Easty, resident Terrapene carolina triunguis at Casa Adams Wedel, sometime gnawer of rat skulls, whose recent exploits will be detailed in future posts.
In Archie Carr’s encyclopedic “Handbook of Turtles: The Turtles of the United States, Canada, and Baja California”, first published in 1952, he quotes favorably and at length the observations of “Mrs. Knowlton” on the behavior of wood turtles (Clemmys insculpta) and box turtles (Terrapene carolina). The source given in the references is:
Knowlton, Josphine Gibson. 1943. My Turtles. Privately printed. Pp. i-xxxvii, 39-222, 22 figs.
Who was Josephine Gibson Knowlton? She was the author of a few other books, including “The Innocent Cause” and “Roma”; the younger sister of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and possibly one of the models for his iconic “Gibson Girl” illustrations around the turn of the 20th century; and she married Daniel Knowlton, who played football for Harvard and was later the legal counsel for the Interstate Commerce Commission. Importantly for our purposes, and for Archie Carr’s, she wrote and privately published a whole book about the turtles in her backyard. At least at the time that Carr was writing in the 1950s, Knowlton had cornered the market on observations of wood turtle mating behavior. For all I know, her observations on the topic are still the most detailed available; lots of people write about where turtles are found, but few take the time to sit like Jane Goodall and watch them go through their stereotypically protracted mating sessions.
It sure as heck looks like Josephine’s quite famous older brother illustrated her turtle book; there are interior illustrations in the same style.
Archie Carr was utterly omnivorous in collecting information on the ranges, life history, and behavior of turtles, and his book cites all kinds of sources, from august scientific journals to newspaper clippings. It’s fascinating just to page through the bibliography. Anyone with more than one citation is almost certainly a professional biologist or scientist of some kind, but a lot of the one-hit-wonders, especially from the 1800s, are regular folks. This is directly relevant to a recent comment by Allen Hazen, in which he asked, “Is it worth trying the ‘experiment’ of comparing articles in the same journal published decades apart?” What follows is the example I promised to post.
While reading Carr, I was intrigued by a reference to Fisher (1887) on Muhlenberg’s turtle at a lake in New York, so I tracked it down. The account appears in the Zoology section of the “general notes”, on pp. 672-673 of the 1887 volume of The American Naturalist. Fisher was an MD, not a herpetologist, and he was just reporting on some turtle shells he found stomping around the edges of a lake. Here’s the whole publication (note that nowadays we’d call it Muhlenberg’s turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergii; when I was a kid it was Clemmys muhlenbergii):
I really admire this little paper — in 165 words, Fisher laid out his methods, described his findings, raised a taphonomic mystery, tied in ornithological and botanical observations to make a biogeographic point, and cited a source, and it’s written like it was meant to be read by humans (curious non-specialists, even) and not merely to pass an editorial gauntlet. This reinforces my strong feeling that conference abstracts can and should be fully-fledged miniature papers, in conception, execution, credit received, and citeability. I will aim to hold my future abstracts to the Fisher standard.
Still, it is wild to me that American Naturalist is now one of the most prestigious journals in ecology and evolution, such that publishing one paper in “AmNat” can be a career-maker for an up-and-coming biologist, and this has been true for some decades already. But 140 years ago they were publishing letters from randos on dead varmints they found down at the lake.
More on that shift — which was certainly not unique to AmNat, and has happened at other journals within my lifetime — in a future post.
Adam Mastroianni’s blog Experimental History is consistently fascinating. In a recent article on whether conversations end when people want them to, he makes this point, very much in passing:
Journal articles […] must simultaneously function as a scientific report, an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure, a plea to the journal’s gatekeepers, a defense against critics, a press release, and a job application.
This is a brilliant insight, and it explains so much about what’s wrong with journal articles. When you’re balancing all six requirements, how are you ever going to write something that people are going to actually enjoy reading?
Because I think Mastroianni missed out the seventh and most important thing that journal articles must do: they must tell a compelling story that communicates interesting information.
