Advide for Aspiring Researchers in Vertebrate Paleontology 3: Look Carefully, Don't Be Afraid To Reinvent The Wheel, Find Your Future Projects

All right, so now you have a project. You are finally getting sitting down with your specimens for the first time. You have a body of literature on previous work on the subject you have accumulated, and hopefully familiarized yourself with. You know how other people have described, classified, and interpreted these animals. Now you are going to look at them with your own eyes.

So do science and yourself a favor. Just for the time being, take most of that shit you read and throw it in the trash, except perhaps for a good general description or two to help you find your way around the specimen. Pretend for a second that you don’t know any of the previous research, and just LOOK. Get out a notebook to take notes and sketch. Look carefully and long at the specimen, and describe in your own words what you see. Draw it, even if you can’t draw well, because drawing forces you to really look at every square inch of the specimen. Note anything that seems interesting or potentially relevant to you. A lot of it won’t be in the end…but some of it will, and chances are that some of the things that strike you will be things that no one ever noticed before. Once you have made your careful observations, go back to the existing literature and see how your observations compare with what other people have said. The paper you write should largely be geared toward comparing and contrasting what you think you saw with what other people before you thought they saw.

One thing you will almost certainly find, especially when looking into a relatively under-studied subject, is that much of what has been written is either overly simplistic or flat out wrong. It is really important that you look at the material with fresh eyes, and not try to squeeze your observations to fit someone else’s model. One of the biggest curses of science is the tendency of people to repeat things others have claimed without actually looking carefully at the evidence with their own eyes and thinking about what they see. We have an unfortunate tendency to try to squeeze our observations into a pre-existing model, either our own or someone else’s, even if the evidence doesn’t really support it. As a result we sometimes miss patterns that should be obvious. If you look carefully and determine that there is a lot more to the object of your study than has previously been realized, then you really have the chance to improve our understanding of a group.

For example, Bill Parker, Bryan Small, and I have been looking closely at aetosaur specimens, and have found that there is a lot more variation among aetosaurs than has previously been recognized. A lot of specimens which had been assigned to well-known taxa are actually distinct genera and/or species that were just dumped into other taxa based on a couple similarities. We refer to this practice of assigning specimens top a known taxa, especially based on scanty material, as “shoehorning,” which we consider to be a little different from “lumping” (This term has been described as “ad hominem verbiage” although I am not sure how it is more ad hominem than saying “splitting” or “lumping”; unless of course criticizing someone's work is "ad hominem," in which case science is pretty screwed).

However, even if, after careful consideration, you decide that previous workers were essentially right after all, you still haven’t wasted your time. One of the most important criteria of good science is that it be testable and repeatable. If two or more people can look at the same evidence and come to the same conclusions, it strengthens the case, and chances are you will still have noticed something that others have missed that strengthens or adds a bit of detail or complexity to the existing model. Probably still worth a paper, or at least a mention in a paper about something else. Just make sure that, regardless of whether you go with the old model or something new, you back up your case with careful observation. Going along with an erroneous old model is bad. Contradicting an accurate old model because you were sloppier and less observant than previous researchers is worse.

As you look at the material you are working on, and visiting other institutions to compare it with other material, you will gradually find that there are just as many new observations to make on other specimens, and more and more interesting observations and patterns will start to jump out at you. You will gradually start to accumulate a list of future projects to work on. Start thinking about future papers describing individual specimens, large-scale papers synthesizing everything you have noticed about the group, etc… As I discussed in the last blog, being one of the tiny handful of people who know a group better than anyone else is what will allow you to make a real contribution to vertebrate paleontology.

NOTE: In response to my last post, David Hone pointed out that being overly specialized can cause tunnel vision, and I certainly would agree with this. Although I still think that it is better to devote the majority of one's original research to one or two specialities, I certainly would encourage at least dabbling in the literature outside one's specialization. It can (for example) help identify characters having a wider phylogenetic distribution than was previously noted, or which occur convergently in different groups. Moreover, workers with other specialities may have beneficial approaches to particular problems you work on. In working on Upper Triassic vertebrate biostratigraphy, I have done a fair amount of reading into systems of biostratigraphy and biochronology for marine invertebrates and Cenozoic mammals, which have longer and more rigorous histories than Triassic vertebrate biostratigraphy. There are some interesting similarities in the ways in which the North American Land Mammal "Ages" and Upper Triassic biostratigraphy and biochronology have evolved (so to speak) as better data becomes available, and there are some useful lessons in how mammalian biostratigraphers define biozones/biochrons, and test their models.