P.Z. Meyers has an excellent post drilling the two most irritatingly nonsensical arguments in the science vs. religion debate: That religion is particularly good at propogating compassion or morality, and that religion restricts itself to ethical questions while science cannot address religious claims.
My own takes on these arguments can be found here and here.
LNJ
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Awesome.
I normally wait until the end of the month to post this kind of shit, but this can't wait.
Bring me the last DO-DO BIRD!!!
P.S. I just decided I needed to add a cat picture for no discernable reason. It isn't even my cat. It is Michelle Stocker's cat. I think his name is Trogdor, and I looked after him one summer while she was working at PEFO. He is almost blind but also liked to explore, and every day he would leave a trail of destruction thoroughout my house as he would blunder about looking for whatever it is that cats look for.
The techniques most cats use for investigating shelves full of stuff is to cautiously sniff individual items, and delicately pick thier way onto the shelf. Since Trogdor couldn't see well, his technique was to just to swipe out with his paw and sweep the whole fucking mess off the shelf and onto the floor, then to lay on the shelf.
I took this picture because he looked so peaceful that at first I thought he had died.
Wow, that was pretty random.
LNJ
Bring me the last DO-DO BIRD!!!
P.S. I just decided I needed to add a cat picture for no discernable reason. It isn't even my cat. It is Michelle Stocker's cat. I think his name is Trogdor, and I looked after him one summer while she was working at PEFO. He is almost blind but also liked to explore, and every day he would leave a trail of destruction thoroughout my house as he would blunder about looking for whatever it is that cats look for.
The techniques most cats use for investigating shelves full of stuff is to cautiously sniff individual items, and delicately pick thier way onto the shelf. Since Trogdor couldn't see well, his technique was to just to swipe out with his paw and sweep the whole fucking mess off the shelf and onto the floor, then to lay on the shelf.
I took this picture because he looked so peaceful that at first I thought he had died.
Wow, that was pretty random.
LNJ
Saturday, May 22, 2010
The JVP Typothorax Paper: Jeff Is Still Best
Typothorax coccinarum was the most common aetosaur in western North America for much of the Late Triassic. Like pretty much all aetosaurs, it is known primarily from its paramedian and lateral osteoderms, which have a distinctive morphology that can be used to identify and characterize the taxon. Prior to a few years ago, the best available specimens of the animal were from Canjilon Quarry, near Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, and a smaller specimen from the Post Quarry in West Texas. These specimens consist of associated but almost completely disarticulated material, including not just osteoderms but vertebrae and appendicular elements, which I described in detail for my master’s thesis (Martz, 2002).
I can safely say, with no conceit, that my thesis is a miracle from God. I thoroughly described and illustrated pretty much every available element. Using positional analysis (elaborated in pp. 127 & 130 in my thesis, and also by Parker, 2007), I was able to correctly infer the anterior to posterior placement and orientation of a jumble of disarticulated osteoderms. My drawings are totally fucking sweet. With the exception of Bill’s own thesis and subsequent publications on Desmatosuchus and Heliocanthus (Parker, 2002, 2007, 2008), it is the best descriptive paper ever published on a North American aetosaur. That statement is not self-aggrandizement. It is simply a fact.
However, God has a sick sense of humor, and provided the NMMNHS group with two nearly complete and better articulated specimens, which they published in the most recent issue of JVP (Heckert et al., 2010).
“Jeff,” I can hear you asking, “how is it?” Well, let me tell you.
In a nutshell, it presents a superficial anatomical description, some interesting and relevant new information and interpretations, and pulls the usual NMMNHS bullshit of trying to marginalize the (usually better) work of other researchers in favor of their own so that they get cited more. This tactic of theirs tends to be annoyingly successful, and I’ll talk about it a little more in my review of the new Triassic Life on Land book by Hans Sues and Nick Fraser. Since Bill will also be discussing the Heckert et al. (2010) paper and its useful points, I’ll delve directly into the bullshit concerning the treatment of my thesis. I’ll put off discussing some of their taxonomic conclusions for another post, and focus on their description.