(You might think that’s what “function as a scientific report” means. In a perfect world, you’re right; in our present world, it often does not.)
I love that Mastroianni’s throwaway comment has clarified this issue so well. And I wonder how much, having now been made aware of this, Matt and I can consciously push back against that tendency.
looking at the six aspects of a paper listed in the original post and the seventh that I added, how do I feel about them all?
- a scientific report — this is important, for sure. In a sense, it what you leave behind. We still quote, for example, Hatcher 1901 all the time because it’s a solid scientific report.
- an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure — also very important in the experimental sciences, maybe the most important thing. But less so for many of kinds of palaeo papers that Matt and I write. I deeply wish this had been important to Stevens and Parrish (1999) in the original DinoMorph paper.
- a plea to the journal’s gatekeepers — sadly, unavoidable. If you don’t achieve this, then your paper simply doesn’t get published.
- a defense against critics — this, I’m not too bothered about, provided we make it past those critics who are gatekeepers. Once our work is published, it’s there to be shot at, and that is part of the process. I don’t especially want to make it harder for critics to bring legitimate criticisms about my published works.
- a press release — I think this is just a mistake: if you want a press release about your paper, you should write one. We’ve done this on occasion, but most papers are not going to be of interest to the general public and there’s no point in forcing the issue.
- and a job application — happily not a problem for Matt or me: he has tenure and I have anti-tenure — i.e. I don’t have a secure academic job but I don’t want one. I pity the people who do have to write their papers as recruitment-process fodder.
- a compelling narrative — if we don’t achieve this, we’ve failed, simple as. Matt and I always aim to make our papers as comprehensible and as narratively coherent as we can — and we have been criticized by peer-reviewers for doing so.
In the end, the bits that matter to me are: presenting scientific information in a way that reads easily and draws the reader through, and enables other to build on the work (including by criticizing it). And to do that, I have to get it through the peer-review gauntlet.
Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists
July 27, 2025
In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form:
[NOUN]
Learn how this amazing [whatsit] allowed the rise of civilization, informs every aspect of our daily lives, and may hold the key to our future.
where the noun in question might be salt or wood or math or clouds or daydreaming or whatever. It’s not enough to write an engaging book on Topic X without somehow, by tortuously overreaching, making it the underpinning of life itself.
If we ever do an SV-POW! book, I’ll be sorely tempted to put on the back cover: “Could understanding diapophyseal laminae improve the health of your spleen? Open this book to find out!”
This cast of a juvenile apatosaur femur really does hold the key to your future: get your eyes back on the dang road!
Tutorial 46: how to write an abstract
November 13, 2024
We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a profoundly fallible AI summary, we could read a summary written by the actual authors, who know the material inside out?
We can, of course. It’s called an abstract, and pretty much every paper has one. Back in ye[1] olden times, authors didn’t write them: they were created by third parties to summarise the main points of the article. These days, you — the author of a scholarly article — are expected to provide the abstract, typically 200-300 words or so, that in some sense represents the article.
But in what sense?
Too many abstracts represent their article by trying to whip up enthusiasm for it — not summarizing the findings but teasing the reader as though to pull them in like a clickbait headline. That’s really not how it should be, because the reality is that an order of magnitude more people — maybe two orders of magnitude more — will read your abstract than will read the paper it’s attached to. You can’t make people read your paper (especially if it’s behind a paywall), so you need to make the abstract count.
Here, then, are four simple rules for writing an abstract that gets the job done.
1. Summarize, do not introduce. I’ve written here before about how an abstract should be a surrogate for a paper, not an advertisement for it, and this remains the single most important thing to remember. For those 99 in 100 people who will read the abstract but not the paper, we need to make sure that the abstract tells them what they need to know. So don’t write:
The body size of the snake was estimated based on extant snakes with a morphometric affinity to Palaeophiidae. The cosmopolitan distribution of Pterosphenus schucherti is modelled based on the sea surface temperature (SST) constraints of the modern cosmopolitan snake Hydrophis platurus, and the known fossil localities of the species. The present findings provide crucial insights into the global paleoecological landscape of the Eocene
Instead tell us what what the body size[2] of the snake was, what cosmopolitan distribution you found, and what insights these findings provide in the global paleoecological landscape of the Eocene.
