February 28, 2011
Brontomerus Continues to Thunder Around the Web
Last week, paleontologists Michael Taylor, Mathew Wedel and Richard Cifelli announced an instant dinosaur sensation: Brontomerus mcintoshi, the “thunder-thighed” dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of Utah. All around the web, the sauropod was seen punting a large, feathery raptor in Francisco Gascó’s wonderful restoration. But the debut of Brontomerus was not a one-shot announcement left to fade after the initial run of news reports. Using their SV-POW! blog, study authors Taylor and Wedel have opened up public discussion about the dinosaur.
Taylor and Wedel’s first follow-up was a detailed response to questions raised by other scientists about the dinosaur. Paleontologist Jim Kirkland, who was directly involved in the excavation and preparation of the Brontomerus fossils in the 1990s, questioned numerous aspects of the new paper, and its authors responded in detail. Normally these kinds of discussions take place behind closed doors, but scientific arguments about Brontomerus have spilled over from e-mail to Facebook to blogs. For non-paleontologists, this is a rare look at the kind of scientific debate that often follows publication. A scientific paper is not a distilled piece of knowledge that can be put on a shelf somewhere. It is just an initial step in scientific debate.
The second supplementary post looked at the weird hip shape of Brontomerus. The original paper contained an illustration comparing the hip of the dinosaur with other sauropods, but the direct overlays of the hips in the blog post highlight the expanded portion of bone for muscle attachments that gave Brontomerus thunder thighs. As Matt Wedel himself writes in the post, “I like the kick in the brainpan that these overlays provide.”
Further posts about Brontomerus are planned for the SV-POW! blog, and I have to applaud what Taylor and Wedel have done. This is science communication done right. All too often new discoveries filter through press releases into news reports, but here two of the paper’s authors are directly engaging with their peers and the public. In addition, Mike Taylor put together a brilliant press package on his website, providing hi-res images, video, and a fact sheet of what the paper does and does not say. Should this kind of outreach come with every scientific paper? No, but if you’ve got a wonderful new dinosaur or other prehistoric critter that’s sure to get attention from the press, I think what Taylor and Wedel have done serves as a good model for how scientists can directly engage with reporters, peers, and dinosaur fans.
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I’m just an interested lay bystander, but here’s my take…
The authors wouldn’t need to be doing this public defense if they had more than one scrappy juvenile ilium to work from. And their clumsy release of the information on Facebook got the public discussion going before the official announcement. Even as a layman, I have to wonder what quality of peer review at “Acta Palaeontologica Polonica” got such a shaky paper published in the first place.
The “brilliant” press package provides reconstructions that the press will eat up, and few in the public and press will realize the extremely high ratio of speculation to actual fossil evidence that they represent. The authors are facile debaters and know that images get more press and public attention than the actual details of a paper. I’m not convinced that any good science is going on here, nor am I convinced that what you call a “wonderful new dinosaur” will hold up to serious peer scrutiny.
Thanks for the comment, BJN, but I disagree. The public defense of Brontomerus comes from the fact that the criticisms of it were made in public forums, as the authors themselves state. Brontomerus was leaked ahead of schedule several times – once by an accidental blog posting, once by APP releasing the paper “in press” against the wishes of the authors before final publication, and once by the daily mail – and, given all these hiccups, I was actually surprised that the lid remained on this dinosaur for as long it did. As I wrote above, the fact that the discussion is happening on SV-POW! and elsewhere is simply letting people see what normally happens behind-the-scenes, anyway.
I also disagree about the descriptive paper being “shaky.” Yes, the material is scrappy and from a juvenile, but I think the authors have made a good case that it is worth noting and probably represents something new. (Just because something is from a juvenile does not make it worthless, and the anatomy of the ilium is truly remarkable compared to other known sauropods.) Even on points that are being quibbled about, the authors of the paper included the logic behind their reasoning in the paper itself. From everything I have seen, they recognize the provisional nature of some of the details about Brontomerus and seem as anxious as anyone to see more material come out of the site in question.
I think you undersell both the public as the press, too. Yes, the restoration is speculative, but is that not true – to some degree or another – of every restoration? Every restoration is a hypothesis. I wish there was more of Brontomerus to look at, but I certainly can’t blame the authors for coming up with a hypothetical restoration rather than showing a juvenile ilium floating in the air. This thing was a sauropod, and I don’t see the problem with restoring it as such. Granted, many reports said that only a partial skeleton had been found and did not fully detail the scrappy nature of the material, but I think that the authors were justified in wanting to put together an eye-catching restoration of the animal.
I am honestly a bit baffled by all the sour grapes about Brontomerus. Plenty of insults and charges have been thrown around, and in every case the details in the actual paper cover these points. (Many of the arguments are vague, “on principle” remarks of what should or should not be done as a matter of course.) What Brontomerus looked like, its evolutionary relationships, etc. are all things that will have to be ironed out on the basis of future studies, but, to speak for myself, I think Taylor, Wedel, and Cifelli did a good job with a unique and unusual fragment of bone. What is the worst case scenario here? That this renewed interest in the specimen and the site leads to more excavations and a better understanding of Early Cretaceous sauropods? That’s still a win. From the sound of it, there are multiple researchers interested in the Brontomerus site now, and with any luck we will learn more about this dinosaur in the near future. And regardless of the scientific details, I still think that the authors did will to create a one-stop site with all the relevant information for the press and members of the public. Speaking as a science writer, the site Taylor put together is invaluable, and I hope that other researchers look into creating press kits to help journalists and writers when new discoveries are made.
The authors wouldn’t need to be doing this public defense if they had more than one scrappy juvenile ilium to work from.
Interesting that you assume we’re blogging about this as a defense. We’ve blogged about all of our papers since we started SV-POW! in 2007. And most people are interested in the additional information we’re able to provide through the blog.
And their clumsy release of the information on Facebook got the public discussion going before the official announcement.
If you’d bothered to read our posts, you’d know that we didn’t release the information on Facebook. Or the DML, or anywhere else. All of those leaks were done by others, and we did our best to keep the lid on until the paper was out.
Even as a layman, I have to wonder what quality of peer review at “Acta Palaeontologica Polonica” got such a shaky paper published in the first place.
Pretty darned good, in fact. Both reviews were quite thorough. Any unhappiness with the result should be leveled at us, not at the editors and reviewers of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, who worked very hard on our behalf. And no need for scare quotes around the journal’s title, either–it’s an outstanding publication.
The authors are facile debaters and know that images get more press and public attention than the actual details of a paper.
Mmm. If that’s the case, why did we immediately post the PDF of the paper on Mike’s website and repeatedly point everyone to it? Hardly the actions of people who are trying to hide a bad paper behind a flashy press release.
I’m not convinced that any good science is going on here, nor am I convinced that what you call a “wonderful new dinosaur” will hold up to serious peer scrutiny.
All right, it’s an open world. Please read the paper and tell us which aspects of it you disagree with and why.
For the record, I didn’t use “scare quotes”, I simply didn’t know that I could embed html styles in comments and I used the convention of indicating a title in quotes.
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my comments.