First things first: No, they didn’t rip me off outright...at least, I don’t think they did based on my first couple readings. Holy shit, they even give me credit for some observations! However, the extent to which they tiptoe around my thesis in the descriptive section is almost hilarious. One of the points that we made during Aetogate is that Spielmann et al. (2006) cited my thesis chapter on Redondasuchus extensively, but only when they disagreed with me, and avoided giving me any credit for observations that they agreed with. They pull some of the same kind of crap here. They almost religiously avoid making any comparison between their material and the Canjilon stuff, and mostly use Long and Murry’s (1995) less detailed coverage in rare cases where they cite a previous observation. This is a rather striking omission since I completely described every element of Typothorax present in both the Canjilon Quarry and Post Quarry material, as well as providing anatomical interpretations and comparisons to other archosaurs. One would think these might be referenced more in a paper on the osteology and functional morphology of Typothorax. However, this isn’t really a problem as most of their description of the new skeletons is so superficial that it doesn’t establish a whole hell of a lot other than that 1) Typothorax was a vertebrate, and probably a tetrapod, and 2) that a lot of the elements aren’t well-exposed. So, no real harm done.
They make a few of the usual attempts to marginalize my description in favor of their own work with subtle word-play and some outright bullshit. For example, on p. 628, they state that “Martz (2002)…wrote extensively on additional elements, although these were largely isolated, or at best associated and in some cases may not pertain to T. coccinarum.” None of this is true. With the exception of a few isolated paramedian plates (which are indisputably Typothorax), ALL the Canjilon material I described was found in piles of associated plates and other postcrianial elements, something I was able to determine by matching the field numbers on individual elements to the original 1933 field maps.
They also do not actually defend the implication that anything I described isn’t actually Typothorax, with one exception: a possible clavicle which doesn’t match their material, and that I was ambiguous about identifying anyway. How do the other Canjilon elements I described compare to their specimens? Their descriptions provide almost no real morphological information beyond measurements, so who knows? However, pretty much everything I described is indisputably aetosaurian (and Typothorax is the only aetosaur at Canjilon), so their implication that I referred a lot of non-aetosaur elements to Typothorax is something they just made up.
Another example of this sort of disingenuous crap is when they point out (correctly) that I erred in showing a one-to-one relationship between vertebrae and osteoderm rows in the reconstruction of Typothorax I did in my thesis (Fig. 4.41). They note (also correctly) that in Desmatosuchus, it was already known that there are fewer plates in the cervical region than vertebrae (e.g. Case, 1922; Parker, 2002, 2008). They then proceed to quip (p. 634): “However, both Long and Murry (1995) and Martz (2002) persisted in reconstructing Typothorax as having a 1:1 match between cervical vertebrae and osteoderm rows” as though we should have known better.
They neglect to mention that a 1:1 ratio between presacral vertebrae and scutes IS known for other aetosaur taxa known from articulated carapaces (e.g. Walker, 1967; Heckert and Lucas, 1999; Schoch, 2007), and that this was pretty much taken for granted for other aetosaur taxa. They themselves had never previously bothered to suggest this might not be the particular case in Typothorax in their 1999 paper or anywhere else until they got the Badlands Ranch specimen.
(I have suspected for a couple years now that Typothorax might not have a 1:1 presacral vertebrae to plate ratio, which is reason I had trouble doing a good life reconstruction of an adult Typothorax that I alluded to in this post. Basically, I would try to line up of Typothorax osteoderms, and would end up with a freak with a gigantically elongate carapace that pulled the legs and head way apart. I knew something was wrong, but didn’t know exactly what until I had a chance to see the articulated skeleton of another as-of-yet undescribed aetosaur specimen in Germany that is closely related to Typothorax. That cleared up the confusion, and allowed by to do this corrected reconstruction last year; I don’t know if the exact pre-sacral scute count is right, but it is probably close).
The fact is, their description overall shows that I more-or-less correctly inferred the placement of most of the isolated paramedian and lateral osteoderms in the Canjilon and Post Quarry specimens using features of morphological variation established by other articulated taxa as my guidelines.
Heckert et al. (2010) are probably correct in that my description missed most of the anterior dorsal paramedians, and draw a lot of satisfaction pointing out possible/probable errors in my carapace reconstruction and in my identification of a few peculiar isolated scutes due to the fact that almost all my material was disarticulated. However, I am not terribly impressed with this, as their own descriptions of disarticulated aetosaur specimens tend to show that they can’t identify or orient isolated plates to save their asses (see Chapter 3 in Martz, 2002, and Parker, 2007). So if a couple ARTICULATED specimens allowed them to correctly identify the placement and orientation of the few anomalous plates that gave me some trouble in the disarticulated Canjilon and Post Quarry specimens, I am not going to exactly wet myself in amazement.
