Meeting Report and pronouncing things

[Ralph Chapman <MNHAD002@SIVM.SI.EDU>]

Hey Dinosaur types:

I just got back from Seattle where I attended both the Society of
Vertebrate Paleontology and Geological Society of America meetings. I hope
I can coax Holtz into reminding me of the many things that happend
at SVP, after both meetings I'm tired, brain-overflowed, and soggy. Seattle
is sure a cold, windy, humid and rainy place (as anyone who watched Frasier
on TV knows), although we did have a few wonderful days surrounded by
the chilly ones. The University area was very nice to be around during SVP.
Downtown during GSA was less nice but Seattle is a pretty nice city with
great Seafood.

Now to SVP - I'll do some now and as I remember more will report more -
I encourage others who were there to throw their 2 cents in.

THe most exciting talks for me were the talks on new Mongolian
material by AMNH types as well as Weishampel, Fastovsky and the
Japanese expeditions. As many of us had already heard, the biggest
news was that they finally found a fetal dinosaur in one of those
abundant protoceratops eggs and ... surprise - its an oviraptor!!!!
The lessons to be learned from assuming the most abundant eggs found
belonged to the most abundant dinosaur (Protoceratops - the NY City
rat of the Cretaceous of Mongolia) are many and I bet we never learn them
fully. So those Oviraptors that were hanging around the nests to eat them
were actually producing the eggs. Bad rap that but we all got a great
laugh out of it. Lots of Protocerratops skeletons, new Mononykus material
and - probably most significant - hundreds of Cretaceous mammals -
apparently most articulated. The pictures we saw from this material was
astounding!!!!!! Having been around people who go nuts when they've found
just a tooth or jaw or a multi and having been raised thinking them a real
jewel (which they are), it was amazing and should help with lots of
clarification on the Cretaceous history of the mammals (it's funny the
pre-Cretaceous history, especially the late Paleozoic and Triassic
history is actually rather good comparatively from what I can tell -
until they got small.)

Lots of marinbe reptile stuff including a whole symposium. As mentioned
there - there is a need for an Illustrated Encyclopedia like dinos and
pterosaurs have. There was a reiteration of the fact that Ichthyosaurs
may not have been at all fast butr, instead, were streamlined to be
quiet to help them sneak up on fish.

Horner's group presented on their T. rex work, as discussed earlier. Just
a note here on the suggestion that stuff is left out of abstracts because
of little confidence in it. Not generally true - instead, when you send in
abstracts 5 months or more before the talk, much can happen between those
times (sometimes ALL of the actual research is done after the abstract is
sent in - sshhh - trade secret here). THere was some discussion of like
material in mosasaurs too - I'll have to check my notes.

Anyway, I'll go through and give additional summaries if Tom or Dave
or whoever don't run from here.

Now onto "correct" ways of pronouncing things. There are some in the business
who seem to think this is important and most have suggested to me that the
proper way is to emphasize the third syllable from the end, which I have
followed and ignored at my own pleasure and convenience. I got my first
professional taste from Peter Galton, a sharp guy and excellent anatomist
who seems to pronounce things, at times, differently from anyone but the
Royal family (ceratopsians are pronounced carrot-topsians - red headed
dinos I guess). The point is that the names are there so we can communicate
and as long as I can figure out who you're talking about, and vice versa,
we have succeeded. I mostly find non-professionals worrying about the
"correct" way to pronounce things and most of the paleontologists I deal
with don't care as long as they communicate and get work done. As a closing
point, when I started in the business in the mid-70's (yes I'm old! 41 a few
days ago - Pleistocene), I was more haevily into trilobites - a group I'm
back into heavily again. At that time I heard the three top experts on
Ordovician trilobites (or at least 3 of the top 5 or 6) all pronounce one
of my favorite taxa Flexicalymene (I have a belt-buckle with it on in brass) -
these were Whittington, Chris Hughes and John Cisne - they all did it
differently. I didn't care then and I still don't. Just try to do it
as well as you can and just don;t  pronounce Pachycephalosaurus as
tri-cer-a-tops and we'll all make out like bandits.


Yours truly  - Ralph Chapman, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution,
MNHAD002@sivm.si.edu.