need to be rich (comparatively speaking), or to take out a second mortgage, as it's a whopping Â£79 ($131 US or â¬93). I mean, seriously... come on. There are lots of other examples.

Can someone seriously tell me that books - even lavishly illustrated, high quality ones like these - really need to be this expensive? I know that profits need to be made, authors and photographers and designers and editors need to be paid and so on (I'm not entirely naive: I've authored several books myself, and have a few in the pipeline, all by highly respectable, mainstream publishers), but - purely from the point of view of disseminating knowledge and promoting education - how can high prices be justified? Or.. is it really, really the wrong time to be asking this? Oh, and I'm not just ranting or picking a fight - I really want to know the answer.

Maybe I should ask my friends in publishing, but this seemed easier and involved less effort.

tetrapodzoology Tue, 07/14/2009 - 01:35

Tags

hate-filled rants

Or you can talk very, very nicely to your parents and get them to buy you 'A Field Guide to the Amphibians and Reptiles of Madagascar' for Christmas. Specialist books are too expensive though, my Amazon wishlist is filled with books I would love but cannot afford.

My lovely parents are of the opinion that I own too many books, and they refuse to buy me new ones. It's been that way for the past 15 years or so. Harrumph.

It's the low volume, I reckon - I recently picked up Rachel Bromwich's Trioedd Ynys Prydein: Triads of the Island of Britain (Third Edition) on sale, reduced from Â£65 to Â£45... And it's got no photos. But it will probably only sell a few thousand copies (at most), mostly to university libraries. On the other hand, I bought Chapman's complete Homer for the princely sum of Â£1.99, brand new...

I'd always assumed it was due to the cost of paying us photographers for all the photos in question and limit print runs (the former being part of the reason I'm such a soft touch when someone says "we'd love to use one of your photos in our book but we're on such a limited budget.......").

When its hugely expensive and not lavishly illustrated my sympathy is very limited.

The same is true for medical literature. Any respectable textbook (Harrison's, or Cecil, or Mandell) will set you back at least 200-300 euros. Even paperbacks usually are around 50 euros. Let us not even discuss sheet music which is ridiculously expensive.

Books I can't afford I try and get hold of through Uni libraries,but yes they are expensive, I assumed it is to do with small market, lavish illustrations and photographs and they expect Universities and Libraries to buy them rather than just interested parties.
World Cat is useful for finding books http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/

Bangot might have some of them, I think they have a Herp specialist in their Zoology dept. (Bernd Wueste)

Lots of academic publishing companies make a profit on the production of books, not the sales; i.e. they receive subsidies for producing a title, and are not always interested in sales. Moreover, they try to squeeze the last ounce of money out of university libraries, who are more or less forced to buy specialist titles, thus leaving us poor sods having to pay library prices. Usually, things become a bit more reasonable after a while. I remember my Ph.D. supervisor co-authoring a book which had to cost a massive 300 euros; on 'sale', it still is about 90. It's a big book (600 pages or so), but not lavishly produced, with hardly any pictures at all and using low-grade paper.
Unfortunately, they still have us by the b*lls. Still more reason to resort to open access publishing.

What is even worse with academic titles, they never get cheaper - even after 50 years in print Bird-Steward-Lightfoot's "Transport Phenomena" it's still going for $125. And no, no fancy artwork and pictures.
Do the biology titles at least come with a recipe section?

Well, being a zoology-and paleontology blogger myself I have to say that I really would like to write more about interesting photos, but often I donÂ´t have the time for longer posts. So I try in general to post better nice photos than nothing...But at least you see always the complete posts on my blog, and not only teaser photos and headlines. When I started my blog, I wrote a lot of long and detailed posts, because I had comparably much time, but time has become more scarce, and I often just have no time for long posts. But in two weeks my semester will be finished, and I hope to have again more time to blog.
But to come to the main topic. Yes, it is really often nearly criminal how expensive some books are. I am in general willed to buy even a more expensive book when its content makes it worth enough, but a lot of books are just highly overprized. There are of course exceptions, books like the "Enceclopedia of Marine Mammals" which are better than 10 other books together and where the price is reasonable (but I wonÂ´t still buy a book for 130 Euro, especially when I can read it also at the university library). The most expensive book I ever bought was a huge biochemistry book which did cost about 80 Euros, but only because I really needed it for a semester when I had a biochemistry course. I still not managed it to publish one of my several own book projects, but I think also even economically more sense to make the pices not too high, because a whole lot of people wonÂ´t buy it.