Their claim that I misidentified some of the weird cloacal scutes of Typothorax as lateral scutes in my thesis (Figs. 4.36-4.38) is probably also bullshit; my identification of most of these osteoderms as laterals is based on the two blocks from the Canjilon Quarry “U” specimen (Fig. 4.24), in which the paramedian, lateral, and ventral scutes are all in articulation (Fig. 4.24), so I am still confident that I assigned them correctly as laterals, although I might have wrongly placed them a little too far forward; they look more like the anterior caudal laterals on the Badlands Ranch specimen than the posterior dorsals that I identified them as. Having gotten a pretty good look at the Badlands Ranch specimen on display in NMMNHS, I am leaning towards some of the weirder scutes in the Canjilon Quarry specimen that I identified as ventral scutes (Fig. 4.40) are actually the weird spikey cloacal ventral scutes (Fig. 4.24b).
Moreover, their own skeletal reconstruction shows at least one probable blunder. As has been the case in the last few NMMNHS contributions, Matt Celeskey’s excellent line drawings are the best thing about the paper. I do like his skeletal reconstruction, which shows Typothorax from front and back as well as top and side; my only real gripe with it is the anterior cervical paramedians. These are missing in one of the specimens they described, and distorted in the more complete specimen, but I identified them in the Canjilon material. The paramedian plates in the Canjilon material are slightly constricted laterally, and have lateral edges perpendicular to the anterior and posterior margins (see Martz 2002, Figs. 4.26-4.27); this is visible in the anteriormost paramedians in the NMMNHS Revuelto Creek specimen. However, these paramedians also have a subtle anterolateral curvature (again, see my thesis), their reconstruction shows them with straight anterior and posterior edges. The only type of osteoderm missing in their specimens, and they screwed it up because they couldn’t be bothered to credit my thesis.
I can safely say, with no conceit, that my thesis is a miracle from God. I thoroughly described and illustrated pretty much every available element. Using positional analysis (elaborated in pp. 127 & 130 in my thesis, and also by Parker, 2007), I was able to correctly infer the anterior to posterior placement and orientation of a jumble of disarticulated osteoderms. My drawings are totally fucking sweet. With the exception of Bill’s own thesis and subsequent publications on Desmatosuchus and Heliocanthus (Parker, 2002, 2007, 2008), it is the best descriptive paper ever published on a North American aetosaur. That statement is not self-aggrandizement. It is simply a fact.
However, God has a sick sense of humor, and provided the NMMNHS group with two nearly complete and better articulated specimens, which they published in the most recent issue of JVP (Heckert et al., 2010).
“Jeff,” I can hear you asking, “how is it?” Well, let me tell you.
In a nutshell, it presents a superficial anatomical description, some interesting and relevant new information and interpretations, and pulls the usual NMMNHS bullshit of trying to marginalize the (usually better) work of other researchers in favor of their own so that they get cited more. This tactic of theirs tends to be annoyingly successful, and I’ll talk about it a little more in my review of the new Triassic Life on Land book by Hans Sues and Nick Fraser. Since Bill will also be discussing the Heckert et al. (2010) paper and its useful points, I’ll delve directly into the bullshit concerning the treatment of my thesis. I’ll put off discussing some of their taxonomic conclusions for another post, and focus on their description.
First things first: No, they didn’t rip me off outright...at least, I don’t think they did based on my first couple readings. Holy shit, they even give me credit for some observations! However, the extent to which they tiptoe around my thesis in the descriptive section is almost hilarious. One of the points that we made during Aetogate is that Spielmann et al. (2006) cited my thesis chapter on Redondasuchus extensively, but only when they disagreed with me, and avoided giving me any credit for observations that they agreed with. They pull some of the same kind of crap here. They almost religiously avoid making any comparison between their material and the Canjilon stuff, and mostly use Long and Murry’s (1995) less detailed coverage in rare cases where they cite a previous observation. This is a rather striking omission since I completely described every element of Typothorax present in both the Canjilon Quarry and Post Quarry material, as well as providing anatomical interpretations and comparisons to other archosaurs. One would think these might be referenced more in a paper on the osteology and functional morphology of Typothorax. However, this isn’t really a problem as most of their description of the new skeletons is so superficial that it doesn’t establish a whole hell of a lot other than that 1) Typothorax was a vertebrate, and probably a tetrapod, and 2) that a lot of the elements aren’t well-exposed. So, no real harm done.
They make a few of the usual attempts to marginalize my description in favor of their own work with subtle word-play and some outright bullshit. For example, on p. 628, they state that “Martz (2002)…wrote extensively on additional elements, although these were largely isolated, or at best associated and in some cases may not pertain to T. coccinarum.” None of this is true. With the exception of a few isolated paramedian plates (which are indisputably Typothorax), ALL the Canjilon material I described was found in piles of associated plates and other postcrianial elements, something I was able to determine by matching the field numbers on individual elements to the original 1933 field maps.