Otherwise people are going to read your abstract, and go away with the message “this snake had a body of some specific size, and had a distribution, and that provides some insights”. Is that what you want? Huh? Huh? No. Didn’t think so.
2. Do not assume specialist knowledge. This is difficult because we work in a specialist field and some amount of specialist terminology is inevitable. But we should still do our best to reduce the amount of background knowledge a reader needs to make sense of our abstracts — again, because the potential readership is so much wider than for our actual papers.
Needless to say (I hope), we should strive to make all our writing as comprehensible as possible — always writing “it flies fast” rather than “the taxon under consideration exhibits velocitous aerial locomotion”. But that goes double for abstracts. So for example, one might write:
The thickness of the articular cartilage between the centra of adjacent vertebrae affects posture. It extends (raises) the neck by an amount roughly proportional to the thickness of the cartilage.
For those versed in the neck-posture wars, it’s hardly necessary to point out that extension of the neck involves raising it (and flexion involves lowering it), but for the wider audience that reads an abstract it’s worth spelling out.
3. Omit needless words. This is, famously, one of Strunk and White‘s rules, and it remains excellent advice. As with “Do not assume specialist knowledge”, this is good advice for all writing but especially so for the abstract.
When I started my palaeo Masters (as it then was) at Portsmouth, I had a very bad habit of writing unnecessary double negatives of the kind the Sir Humphrey Appleby might use. Instead of saying “Taxon X resembles taxon Y”, I would say “is not dissimilar to”. I did this all the time. One of the best things Dave Martill (my supervisor) did for me was to red-pen all these circumlocutions. I hope I’m better now. You be better, too
(When I was doing the video to publicise Brontomerus in 2011, I mentioned Utahraptor near the end, and stupidly described it as “not unlike Velociraptor“. I was so mortified when I heard the first draft of the video that I got in touch with the videographer and begged him to snip out the “not un-“. He did a great job, and I bet you can’t hear the join.)
4. Write the abstract after the paper, not before. It’s so tempting, isn’t it? You have a new, blank document. You type in the title, your name and academic address, and the word “Abstract”. Then you go ahead and summarize what the paper is going to to say.
Except you don’t know what the paper is going to say. Sure, you have a sense in your head of how it’s going to run, but no project plan survives contact with data. In my experience, almost every paper ends up saying something I didn’t anticipate when I started, or leaving out something I did expect to say, or drawing a different conclusion from the one I expected. (When I started to write my 2009 paper on Giraffatitan brancai‘s generic separation from Brachiosaurus altithorax, it was with the intention of proving that “Brachiosaurus” brancai was a perfectly cromulent species of Brachiosaurus, and I ended up discovering the exact opposite.)
So now I leave the abstract till last, so there is no danger that the ghosts of its early version will haunt it. I have a paper in the works now that’s reached 25 single-spaced manuscript pages and 15 illustrations, which I hope to submit within a week — but it’s abstract currently reads as follows:
Abstract
XXX to follow.
Only when the paper is actually complete will I go back, read through it, and summarize as I go, trimming down to 250 words or so if necessary when I’m finished.
Go thou and do likewise.
Notes
- “Ye” should be pronounced “the”, as it was in the days when it used to be written. It was always and only an abbreviation, “y” standing in for the “th” letter-pair. Similarly, the “e” on the end of “olde” was silent. So if arrange to meet your friends at a pub called “Ye Olde Hostelrie”, you should pronounce it “the old hostelry”.
- “Body size” as opposed to what other kind of size? Soul size? When you write “size”, body is understood. Just write size. And while I’m at it, do not give your paper a title like “A new, large-bodied omnivorous bat” or, worse, “A new large-sized genus of Babinskaiidae”. Seriously — large-sized? Again, as opposed to what? Big-hearted?