Because they are sold to university libraries. How many people might be interested in, say "Wildlife of islands of Tristan da Cunha"?

On the other hand, they are impossible to sell. We spent like EUR150 on bird and mammal books and recodings on Venezuelan trip and cannot sell them back. Anyone going to Venezuela? Never was interested how a bearded bellbird sounds like or how to tell puma from jaguar footprints?

BTW - you CAN find wildlife books extremely cheaply on amazon & the like of them.

I remember that I tried to find Schaller's "Wildlife of Tibetan Steppe" and couldn't find less than say EUR100 or similar outrageous sum. Few months later I casualy looked at amazon and bought one of several used-as-new ones for a normal price.

Simple answer is that these books are only expected to sell a limited number of copies. In order for the publisher to realize some amount of profit, the price is jacked up. And then quite often the publisher doesn't sell the amount needed to break even. That for some reason signals the publisher to make the price even more ridiculous on future titles.

Note that I very deliberately wrote that the publisher is looking to realize a profit.

At this age (31 :/ ) I've noticed that the books I really need are either wikkid expensive or dirt cheap. I could easily tell you my tale of woe; how there used to be three lovely used/discount/surplus and salvage bookstores within a quick bus ride of my house and now they're all gone. Some of the coolest nonfiction books I own were from those stores, and I found loads and loads of imaginative fantastic fiction novels that I otherwise would have never heard of. I'm much less likely to buy a book I've never heard of and potentially discover a hidden gem if the book in question costs up to ten bucks than if it costs only fifty cents.
On the flipside, there was the time when I had to have the Gregory S. Paul book I hadn't heard of before but which had to be a beautifully illustrated follow-up to Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (one of my favorite nonfiction books ever); a forty dollar brick named Dinosaurs of the Air.
Turns out it's a textbook...

And the above should read:
"At this age (31) I've noticed that the books I really need are either wikkid expensive or dirt cheap. ect. ect."
Have no idea what happened there.

Yeah - I just edited your comment because the platform didn't like the emoticon you used...

Funny, I just pre-ordered the " The Great Dinosaur Discoveries" HC thru Amazon.com.for $19.77. Release date Oct 2009. Publisher Univ of Calif Press,AUTHOR Darren Naish. I just happen to be on a number Of University Mailing Lists for specific Natural History Puiblications and I belong to the Sci American Book Club.I look for discounts and sales at Border`s and Barnes& Noble.
I am retired and limit my purchaes to quality books that i can pass on.

Hear, hear
I spend more on these books than on beer and whiskey in my student days.
And trust Elysian and Walhalla didn't come cheap.

Ha ha - good to see that I'm not a hypocrite, as $19.77 is pretty cheap. Thanks for your support Bob :)

Purely for the sake of interest, I want to add at this point that I own some horrendously expensive books: the most disgustingly expensive being Evolution of Tertiary Mammals of North America, Vol. 2: Small Mammals, Xenarthrans, and Marine Mammals. An unbelievable $270, or Â£120 on Amazon.co.uk. Mine's a review copy, of course.

I suspect that if the price of a $50 book on amphibians was lowered to $20, only a relative handful of increased sales would result. Most of the people who want or need these books have such specialized needs that they are going to buy them almost regardless of cost, and dropping the price isn't going to tempt some random person in a book store to suddenly get interested in the amphibians of East Africa.

The answer is that academic/specialized books sell low volume but that most publishers want to maintain a large profit. Even in more mainstream science writing I have heard that selling 10 000 copies would be considered a best seller. And you can be sure that "Birds of the Upper Montane Forests of Costa Rica (I made that up) isn't going to sell 10 000 copies. But the ultimate problem is that many academic publishers--ahem, Elsevier, Springer, ahem--exploit authors and the reading public by charging ridiculous prices so that they make bucket loads of money and maintain their multinational stranglehold on the publishing and academic library world. On the other hand, there are publishers such as UC Press which charge more reasonable prices even for their large, academic titles (e.g. Oceanic Anglerfishes for about $85, and they sell at discount to Amazon so you can often get it cheaper) so we should do what we can to support them.

You know, I wanted to have my own Handbook of mammals of the World for 110EUR but thought it will be unacceptable opulence.

Thanks!