They also do not actually defend the implication that anything I described isn’t actually Typothorax, with one exception: a possible clavicle which doesn’t match their material, and that I was ambiguous about identifying anyway. How do the other Canjilon elements I described compare to their specimens? Their descriptions provide almost no real morphological information beyond measurements, so who knows? However, pretty much everything I described is indisputably aetosaurian (and Typothorax is the only aetosaur at Canjilon), so their implication that I referred a lot of non-aetosaur elements to Typothorax is something they just made up.
Another example of this sort of disingenuous crap is when they point out (correctly) that I erred in showing a one-to-one relationship between vertebrae and osteoderm rows in the reconstruction of Typothorax I did in my thesis (Fig. 4.41). They note (also correctly) that in Desmatosuchus, it was already known that there are fewer plates in the cervical region than vertebrae (e.g. Case, 1922; Parker, 2002, 2008). They then proceed to quip (p. 634): “However, both Long and Murry (1995) and Martz (2002) persisted in reconstructing Typothorax as having a 1:1 match between cervical vertebrae and osteoderm rows” as though we should have known better.
They neglect to mention that a 1:1 ratio between presacral vertebrae and scutes IS known for other aetosaur taxa known from articulated carapaces (e.g. Walker, 1967; Heckert and Lucas, 1999; Schoch, 2007), and that this was pretty much taken for granted for other aetosaur taxa. They themselves had never previously bothered to suggest this might not be the particular case in Typothorax in their 1999 paper or anywhere else until they got the Badlands Ranch specimen.
(I have suspected for a couple years now that Typothorax might not have a 1:1 presacral vertebrae to plate ratio, which is reason I had trouble doing a good life reconstruction of an adult Typothorax that I alluded to in this post. Basically, I would try to line up of Typothorax osteoderms, and would end up with a freak with a gigantically elongate carapace that pulled the legs and head way apart. I knew something was wrong, but didn’t know exactly what until I had a chance to see the articulated skeleton of another as-of-yet undescribed aetosaur specimen in Germany that is closely related to Typothorax. That cleared up the confusion, and allowed by to do this corrected reconstruction last year; I don’t know if the exact pre-sacral scute count is right, but it is probably close).
The fact is, their description overall shows that I more-or-less correctly inferred the placement of most of the isolated paramedian and lateral osteoderms in the Canjilon and Post Quarry specimens using features of morphological variation established by other articulated taxa as my guidelines.
Heckert et al. (2010) are probably correct in that my description missed most of the anterior dorsal paramedians, and draw a lot of satisfaction pointing out possible/probable errors in my carapace reconstruction and in my identification of a few peculiar isolated scutes due to the fact that almost all my material was disarticulated. However, I am not terribly impressed with this, as their own descriptions of disarticulated aetosaur specimens tend to show that they can’t identify or orient isolated plates to save their asses (see Chapter 3 in Martz, 2002, and Parker, 2007). So if a couple ARTICULATED specimens allowed them to correctly identify the placement and orientation of the few anomalous plates that gave me some trouble in the disarticulated Canjilon and Post Quarry specimens, I am not going to exactly wet myself in amazement.
Their claim that I misidentified some of the weird cloacal scutes of Typothorax as lateral scutes in my thesis (Figs. 4.36-4.38) is probably also bullshit; my identification of most of these osteoderms as laterals is based on the two blocks from the Canjilon Quarry “U” specimen (Fig. 4.24), in which the paramedian, lateral, and ventral scutes are all in articulation (Fig. 4.24), so I am still confident that I assigned them correctly as laterals, although I might have wrongly placed them a little too far forward; they look more like the anterior caudal laterals on the Badlands Ranch specimen than the posterior dorsals that I identified them as. Having gotten a pretty good look at the Badlands Ranch specimen on display in NMMNHS, I am leaning towards some of the weirder scutes in the Canjilon Quarry specimen that I identified as ventral scutes (Fig. 4.40) are actually the weird spikey cloacal ventral scutes (Fig. 4.24b).
 |
| From Paleo Errata |
Moreover, their own skeletal reconstruction shows at least one probable blunder. As has been the case in the last few NMMNHS contributions, Matt Celeskey’s excellent line drawings are the best thing about the paper. I do like his skeletal reconstruction, which shows Typothorax from front and back as well as top and side; my only real gripe with it is the anterior cervical paramedians. These are missing in one of the specimens they described, and distorted in the more complete specimen, but I identified them in the Canjilon material. The paramedian plates in the Canjilon material are slightly constricted laterally, and have lateral edges perpendicular to the anterior and posterior margins (see Martz 2002, Figs. 4.26-4.27); this is visible in the anteriormost paramedians in the NMMNHS Revuelto Creek specimen. However, these paramedians also have a subtle anterolateral curvature (again, see my thesis), their reconstruction shows them with straight anterior and posterior edges. The only type of osteoderm missing in their specimens, and they screwed it up because they couldn’t be bothered to credit my thesis.