To what extent is science a strong-link problem?
October 30, 2024
Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top journals for years, and whose problems have only recently become apparent because of amateur sleuthing through PubPeer.
I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute. In general I’m very sympathetic to Adam Mastroianni’s line “don’t worry about the flood of crap that will result if we let everyone publish, publishing is already a flood of crap, but science is a strong-link problem so the good stuff rises to the top”. I certainly don’t think we need stronger pre-publication review or any more barrier guardians (although I have reluctantly concluded that having some is useful). But when fraudulent stuff like this does in fact rise to the top in what seems to be a strong-link network — lots of NIH-funded labs, papers in top journals (or, apparently, “top” journals) — then I despair a bit. Science has gotten so specialized that almost anyone could invent facts or data within their subfield that might pass muster even with close colleagues (even if those colleagues aren’t on the take, he said cynically — there is a mind-boggling amount of money floating around in the drug-development world).
Immediate thought experiment: could Mike or I come up with material for a blog post or paper that would be false but good enough to fool the other? Given how often we find surprising or even counterintuitive results, I think possibly so. I’m not particularly motivated to run the experiment when we’re already digging out from a deep backlog of started-but-never-finished papers, but it remains a morbidly fascinating possibility.
Fang and Casadevall 2011: fig. 1.
Anyway, one problem is that “top” journals have a lot of fraudulent or at least incorrect science in them, roughly corresponding to their impact factors. Now, you might say “yeah but the positive correlation means bad actors get caught”, to which I’d reply “not fast enough” and “how do you know we’re catching all of them?”
Sinking feeling
There’s another problem, I don’t know if it’s equal-and-opposite but it definitely exists: good science that doesn’t float to the top. Here are a couple of quick examples from my neck of the woods:
Working from very little evidence by modern standards, Longman (1933) had correctly figured out that pneumatic sauropod vertebrae come in two flavors, those with a few large chambers and those with many small chambers. He called them “phanerocamerate” and “cryptocamerillan”, corresponding to the independently-derived modern terms “camerate” for the open-chambered form and “camellate” or “somphospondylous” for the honeycombed one. As far as I have been able to determine, nobody paid any attention to this before Wedel (2003b) — Longman’s work on vertebral internal structure wasn’t mentioned or cited by Janensch in the 1940s or Britt or anyone else in the 1990s. To be clear, I’m not putting myself forward as a better researcher than anyone that came before. I just got lucky, to have read a fairly obscure paper while I had my antennae out for any possible mention of pneumaticity.
Speaking of Janensch, his 1947 paper on pneumaticity in dinosaurs was pretty much ignored until the 1990s and early 2000s.
OMNH 1094, a cervical centrum of an apatosaurine, and a crucial player in the Wedel origin story — this was the first vertebra of anything other than Sauroposeidon that Kent Sanders and I scanned.
I owe my career to the Dinosaur Renaissance
Here’s what bothers me about this: I made my career studying pneumaticity in sauropods, buoyed in large part by the fact that I stumbled backwards into a situation where I had access to a big collection of sauropod bones (at the OMNH), free time on a CT scanner (at the university hospital), and a curious and collaborative radiologist (Kent Sanders). But you don’t need a CT scanner to study pneumaticity, as John Fronimos has convincingly demonstrated (see Fronimos 2023 and this post). So why didn’t the revolution in sauropod pneumaticity happen in 1933 or 1947? Or, heck, in 1880 — Seeley and Cope and Marsh and many others recognized that sauropods had highly chambered vertebrae.
I think the most likely explanation is that at the time no-one cared. Pneumatic vertebrae in sauropods were possibly interesting trivia, but sauropods were an evolutionary dead end and so their vertebrae couldn’t tell us anything important about evolutionary success. These attitudes may not have been universal, but they were certainly prevailing.