Low volume, definitely. Most of these very expensive books are smaller publishers, so their production costs are higher than the big guys to begin with. Also, sadly for smaller libraries with small budgets, they mostly cater to academic libraries/departments with big budgets. If you want to do a good deed though, buy the books from the smaller publishers who are further afield, and get all the Elsevier/Blackwell/Wiley big pub books from the library.

Low volume, low expected readership...the science books that I buy are sometimes cost-prohibitive. Example: I'm not sure where I'm going to find the spare change to shell out for the upcoming ceratopsid volume ($110!). Granted, it's well over 700 pages of horned dinosaur goodness, but yeesh--that's-a pricey a-meat-a-ball!

It doesn't help that copyright terms are as long as they are. If they were the same as patents, these books would become public domain after 15 years or so. Still a long time for authors to make profits, but not so long that monopolies can keep a 50 year old reference prohibitively expensive.

If everyone who reads Darren's blog would just click on the "Donate Button" concealed artfully, way, way down the page under the Isle of Wight, Darren could buy the books he needs to regale us with the details we all crave.

Even in more 'mainstream' areas, reference/nonfiction books are pricey. For instance, I want to buy "Domain Driven Design" by Eric Evans (ISBN 978-0321125217), but even Amazon wants $52 for it. And it's the kind of book that every programmer should read, not something limited to a handful of specialists.

And don't get me started on textbooks. Trigonometry hasn't changed in centuries, and calculus in decades... why do we need a new $150 book every four years?

While I agree with Darren in general here, I stumped up for a copy of Vences and Glaw when I went to Madagascar a few years back and it was worth every penny. I spent as much time as possible in the back country and would have had to lug along a library in order to identify what I was seeing if I hadn't had this field guide. It was a low-budget trip but this one luxury purchase made such a difference in how much I got out of it.

There is one publisher whose bird field guides seem very much more expensive than comparable guides from other publishers. Even at the annual 20% sale at the local Audubon society bookshop the books are just so expensive.

I haven't bought a high-quality natural history book for almost a decade now because of the price of any decent ones around - and it is even worse for historical literature, which as a recent Medieval History graduate I needed to buy quite often. One primary source which I honestly needed my own copy of would have cost me Â£500, whereas if I were able to order from abroad (which at the time I couldn't) it would have cost me the lesser price (but still far too much) of $75

The last natural history book I purchased, incidentally, was The New Encyclopedia of Mammals by David W. Macdonald and Sasha Norris (Hardcover - 27 Sep 2001)

One of my other interests is military history. The original German editions of the volumes of the magisterial 'Germany and the Second World War' go for about $60 US, which is not unreasonable considering their bulk and that they come with a reasonable number of maps. If I read German, I'd get them all (they're up to about 9 volumes now). Unfortunately, Oxford University Press which publishes the English translations charges well north of $200 US for the same volume. They're not original, they generally use the German maps and yet they are far more costly. The best guess anyone has is that OUP reckons nobody but libraries would buy them at any price so they do a short print run at a ridiculous price. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

On the other hand, news of forthcoming 'The Great Dinosaur Discoveries' is most welcome.

You want expensive books? Try Art History. Used books often run over $100, if you can find them. I was paying $200 + in Grad School 15 years ago.

At least sometimes you have really luck. I have a lot of books which I bought for a VERY moderate price, for example NelsonÂ´s "Fishes of the World" which costs new at amazon 114 Euro. I think I bought my copy for 20 or so. Just this morning I found also a copy of Karl ShukerÂ´s "In Search of Prehistoric Survivors", a book which is among the most expensive but most interesting publications in cryptozoology. I have it seen very often for well over than 100 Euros, but know I found a copy for just 10Euros including shipping from the UK(!!!). Sometimes you just have to wait some time, untill suddenly a merchant will offer a good price.

I totally agree, Darren.

Also, in response to the cover of "Amphibians and Reptiles of Madagascar", all I can say is "All hail the hypno-toad!"

You've highlighted yet another reason why traditional publishing is going to be flushed down the sewers of history as more and more people publish electronically.

So, I see this message has a great reaction from the side of readers. You see, that's why in Russia some people just scan and convert books into PDF, DjVU and other formats and load them into Internet for free using. Yes, I know, there are some kinds of copyrights and copylefts, but all the same, there are variuos free libraries for loading of books. I also make it, but my own library is very small compared to some giant ones like this:
http://zoometod.narod.ru/ - Russian and English books about animals and plants.
http://herba.msu.ru/shipunov/school/sch-ru.htm - great botanical library (Russian)

Yes, copyright is good thing... for author's benefit. But I think most of readers may agree that knowledge must belong to everybody.

