Various topics

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

A few notes on various subjects:

1) I know of no other dinosaur paleontologists (or any other paleontologists)
that take Bob Bakker's idea of disease knocking off the dinos seriously.
That's out of dozens I've talked with through the years where the subject has
come up. Knock off a species of a couple very closely-related species maybe,
but most or all dino taxa worldwide, no. It is up to Bakker to come up with
a testable mechanism and go through the process of testing it. Otherwise,
it's just an idea (and we all have skillions of them) that may go over
well during some of his public talks but will go no further. When he does
come up with something testable, then I'll really enjoy going over what he
presents and considering it seriously. Tom, Mike, Ken - anything I've missed
here? If so, I'll happily say ignore the above.

2) I've very uncomfortable about clasifying paleontologists - or people
who are paleontologically inclined. As we've seen, the categories start
expanding and fuzzing until the classification disolves in usefulness.
I started as a bug picker up through high school and college and then
transferred over to being able to do some of it as part of my position here,
for which I feel very lucky. The vast majority of the collectors I've known
have been great people who want to do good - something the classification
was attempting to account for was, in my opinion unsuccessful. Everyone
is ignorant of some aspects of collecting, including professionals, and
we all try to get less so with time. Much of the material collected more
that 20 years ago by professionals was collected with techniques and
data recording that makes the material much less useful now than we'd
like. Also, note how much better we seem to be getting at sampling
whole faunas rather than the big chaps. The professionals are working
to get better and so are many "amateurs". I think it is time for a
publication on how to collect better aimed toward amateurs so they can
improve by increasing their knowledge. I wish I had a position where I
could develop a large collector base and provide mutual training. I admire
programs like the Denver Museum has developed and would encourage
more professionals to develop such systems. The SVP in their outreach
program seems to be working toward this. Lots of invertebrate types have
had such networks for years - Eugene Richardson of the Field Museum
was legend for his contacts in the collector community. It's a shame that
som many academic paleontologists are pulled in so many directions by
publication pressures that they can;t do as much as they like in this area.
    I won;t talk about locality trashers here and people who deal in
fossils in a way detrimental to the science (notice the non-inclusivity
[just made up that word] of the latter). I should think that most of us
share the same general attitude there.

3) Finally, I believe in the expression of opinions (a child of the 60's
here) so don;t want people muzzled. I would just suggest that flaming and
labeling people (not in the classification sense discussed in 2 but with
derogatory names) is worthless and only exposes ones own short-comings.
Let's try and keep it civil and try and make most of the emotion flow
in the vector of excitement over the new stuff coming out and for the
science in general.

Sorry about the length.

By the way, I made a standing offer to Horner that I'd buy him a beer
refrigerator (for his Vitamin R) if he'd find me an articulated
pachycephalosaur that I could describe and that would be deposited in
a good Museum. I'll do the same for any one else.


Ralph E. Chapman, Applied Morphometrics Laboratory, NMNH,
Smithsonian Institution, MNHAD002@sivm.si.edu