I had the good fortune to come along at a time when there was renewed interest in dinosaur paleobiology, particularly any characters or body systems shared between non-avian dinosaurs and birds. Suddenly pneumaticity wasn’t some obscure bit of trivia, but the skeletal footprint of a bird-like respiratory system that was potentially a key adaptation for sauropods (Sander et al. 2011) and possibly for dinosaurs more generally (Schachner et al. 2009, 2011). And dinosaurs weren’t any more of an evolutionary dead end than we are, they just happened to mostly not fit into small holes or deep water when the asteroid hit. (Let’s heat the atmosphere to 400F for a few hours and then make the world dark for a few months or years and then we can talk about evolutionary dead ends.) So adaptations that facilitated dinosaurosity might tell us something about evolutionary success after all.
What are you doing in that cell?
Having a successful career because I happened to hitch a ride on a wave of renewed interest in dinosaur paleobiology is certainly nice, but also worrisome. If it takes 70 or 100 years for the good science to float to the top, does that really count? Whatever convection cells push the good science toward the top would ideally work more like a cook pot on a rapid boil, and not like the imperceptible roiling of Earth’s mantle. So ask yourself: what’s still on its way up to the top right now, that no-one has clocked yet? What’s the Longman (1933) of 2024 — the seemingly incidental observation that is going to seem prophetic in a few decades? Or worse, what was the Longman (1933) of 1994 or 2004, the solid paper that attracted no attention and won’t for another half century?
The convection cell metaphor is particularly apt because a lot of science is siloed. A good idea — say, that the peroneus tertius muscle occurs at a lower frequency in monkeys and apes than in humans, and this tells us something about its evolution — may rise to the top in one cell (comparative anatomy), but not make it over to the neighboring cell (clinical anatomy), where all the happy little molecules think that peroneus tertius is a muscle unique to humans (if you have no idea what I’m on about, see the second numbered point in this post).
So if you want to do good work — in this metaphor, to be at the top where the good science floats (eventually, alongside a seasoning of not-yet-unmasked bad science) — then I think you have to be aware that other cells exist, and occasionally peer into them, if for no other reason than to make sure you don’t accept an idea that’s already been debunked over there. And you need to read broadly and deeply in your own cell — there’s almost certainly valuable stuff you don’t know because the relevant works are stuck to the bottom of the pot. Go knock ’em loose.
References
- Fang, F.C. and Casadevall, A. 2011. Retracted science and the retraction index. Infection and Immunity 79(10):3855-3859.
- Fronimos, John A. 2023. Patterns and function of pneumaticity in the vertebrae, ribs, and ilium of a titanosaur (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the Upper Cretaceous of Texas, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 43:2. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2023.2259444
- Janensch, W. 1947. Pneumatizitat bei Wirbeln von Sauropoden und anderen Saurischien. Palaeontographica, Supplement 7, 3:1–25.
- Longman, H. A. 1933. A new dinosaur from the Queensland Cretaceous. Memoirs of the Queensland Museum 10:131–144.
- Sander, P.M., Christian, A., Clauss, M., Fechner, R., Gee, C.T., Griebeler, E.M., Gunga, H.C., Hummel, J., Mallison, H., Perry, S.F. and Preuschoft, H. 2011. Biology of the sauropod dinosaurs: the evolution of gigantism. Biological Reviews 86(1):117-155.
- Schachner, E.R., Lyson, T.R. and Dodson, P., 2009. Evolution of the respiratory system in nonavian theropods: evidence from rib and vertebral morphology. The Anatomical Record 292(9): 1501-1513.
- Schachner, E.R., Farmer, C.G., McDonald, A.T. and Dodson, P., 2011. Evolution of the dinosauriform respiratory apparatus: new evidence from the postcranial axial skeleton. The Anatomical Record 294(9): 1532-1547.
The pneumatic rib evolution figure in a more useful format
October 25, 2024
Here’s a funny thing I hadn’t given much thought to until recently: virtually all journals, even the born-digital variety, have pages in portrait mode for easy printing on 8.5×11 or A4 paper. And many offer a column-width option for figures. So if you want to line up a whole bunch of stuff for easy comparison, for a paper it’s usually easier to orient a figure vertically, like so:
Pneumatic dorsal ribs in a selection of sauropods and their outgroups. King et al. (2024: fig. 3).