Maybe I should ask my friends in publishing, but this seemed easier and involved less effort.

LOL! Darren, are you feeding the legend of your 'laziness'?

I recently tried to see about what is apparently the only book with a thorough analysis of solifugids - until I realized that is was $250+ and only a couple hundred pages.

You think just the buying of expensive books is annoying.

$170 textbooks that I only need for class and when I use the buyback system I get $30 back. The Hofstra bookstore stinks with prices. It's a gyp but we all use it anyway.

While we are on the subject of books does any one know any good books on Synapsid evolution or animal behavior.

Maybe, here you can find anything useful:
http://zoometod.narod.ru/paleo-2.html

If everyone who reads Darren's blog would just click on the "Donate Button" concealed artfully, way, way down the page under the Isle of Wight, Darren could buy the books he needs to regale us with the details we all crave.

Problem is, as far as I can tell, most readers aren't any richer than Darren himself. I'm not even only talking about my fellow grad students. Scientists in general tend not to be rich, except the best and luckiest ones, and even those only in late stages of their careers.

It's true. Speaking as someone who has worked in the drinks industry, in retail, and in the media (where the amount of money kicking around is insane), my feelings are that the wages typically available to scientists are (comparatively speaking) a joke. Becoming a scientist is - financially - a poor decision. Maybe if I were a tenured professor I might have a different take on things...

I always thought that some titles were so high because university libraries were well funded. It is tough to get what you want when you are a non- academic naturalist who lives far from any university. But somehow I usually find the money for ones I "need" like Johnson and Janiga's Feral Pigeons or books on the evolution of birds. Books are my highest priority!

If you want to actually ask a publisher, Krieger Publishing is a small publisher with a heavy herpetological bias, there's a good chance that the person answering the phone is the owner (or you can ask for him; there aren't many staff) and he'd probably be happy to explain the numbers to you.

But basically, even with zero author advance, and assuming that the illustrations are all provided by the author too (i.e. no technical artist to pay), a publisher has to pay, up front, for editing, typesetting (has come down a lot lately), advertising (not a lot, but there is some), making printing plates, doing a print run of a few thousand copies, warehousing overhead, and distribution.

All before any actual sales are made. Which is a bit of a crap-shoot. I know Krieger generally starts offering discounts when a book has made its own production costs back. Which usually takes a couple of years.

Now, admittedly, the above is all a matter of what the minimum is a book can cost without bankrupting the publisher.

The actual price computation is finding the maximum of (wholesale price â variable cost of sale) Ã (copies sold). With appropriate time amortization. So a publisher is not interested in halving the price unless it will more than double the sales. For an esoteric and specialized book, the market just isn't that big.

In fact, the main thing holding the price down is competition from similar books from other publishers. If you're publishing a generic Category Romance (Harlequin, Silhouette, etc.) novel, which are highly interchangeable, then a $0.50 increase in price is going to result in all your readers defecting to Mills & Boon.

Buy the more specialized a subject is, the less interchangeable the books are. And the less price competition there is to worry about.

Have any of you read Feynman's story about the time he was on a high school textbook review committee? After a lengthy period of despairing about the quality, the committee had two evenly-matched books, and the choice was to be made based on cost. So they called the salesmen in and started talking about price. Now, this was a situation where there was a high-volume sale that would be made or broken based on prices which were normally not considered by textbook review committees. Oh, how the prices did fall! Every time they asked for a change like earlier delivery (which normally is used as an excuse to jack the price), the salesmen would use it as an excuse to undercut each other.

A Field Guide to the Amphibians and Reptiles of Madagascar is available at this site, newly set up to raise awareness of the endangered frogs of Madagascar.

Pity it's only available in the local Malagasy language. But there is Threatened frogs of Madagascar.

An annoying hiatus

tetrapodzoology — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:34:00 +0000

An annoying hiatus

Those of you who notice such things might have wondered where I've been over the last few days: after all, I'm now pretty much in the habit of posting to Tet Zoo every day. I've been 'absent' due to internet problems (now resolved, for the time being at least)... though, yeah, I've got other excuses too. As a result, my plans have been temporarily derailed, but I'll try and get back to speed ASAP. Meanwhile, the adjacent image shows one of the things I've been busy with this week. Would like to tell you the whole story, but can't.

tetrapodzoology Fri, 02/13/2009 - 10:34

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hate-filled rants

Agh! I can't read it! Please tell me you're going to make that larger at some point, right?

