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RE: journal purchase



    For greatest concentration of charismatic megafauna, the _Journal
of Vertebrate Paleontology_ is probably your best bet. I'm not a
vertebrate expert either, but I find most of the articles quite
readable. Be warned though, you will be getting a lot of fish. Also,
the journals coverage is probably biased towards systematics papers,
with less on ecology and such. I'm afraid I couldn't really comment
on what would be the best option if ecology and behaviour are your
main interests, as I mainly just follow the systematics.
    Among other prominent journals (and just looking through my
reference library - gee, there's a lot of them), the _Journal of
Paleontology_ covers all fossil taxa, again with a strong systematics
bias. It probably competes for the position of top palaeontology
journal with the British journal _Palaeontology_. _Journal of
Paleontology_ tends to have more, shorter articles per issue than
_Palaeontology_, which has a more monographic bent.
    Other journals I find are worth keeping an eye on: _Lethaia_ has
probably got a great deal of coverage of palaeoecology, but does tend
to focus mostly on marine invertebrates. _Acta Palaeontologica
Polonica_ is extremely good, and also contains a lot of articles on
vertebrates, but is also freely available online at
http://app.pan.pl/. [It always amazes me that what one would expect
if one had only heard the title to be a minor journal is so
consistently high-grade - it says a lot about the quality of workers
that have been based in Poland in the last 50-plus years].
_Paleontological Journal_ [the English translation of the Russian
_Paleontologicheskii Zhurnal_] contains a few gems, but be warned
that the Russian academic paradigm is quite different from that in
most western countries. Most Russian workers, for instance, still
prefer intuitive analyses over more statistical methods. _Comptes
Rendus Palevol_ has only been around a few years, and I have to
confess that so far I'm fairly underwhelmed by the quality of
articles published in it. The _Journal of Systematic Palaeontology_
publishes mostly longish monographs which seem to be consistently
high-quality, but again you'll probably get more invertebrates
(because after all, there's so much _more_ of them than vertebrates).
    The _Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History_ and
_American Museum Novitates_ are free online at
http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/, and are worth keeping an eye on for
their occassional palaeontology papers. Finally, there's also
_Nature_ and _Science_, which only occassionally have palaeontology
papers, but include papers on a wide range of topics across the
scientific world. Mind you, I've personally come to be quite
frustrated with _Nature_/_Science_ papers, which are invariably quite
short (only a few pages long), and often frustrating in their brief
coverage and lack of detail.

    Cheers,

        Christopher Taylor

>
>---- Original Message ----
>From: hmwh@together.net
>To: DINOSAUR@usc.edu
>Subject: RE: journal purchase
>Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2006 16:11:10 -0400
>
>>Hey, list--
>>I have a generous-hearted sister who wants to subscribe me to some
>>paleontology journal, an offer I intend to accept with gladness.
>What
>>recommendation(s) would you make for a dinosaur devotee, given that
>my
>>general knowledge base is more that of an amateur than of an expert?
>Amateur
>>in the high old sense, of lover. I have never gotten over my 3rd
>grade
>>affair with dinosaurs. Now, at age 66, I'm busy indulging my
>passion. If
>>there is a journal that specializes in dinosaurs, that's probably
>the one
>>for me. I'm not too keen on reading about trilobites. Any
>suggestions?
>>Scott Perry
>>High Mountain Writers' House
>>Irasburg, Vermont