Thanks for taking the time to reply to my comments.

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.

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. 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.