Congrats BTW,

Best,

Brett

Kids take up a lot of brain space. You'll get used to it. In a while...

By the looks of it, under the baryonyx image you seem to be trying to work out how a megalosaurid jaw developed into a spinosaurid jaw. If so it's quite funny, as I was doodling along those lines today.

Go spend some time with your wife and children! We can suffer the pangs of withdrawal (and can use the time to reflect on just how much you've given us over the last three years!).

Dave Howlett wrote...

under the baryonyx image you seem to be trying to work out how a megalosaurid jaw developed into a spinosaurid jaw

No no no - these sketches are annotated corrections. The spinosaur jaw pics show (at top) what the jaw is meant to look like, while the ugly thing below it is what the artist originally produced. And it's not a Baryonyx, but a spinosaurine.

Darren, I'm glad you've found the time outside your parenting duties for other things, because those sketches look very interesting. I'm quite a buff when it comes to the anatomy of dinosaurs and other extinct animals, I can never get enough information, so I'll be awaiting more details! P.S. I'll bet you're not getting a lot of sleep, are you?

It's amazing how cheerful all the heads look.

Ah, fair enough :) the sketches do indeed look interesting - hope we hear the full story someday!

Darren, your teasingness is abominable, but forgiveable given recent events!
I refer of course to the illegibility of the annotations and detail on those so-intriguing sketches.

Hint#1: if you post an enlarged version big enough to read, you can take a conscientious break from posting while we correspondents all just discuss your drawings at length.

Hint#2: if you do that, please be so kind as to superimpose a grid system for our ease of reference ;-)

Graydon said

It's amazing how cheerful all the heads look.

That's because... Darren loves his dinosaurs... and his dinosaurs love him!

Nice drawings. May i ask where and how did you learn draw such things?

I am lazy and must change in 2009

tetrapodzoology — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0000

I am lazy and must change in 2009

Over the course of my research career I have, like so many scientists, accrued a ridiculous list of 'semi-complete', 'near-complete' and 'essentially complete' research projects, all of which are sitting there, awaiting that extra investment of time and effort required to get them to the submission stage. A colleague recently accused me of being a lazy bastard because I have still not published a paper on a specimen that I've had in my care for over five years now: it's a new small theropod from the Santana Formation, definitely distinct from the other named Santana Formation theropods (Irritator challengeri Martill et al., 1996, Angaturama limai Campos & Kellner, 1996*, Santanaraptor placidus Kellner, 1999 and Mirischia asymmetrica Naish et al., 2004). Indeed, I gave a conference talk about this theropod way back in 2003: you'd think that, by now, something on it would have appeared in the technical literature. Yes, it's true, what a lazy, lazy bastard I am...

* Angaturama limai is almost certainly synonymous with Irritator challengeri, though (unfortunately) the latter beat the former into print by something like two weeks.

[If you're wondering about the Veronica Lodge cover: well, I got my reasons, ok?]

It would be trite to show exactly how lazy I've been over the past five years. Let's just look at 2008, a year in which I was excessively lazy. I only published two - ha, two - peer-reviewed papers (Naish & Martill 2008, Witton & Naish 2008), only one book review worth noting (Naish 2008a), and only one popular article (Naish 2008b). I also wrote a book (but it hasn't been published yet, so can't yet be used to show how lazy I was in 2008).

Oh, together with Mark Witton I completed a manuscript on tapejarid pterosaurs (it also has yet to see publication), I submitted a paper with two colleagues (Michael Woodley and Hugh Shanahan) on pinniped discovery rates, another with Don Henderson on flotation dynamics, another with SV-POW! boys Mike and Matt on functional anatomy, and another (a biography of the late Alan Charig) with Dick Moody. I also submitted a short paper on saurischian pneumaticity, and completed the better part of a huge editorial job that took up the first half of the year. Roger Benson, Steve Brusatte, Steve Hutt and I got a paper into press at Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. I also helped organise and run a meeting (Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective), I helped edit an abstract volume for an international conference (the 56th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy), and I only gave four conference presentations (Moody & Naish 2008, Naish 2008c, Naish & Witton 2008, plus BCiB talk). Only four: how pathetic! [in adjacent - unrelated - image, Graeme attacks! Full caption here].