Do I feel scooped because they published these specimens before I finally got around to publishing my thesis on the Canjilon and Post Quarry stuff? Not at all. As is usual with their descriptive papers, their treatment shows a lack of useful detail and much recognition of relevant features of taxonomic variation in aetosaurs, which means that I will still have adequate reason to re-describe Typothorax myself, once I get my current series of stratigraphy papers and a couple more aetosaur descriptions off my plate. If Heckert et al. eventually plan to elaborate on their superficial preliminary treatment by describing the NMMNHS specimens in proper detail, making comparative use of the most thorough, useful, informative, and best-illustrated description of Typothorax postcranial elements available (which is to say, mine), I will be absolutely delighted. I will also be so shocked that I’ll probably shit myself. I’m not holding my breath.
In the mean time, if you want a REAL description of the osteology of Typothorax, click here and download from the link at the bottom of the page.
P.S. It has been pointed out that referring to the "NMMNHS group" casts all reasearchers at NMMNHS in an unfair light. Fair enough, and apologies to anyone there actually doing legitimate work. I will try to cook up a new nickname which is more specific.
REFERENCES
Case, E.C. 1922. New reptiles and stegocephalians from the Upper Triassic of western Texas. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication, no. 321 (October, 1922). Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington D.C., 84 pp.
Heckert, A. B., and Lucas, S. G. 1999. A new aetosaur (Reptilia: Archosauria) from the Upper Triassic of Texas and the phylogeny of aetosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 50-68.
Heckert, A.B., S.G. Lucas, L.F. Rinehart, M.D. Celesky, J.A. Spielmann, and A.P. Hunt. 2010. Articulated skeletons of the aetosaur Typothorax coccinarum Cope (Archosauria: Stagonolepididae) from the Upper Triasssic Bull Canyon Formation (Revueltian: Early-Mid Norian), Eastern New Mexico, USA. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 30, no. 3 (May), pp. 619-642.
Long, R.A., and Murry P.A. 1995. Late Triassic (Carnian and Norian) tetrapods from the southwestern United States. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 4, 254 pp.
Martz, J.W. 2002. The morphology and ontogeny of Typothorax coccinarum (Archosauria, Stagonolepididae) from the Upper Triassic of the American southwest. M.S. thesis, Geosciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 279 pp.
Parker, W.G. 2003. Description of a new specimen of Desmatosuchus haploceros from the Late Triassic of northern Arizona. M.S. thesis, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, 315 pp.
Parker, W.G. 2007. Reassessment of the aetosaur "Desmatosuchus chamaensis" with a reanalysis of the phylogeny of the Aetosauria (Archosauria: Pseudosuchia). Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 41-68.
Parker, W. G. 2008. Description of new material of the aetosaur Desmatosuchus spurensis (Archosauria: Suchia) from the Chinle Formation of Arizona and a revision of the genus Desmatosuchus. PaleoBios 28:1-40.
Schoch, R.R. 2007. Osteology of the small archosaur Aetosaurus from the Upper Triassic of Germany. Neues Jahrebuch für Geologie und Paleontologie Abhundhungen, vol. 246, no. 1 (October), pp. 1-35.
Spielmann, J.A., Hunt, A.P., Lucas, S.G., and Heckert, A.B. 2006. Revision of Redondasuchus (Archosauria: Aetosauria) from the Upper Triassic Redonda Formation, New Mexico, with description of a new species. In J.D. Harris, S.G. Lucas, J.A. Spielmann, M.G. Lockley, J.I. Kirkland, and A.R.C. Milner (eds.) The Triassic-Jurassic Terrestrial Transition. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 37, pp. 583-587. Albuquerque, NM.
Walker, A. D. 1961. Triassic reptiles from the Elgin area: Stagonolepis, Dasygnathus and their allies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, vol. 244, no. 709, pp. 103-204.
LNJ
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