PERSONAL EXAMINATION OF SPECIMENS

[Tetanurae@aol.com]

I think that on this subject, my thoughts fall between those of George
Olshevsky and Ken Carpenter's.  

George has the correct point that you need to illustrate specimens correctly
and with high quality in as many different views as possible.  I can't count
how many times I have looked through texts looking for something and coming up
short, or coming up with everything BUT what I was looking for.  Or, looking
through a paper, a monograph even, and finding only line drawings of the bones
and only in one angle...  

One author in particular (not naming any names, but he wrote a monograph on an
English ornithischian in 1974) has a particular knack of having some of the
worst scientific illustrations that I have ever seen.  This is just not
something that should ever be done if it can be avoided.

On the other side of the issue, there is no substitute for not viewing
specimens.  I have quite a few ideas concerning the internal relationships of
Psittacosaurus, and also some rather unorthodox ideas about the relationship
of Parksosaurus to other ornithopods.  I would not however think of publishing
anything on these until I were to first visit New York, Beijing, Ulan Baatar,
and Toronto, London and Buenos Aires respectively.

In particular, there are a lot of details of the skeleton of Parsosaurus that
I just can't make out from Parks' description, or from Galton's for that
matter.  Can you believe that after three papers, no one really has any real
idea what its teeth look like without getting on a plane and going to Toronto
to look at 'em?

An example of how bad illustrations can be dealt with by reexamination is
Arstanosaurus.  When it was described by Suslov and Shihlin in 1982, where
they seemed to show it was a totally abnormal hadrosaur based on the jugular
shelf of the maxilla.  When Norman redescribed it in 1996? he showed that all
the abnormality was due to them looking at it from a strange angle, and that
Arstanosaurus is a nomen dubium.

So, yes, in conclusion, my ramblings are basically saying: make good
illustrations when you describe stuff, but don't rely on published
descriptions alone.

Peter Buchholz
Tetanurae@aol.com

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