Yes, I stand guilty as charged: lazy, lazy, lazy.

So, to help me be more efficient and actually get stuff done in 2009, I've decided to write down what Mike and Matt call a Prioritised Order of Publishing (or POOP) list for 2009. This isn't the whole thing, but here are the highlights... [adjacent image shows one of the slides from the presentation that accompanied Naish (2008c)]

-- Unfortunately, tapejarid pterosaurs are top of the list. I say 'unfortunately' because another manuscript has to be completed first: a manuscript which has been extensively delayed by a co-author who shall remain nameless. It's all to do with this.
-- Yes, Dave Hone... that project. I haven't forgotten.
-- The new Santana Formation theropod should fit somewhere around here. Once it's in press maybe I won't look so lazy; my bad.
-- During 2009, a full monographic description of Neovenator will appear. That's nothing to do with me, but it acts as a reminder that the paper on the pathologies of the Neovenator holotype is now well overdue. 'All' I have to do is complete the figures.
-- The 're-evaluation of Yaverlandia' paper really must see the light of day. It needs tidying, plus incorporation of the excellent CT data I have. The primary conclusion is already out there in the literature, and even Peter Galton thinks I could be right.
-- Valdoraptor and Becklespinax must also be put to sleep.
-- I really should get the Eotyrannus monograph sorted before someone else comes along and beats me to it. Having said that, things are moving along there - more news when appropriate.

So there we have it. Sorry for being such a monumental failure, and for being so bone-idle and unproductive: I promise to work EVEN HARDER in 2009. Incidentally, I've had to give up Tet Zoo the book as I'm too lazy to finish it. Or, too busy.. I can't remember.

Refs - -

Moody, R. T. J. & Naish. D. 2008. Alan Jack Charig (1927-1997). An anecdotal tribute! In Moody, R., Buffetaut, E., Martill, D. & Naish, D. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Abstracts of Meeting Held on the 6-7 May 2008. Geological Society of London, London, p. 60.

Naish, D. 2008a. [Review of] Patagonian Mesozoic Reptiles. The Palaeontology Newsletter 62, 92-97.

- . 2008b. Intelligent dinosaurs. Fortean Times 239, 52-53.

- . 2008c. Conan-Doyle [sic], Piltdown, and the dinosaur in the well: obscure Wealden dinosaurs and the stories behind them. In Moody, R., Buffetaut, E., Martill, D. & Naish, D. (eds) Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective. Abstracts of Meeting Held on the 6-7 May 2008. Geological Society of London, London, pp. 8-9.

- . & Martill, D. M. 2008. Dinosaurs of Great Britain and the role of the Geological Society of London in their discovery: Ornithischia. Journal of the Geological Society, London 165, 613-623.

- . & Witton, M. P. 2008. The feeding behaviour of azhdarchid pterosaurs. In Dyke, G., Naish, D. & Parkes, M. (eds) SVPCA 2008: Programme & Abstracts, Dublin 2008. National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, pp. 41-42.

Witton, M. P. & Naish, D. 2008. A reappraisal of azhdarchid pterosaur functional morphology and paleoecology. PLoS ONE 3 (5): e2271. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002271

tetrapodzoology Mon, 12/29/2008 - 00:00

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hate-filled rants

Your summary of what you did this year seems to show that you're generally alot less lazy than most. My main thing this year was completing my Illustration degree, which I thankfully did, I've also been illustrating for Karl Shuker.

Merry Christmas and Happy New year :)

Also, where did you get that pic for the apeman? is there an *Illustrated* version of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World"?

Lazy? come on, you seem to have worked and submitted several manuscripts that will likely be on the 2009 published list!!

Making a to-do list seems like a good idea!! I did it once and it worked (to some extent), maybe I should do it again. I have two almost-complete manuscripts from 2003, just need to elaborate a little more and work on the pictures; a list might even get me started with other things I set out to do at the beginning of this year and have barely completed :S

Oh, and make sure you have that list in a place where you'll see it everyday!!

Not lazy at all! Did someone (jokingly or seriously) accuse you of being so?

Publication: the world's worst measure of how productive any given year is, thanks to all the random delays brought about by co-authors, editors, reviewers, and in-press queues. Believe it or not, I was way more productive in 2008 than in any previous year, but in terms of publications I have literally nothing whatsoever to show for it -- not one.

