

If you were a kid who knew all dinosaur names, but now only remember that period occasionally when paleontology appears in the media, what would you expect you'd hear if you suddenly appeared at the annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology?

You may have missed it, but I was there, so I will tell you. I am not that different from most of you. Childhood fascination with dinosaurs, graduate studies in physiology and behavior of perfectly living animals, a brief burst of intense study during one semester taking 'Dinosaur Osteology' course with Dale Russell, followed by getting my paleo news from media and blogs.

My colleage Kate Wong will cover several stories from the meeting (here is the first) and we'll have some syndications from Nature (here's the first)

My assignment? "Blog it!", said the Editor-In-Chief.

Big Questions


If you have not paid attention lately, you may think that some old questions and controversies are still around and unresolved. For example, "were dinosaurs warm-blooded?". That is a poorly worded question, and it was answered, with some reframing of the question, a decade ago. "Warm-blooded" probably does not mean what you think it means (that would be "endothermic"), but today's researchers are working out the details of thermoregulation mechanisms, not re-fighting the old wars of decades past.

Likewise, "did birds evolve out of dinosaurs?" has been answered more than a decade or so ago. And the answer is: birds are dinosaurs, the only surviving, living dinosaur lineage. Much more interesting is the current work on details of the origin of flight and feathers.


How the animals of the past evolved, developed, looked, lived, made a living, behaved, and died? What information can we extract out of fossils beyond "it belonged to species X"?. And new, often hi-tech approaches are now all the rage.



Molecular techniques. Combining genetic and anatomical data to build better phylogenetic trees. Using molecular techniques to see if we can find DNA or proteins in dinosaur fossils. A poster from Mary Schweitzer's group suggests that melanosomes - intercellular packets of pigments we are now using to figure out colors of fossil feathers - may not be melanosomes, after all, but remnants of bacterial films aggregated on the surfaces of feathers.


Comparative studies in living animals. And not just dissection of an ostrich (although that, too). Dissections of many species (and individuals) to study the variability, relationship between anatomy and function, between anatomy and ecology, and between anatomy and behavior. There is no such thing as a "model animal" when one studies evolution - good inference from fossils requires understanding of anatomy in a wide variety of related organisms.






I was pleasantly surprised by how evenly different groups of animals were represented. I expected much more primates, especially those fossils interesting for human evolution, but there were not that many talks and posters about them - I guess those folks go to their own meetings.

While there was a lot of dinosaur stuff - and yes, that is very exciting! - they did not dominate the meeting nearly as much as I expected. There was a lot of work on birds, mammals, extinct and living reptiles, including aquatic and flying reptiles, some work on amphibians, and quite a lot on fish.

Perhaps it is only my own biased perception, but it seemed to me that fish people are somewhat a world of their own - unless it's an absolutely terrifying shark or bone-plated fish with enormous jaws, I did not detect much interest in fish work by researchers who study more terrestrial organisms. Which is a pity - I saw some interesting posters about fish. Or, if we think phylogenetically, everyone was interested in fish:


One of the beauties of paleontology is that the rewards are mainly intrinsic. It is hard to find a job, and if you snag one, it's unlikely to be at Harvard. No matter how much of a superstar you become, you cannot just hire an army of students, postdocs and technicians to do the work for you while you sit in the office writing grant proposals or travel around the world giving talks - you still have to go out in the field, suffer the heat and dust, and wield the hammer, then come back to the lab and do some manual work yourself. You can become famous, but are unlikely to get rich. No patents, no Nobel Prizes. And importantly, the findings are unlikely to directly affect lives or livelihoods of millions of people (as in medicine, for example), which allows one to follow one's curiosities wherever they may lead.

Thus, paleontologists are a really fun bunch to be around. They are not secretive about their work, instead they want to tell you everything about it. No fear of scooping, as this is a small, tightly knit community where everyone knows what the others are doing, where they are digging, etc. I asked a bunch of people "Where will this work be published?" and in nine out of ten cases the answer was PLOS ONE (and in one case "PLOS ONE, or perhaps PeerJ"). Only once I heard "so, so sorry, but this will be behind a paywall, ugh". Openess rules.






Twitterfall in the hallway
Twitterfall in the hallway




The number of paleontology bloggers and twitterers is pretty small - though a great bunch!

#2012SVP tweetup

#2012SVP tweetup

Being active on Twitter certainly has some advantages:

But what I was most careful about was always asking people what is and what is not OK for me to blog about. There is still so much misunderstanding about the way publishing works these days, and especially about the notorious Ingelfinger Rule (see this Embargo Watch post specifically about SPV policy, and Tony's post about the utter illogic of not making the meeting's abstracts public, which is also why I cannot link to individual abstracts in this and future posts). People don't seem to understand it, and assume much harsher rule than it really is. Much of the communication stuff they are afraid of doing is actually perfectly acceptable (and not considered as "prior publication") by the major publishers like Nature, Science and PLOS.


But today, meetings are truly public events. When the means of production of media change hands, and is now cheap and easy to own by anyone, there is no such thing as media any more. Everyone is potentially "the media". Researchers are now their own media. Thus, the media cannot be controlled. Thus, the researchers (and scientific publishers) need to adapt to the new world.

Reminder: "to publish" means “make public”.

No, your paper in a journal is not the only "publication" of your work.

If you give a talk or poster, that's a publication. If you tweet or blog about your work, it's publication. If others livetweet your talk, it's publication. If others discuss your work on their blogs, it's publication. When your paper appears in a journal (typeset and formatted in traditional ways to appeal to traditionalists), that is also publication, one snapshot of it. Media and blog coverage of your paper is publication. TV and radio appearances are publication. Your own blog post detailing the background information and context of your research is also publication. People who tweet out links to your blog post are also publishing it. Every blog post and comment in the back-and-forth you may have with colleagues on blogs (or social media, from Twitter to Facebook to Google Plus) about your work is an item of publication. Your next paper is also a part of the publication cycle of your previous paper (unless you suddenly switch your research interests from Hadrosaurs to particle physics).

Just like science, publishing is not a singular event - one piece, one date, one time. It is a continuous work and continuous conversation. It is not a single paper-bound broadcast by just one lab. It is a discussion between a number of players, continuously, in various venues, and in different forms and formats. My bugging SVP (several tweets, a blog post, an email, and saying it out loud during the media workshop, especially about the availability of free wifi as an essential element of a modern conference) are not bugging, not angry criticism - they are intended to help the society move faster into modern media times. Those things help publication, in all of the forms I noted above - researchers' presentations, livetweeting/blogging, traditional media coverage, everything. And publishers are quickly adapting to the new world as well, gradually diminishing the scope of Ingelfinger Rule, hopefully to abandon it entirely in the near future. And as a result, science will do better. Don't we all want that?