And here it is in context on the page:
But virtually all slide presentations use a landscape format, 4:3 for a long time but often 16:9 these days to accommodate wider screens, or phones and tablets in landscape mode. For this a figure much taller than wide is usually not a good use of space, and may present at too small a scale to be readable.
I ran into this last week while prepping a presentation on my research for an anatomy department meeting at work. I wanted to use that King et al. figure because it summed up so much of the paper in one image, but the only version I had was the skyscraper version we’d used in the JVP paper. So I went into GIMP and rotated the image and every element within it by 90 degrees, to produce this landscape version:
I was presenting to an intellectually diverse audience, most of whom do not work on dinosaurs, so I added little silhouettes (my own, cribbed and hacked from all kinds of older work) to make it all more explicable:
This is all my original work, and I’m letting it out in the world here in case anyone else wants to use it. CC-BY like everything else on this blog. FWIW I think mamenchisaurs and diplodocids held their necks elevated — the baseline alert posture for extant tetrapods — I was just moving quickly and more concerned with getting little doodads for all the genera than with any paleobiological implications.
So now I’m wondering if there are any figures in old papers that I’ve avoided putting in talks, possibly subconsciously even, because they’re the wrong shape. Not that I need to do any more navel-gazing than I already do, but maybe something for me to keep an eye out for when I have reason to go back to them (which is often — they’re thought archives).
The more forward-looking takeaway is that if you have to make a taller-than-wide figure to fit a journal page, consider making a wider-than-tall version at the same time to throw into your talks — or vice versa if you’re making the talk first. It’s a time investment for sure, but it may be easier while all the bits are fresh in your head and you have all the elements in separate layers or whatever. Hopefully you already back up the uncompressed versions of all your figures, but Past Matt didn’t always do that, so at least be smarter than that guy!
Tate v2610, a sauropod dorsal rib. Check out the nice deep pneumatic fossa a little way down from the tuberculum of the rib (upper left in the photo).
Parting shot (and an excuse to post a photo for Fossil Friday): on my Tate trip this summer I hit a gang of museums, and everywhere I went I found pneumatic sauropod ribs. I think there are a lot more of these things out there than most folks have appreciated. I’m proud of my recent pneumatic rib papers (Taylor et al. 2023 and King et al. 2024), but I hope they are the just the start of something.
And because I picked that photo: you know what institution has a ton of super-interesting, well-preserved, well-prepped, not-yet-published-on sauropod vertebrae and ribs in a really nicely appointed collections room in an awesome museum run by a small team of excellent human beings? The Tate Geological Museum, that’s who. If you can get yourself to Casper and you have a legit research interest, go check out their collections, there’s SO MUCH good stuff in there. I myself will be back as soon as it can be conveniently arranged.
References
- King, J.L., McHugh, J.B., Wedel, M.J., and Curtice, B. 2024. A previously unreported form of dorsal rib pneumaticity in Apatosaurus (Dinosauria: Sauropoda) and implications for pneumatic variation among diplodocid dorsal ribs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2316665
- Taylor, Michael P., and Matthew J. Wedel. 2023. Novel pneumatic features in the ribs of the sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 68(4): 709–718. doi:10.4202/app.01105.2023
Brian Engh’s free public paleoart lectures next week!
August 21, 2024
If you live within striking distance of Norman, Oklahoma, and you have some time free next Monday and Tuesday, August 26 and 27, and you care enough about dinosaurs to be on SV-POW! reading this, then I have good news for you.
From Brian’s announcement post on Facebook:
NEXT WEEK (Mon) I’m visiting the University of Oklahoma’s Art department to do a live paleoart drawing seminar. We’ll be analyzing big cool fossils and discussing comparative anatomy in order to reconstruct dinosaurs!
THEN! (Tues) I’m doing a talk at the Sam Noble Museum exploring the philosophy of palaeoart and paleontology.