Anyway, I now hazard a prediction that is so wholly certain to be correct that I feel bad even bothering with it: you will NOT get half of your POOP-list done and submitted this year, but you WILL get a bunch more stuff done that is not on that list, most of which you've not even thought about yet.

Mr. Naish, I'm afraid that I may be impertinent but I think I may have some experience with a similar situation to the one you find yourself in -- so I'm going to say a few things I wish I'd heard when I was younger.

First off, describing yourself as lazy is, as others have said, pretty inaccurate. You've easily produced a book's worth of material this year on this website alone and it's clear you've done quite a few other things.

I suspect the problem may be that you're more of a tactician than a strategist -- that you're overwhelmed by the vast mass of varied tasks that constitute your professional life while finding the individual tasks much easier to tackle.

Try and stop worrying about everything -- concern yourself only with the thing you're doing right now. Complete individual tasks one at a time.

You won't be able to stop worrying about everything, of course. But you can work toward making the energy you put out in that arena useful. That's your time to strategize. When you think of everything you have to do think more in terms of prioritizing smaller tasks than trying to fix the big picture.

In other words, the question you should be asking yourself should not be, "How am I going to get all this pulled together?" It should be, "What am I going to do next?"

Tell you what, it's working for me.

To be fair, I much prefer the name "Irritator." Much more personality.

Keep doing good stuff!

Did you ever consider you might be too good for a career in paleontology? ;)

Nemo: No one called Darren lazy. He's a Brit, he abuses himself more effectively than anyone else ever could. Anyway why would he pay attention to anybody else's opinion? We can praise him to the heavens and it justs irritates him, because really, what do we know? If you want his attention, send him money, via the DONATION button cleverly concealed to the left and far, far below. That would irritate him, too, but it would also get his attention.

I made second on Darren's POOP list - wow! Cheers bud, I know the Taps need to get done (I'm buried in my share too), but ti would be great to get our boy off the launchpad soon!

Thanks for comments. Tim: the picture of Doyle's ape-man comes from a children's version of The Lost World, published by Ladybird Books in 1989 (it's available on ebay for a tiny sum: buy it for the pictures).

Yes, I was recently accused of being lazy with regard to academic output. The point is that this is clearly complete bullshit, but it very much pissed me off, hence my rant here. It shouldn't bother me, but it does. Anyway, thanks to everyone for advice.

As for Irritator: this is just my opinion of course, but it ranks as one of the crappest names ever awarded to a dinosaur, up there with Gigantspinosaurus and Futalognkosaurus. Giving a meaningless, frivolous name like this to such a remarkable and charismatic fossil really does seem pretty criminal. But, oh well, the damage is done.

See, I can pronounce Irritator right off the bat, whereas I feel like I'm butchering An-GAT-OO-rama.

See, I can pronounce Irritator right off the bat

Ah - but can you? It's supposed to be said like the English word (IRRI-ta-ter) - at least, that's how Dave Martill pronounces it - but I've heard others (namely Angela Milner) say it 'irri-tat-OR'.

As for Angaturama, I'm pretty sure that an-gat-oo-RAMA is correct.

ahng-ah-too-rah-MAH. Stress on the last syllable, if I'm correctly informed, and almost certainly no [g].

'irri-tat-OR'

What? Stress on the last syllable? Never.

About being lazy... as a student you constantly have deadlines to adhere to in order to succeed to the next level or qualification. "Learn everything in this book by next Tuesday or fail!", and so on. Therefore, once you have climbed this ladder of enforced diligence, you have the excuse to kick back and take your time with projects. I'm not suggesting that those with PhDs no longer have to worry about deadlines, just that the ones that students face could mean they can't qualify and have to start over again.

And don't give up on "Tet Zoo: The Book" (if that is its official title)... add it to the end of your to-do list!

Just so you know the Neovenator monograph came out this week, so is actually 2008 (just)...

Thanks Paul!

Darren ur defntly not lazy! (I originally wrote 'ur def not lazy' then realizd that could be misread as 'you're deaf, not lazy'. Of course defntly could be misread as 'defiantly'... fair enough, that works too... but I meant 'definitely').

Y the abbrev NEway? cos I honestly wish I could be a FRACTION as 'lazy' as Darren is, getting so much done. So to sav tm I'm abbrvtng wldly 2 get to my nXtask (oh look, that works as 'next task' or 'next ask').

trubl is I kp goin off on tngnts