Both events are free and open to the public! Bring your hardest questions about what we really know about paleontology, paleo reconstruction, changing ecosystems, why we explore the depths of deep time, and our place in the vast ancient universe we struggle to survive in!!!
And as long as you’re there, hit the Sam Noble public galleries and say hi to Aquilops, Sauroposeidon, and the giant Oklahoma apatosaurine for me.
Go have fun!
Two thoughts on blogging: thought archives, and bullets dodged
November 16, 2023
Brian Engh made this and posted it to FaceBook, writing, “Apropos of nothing here’s Mathew Wedel annihilating borderline parasitic theropods with the Bronto-Ischium of Eternal Retribution — a mythic energy weapon/sacred dinosaur ass-bone discovered by Uncle Jim Kirkland, now stored in Julia McHugh’s lair at Dinosaur Journey Fruita CO.”
I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while. Maybe because blogging already feels distinctly old-fashioned in the broader culture. A lot of the active discussion migrated away a long time ago, to Facebook and Twitter, and then to other social media outlets as each one in turn goes over the enshittification event horizon.
But I continue to think that if you’re an academic, it’s incredibly useful have a blog. I’ve thought this basically forever, but my reasons have changed over time. At first I only thought of a blog as a way to reach others — SV-POW! is a nice soapbox to stand on, occasionally, and it funnels attention toward our papers, which is always nice. Over time I came to realize that a huge part of the value of SV-POW! is as a venue for Mike and me to bat ideas around in. It’s basically our paleo playpen and idea incubator (I wrote a bit about this in my 2018 wrap-up post — already semi-ancient by digital standards!).
More recently I’ve come to realize another part of the value of SV-POW! to me, apart from anyone else on the planet: it’s an archive for my thoughts. If I want to find out what I was thinking about 10 or 15 years ago, I can just go look. And at this point, there is far too much stuff on SV-POW! for either Mike or me to remember it, so we regularly rediscover interesting and occasionally promising observations and ideas while trawling through our own archives.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from Nick Czaplewski, who was a curator at OMNH when I was starting out and for many years thereafter. He told me that you end up writing papers not only to your colleagues but also to your future self, because there’s no way you’re going to remember all the work you’ve done, all the ideas you’ve had, all the hypotheses you’ve tested, and so your published output is going to become a sort of external memory store for your future self. I’ve always found that to be true, and it’s even more true of SV-POW! than it is for any one of my papers, because SV-POW! is vast and ever-evolving.
Created by Stanley Wankel, also from Facebook.
I’ll preface what comes next by acknowledging that I’m speaking from a place of privilege (and not just because I have friends with image-editing software and senses of humor). Broadly, because I’m a cis-het white dude who had a fairly ridiculous string of opportunities come his way (like these and these), but also narrowly in that I’m not trying to make a name for myself right now. I have the freedom to not engage with social media. I never got on Twitter (bullet dodged), and I don’t plan on joining any of the Twitter-alikes (my life is already full, and I already struggle enough with online attention capture). I’m only on Facebook to keep in touch with a few folks I can’t easily reach otherwise, and to promote papers when they come out (because I want to, not because I feel any pressure to). And, frankly, at this point I expect every social media outlet to decay, so my motivation to invest in whatever’s next is minimal.
So, while I’m a definite social media skeptic at this point, I’m alert to the fact that people just coming into the field may want or even need to engage on the new platforms, because they don’t have the option of starting a reasonably popular paleo blog in 2007. But I still think it’s useful to have a blog, precisely because social media platforms decay, and because the conversations that happen on them are so ephemeral. Theoretically you could go back and see what you were saying on Twitter or Facebook 10 years ago, but they don’t make it easy, and why would you? (And good luck doing the same with Google Plus.) So I think if I was starting out at this point, I’d still have a blog, and every time I wrote something substantial or at least interesting on the platform du jour, I’d copy and paste it into a blog post. It might reach a few more folks, or different ones; it might start different conversations; but minimally it would be a way to record my thoughts for my own future self.
I’m curious if anyone else finds that reasoning compelling. It will be interesting to come back in 10 years and see if I still think the same. At least when that time comes, I’ll know where to come to find out what I was thinking in late 2023, and I’ll be able to (provided WordPress doesn’t mysteriously fail between now and then).
My other thought for the day is that SV-POW! has survived in part by dodging a few specific bullets. The first was exhaustion — after blogging weekly for over two years, we decided that we wouldn’t even attempt a weekly schedule anymore, and just blog when we felt like it (2018 was, by intention, an odd year out, and we haven’t repeated that experiment). The second was over-specialization. For the first couple of years we worked a sauropod vertebra into just about every post, and if we blogged about something off-topic, we flagged it as such. Over time the blog evolved into “Mike and Matt yap about stuff”, like how to make your own anatomical preparations, and — most notably — open-access publishing and science communication. I think that’s been crucial for the blog’s survival — Mike and I both chafe at restrictions, even ones we set for ourselves, and it’s nice to able to fire up a WordPress draft and just let the thoughts spill out, whether they have to do with sauropods or not.
Another Stanley Wankel creation. Gareth Monger commented that the band name was ZooZoo Tet, which is instantly, totally, unimpeachably correct.
A third bullet, which I’d nearly forgotten about, was blog-network capture. As I was going back through my Gmail archive (my other digital thought receptacle) in search of the origins of the “Morrison bites” paper (see last post), I ran into discussions with Darren with about Tetrapod Zoology moving from ScienceBlogs to the Scientific American Blog Network. I had completely forgotten that back when the big professional science-blogging networks were a thing, I had a secret longing that SV-POW! would be invited. But they all either imploded (ScienceBlogs) or became fatally reader-unfriendly (SciAm, at least for TetZoo*), and now I look back and think “Holy crap I’m glad we were never asked.” Because even if those networks didn’t implode or enshittify, they’d have wanted us to blog on time and on topic, and both of those things would have killed SV-POW!
*If you are on SciAm, or read any of their blogs, and like them: great. I’m glad it’s working out for you. It didn’t for the only SciAm blog I cared about.
So really both my points are sides of a single coin: have a digital space of your own to keep your thoughts, even if only for your future self, and don’t tie that space to anything more demanding or ephemeral than a website-hosting service.
The untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus
September 14, 2023
My talk (Taylor et al. 2023) from this year’s SVPCA is up!
The talks were not recorded live. But while it was fresh in my mind, I did a screencast of my own, and posted it on YouTube (CC By).
For the conference, I spoke very quickly and omitted some details to squeeze it into a 15-minute slot. In this version, I go a bit slower and make some effort to ensure it’s intelligible to an intelligent layman. That’s why it runs 21 minutes. I hope you’ll find it worth your time.
References
- Taylor, Michael P., Matthew C. Lamanna, Ilja Nieuwland, Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Steven D. Sroka and Kenneth Carpenter. 2023. The untold story of the Carnegie Diplodocus. p. 31 in Anonymous (ed.), SVPCA 2023 Lincoln: the 69th Annual Symposium of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMGIacxCaaQ
Do you storyboard your visuals?
May 27, 2023
Figure 1 from our 2021 paper on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus as I sketched it in my notebook (left) and as it got submitted (right). We shifted part F into a separate figure during the proof stage for complicated production reasons.
This is one of those things I’ve always done, that I’ve never thought to ask if others did. When you’re putting together a talk, or making a complicated figure, do you storyboard it first with a pen or pencil? I usually do, and have done since I started way back when. I remember storyboarding my first conference talk on a legal pad when I was working on my MS back at OU. Sometimes I’ll start building the complicated thing — slide deck, multi-part figure, whatever it is — with quick sketches as placeholders until I can replace them with final art.
I illustrated this post with probably the most straightforward translation of idea to image that I’ve ever achieved. Most often the product mutates along the way, sometimes radically. The goal is to get the mutations to happen at the paper stage, when they’re cheap, rather than at the pixel stage, when they’re less so (at least for me — YMMV).
What do you do?
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 