Re[2]: Duckbill necks

["Matt D. Celeskey" <mceleskey@cabq.gov>]

Peter Von Sholly wrote:
>Well, you get things like "Spitters" from the media- and then when you talk
>to "non dinosaur-intensive" people...
>snip<
>Part of my sense of disenchantment and confusion is of course, my own.  I
>worked on a dinosaur movie where certain people didn't know or care squat
>about dinosaurs, yet were in charge of people who passionately did care.
>Guess who called the shots?

Good points, and I suppose if I had thought a little more about the confusion
end I would have come up with similar scenarios...I was thinking a little more
along the lines of your statement "making it seem as though dinosaur-folk don't
know what they're doing", which seemed to imply that the confusion might have
more sinister effects, something like funding cuts, frustrated "non-dinosaur
intensive" people signing on to Creationist philosophies, or simply poor public
perception of paleontology.

Although it sounds like your experience with the dinosaur movie was "sinister"
enough...


>Well, I would think one needs a lot more than the following:
>
>> *"The collected material includes a sequence of 19 incomplete neural
>arches, 9
>> dermal ossifications located on the neural spines, a right tibia and
>fibula
>> with an incomplete astragalus, and 5 metatarsals from the left side."
>
>Will that stop somebody with a little bit of knowledge (sometimes called a
>dangerous thing!) from picking up brush and sculpey?

On the one hand, I agree that the stated Augustia remains would not permit an
accurate restoration; on the other, I wonder if simply describing and
classifying the fossils leads to an implied restoration: Obviously, any
"dinosaur-intensive" person reading the abstract visualizes a sauropod, or a
sauropod skeleton, or even a partial sauropod vertebral column, with these wierd
plates/spikes attached to the back/vertebrae. Even the scrappiest tooth or bone
fragment labelled "Theropoda indet." makes some assumptions that are relatable
to some degree of restoration - "This tooth came from a probably bipedal,
probably carnivorous animal that once lived in this area (possibly in a certain
type of environment) at such and such a time."

I'm not going to argue that this gives an illustrator any "divine right" to
restore any labelled fossil into a fully-fleshed animal that hunted this way or
ate leaves that way or raised its young like so. But if the degree of
restoration that goes on in the mind of the "dinosaur-intensive" person is *
worth* presenting to a "non-dinosaur intensive" person, then I think an
illustrator would be essential, regardless of the inevitable degradation of the
restoration as it is used as the unquestioned base for other illustrations,
model kits, cheap rubber toys, etc.

Still, I agree that the current ratio of research to sloppiness in popular
paleo-restoration is sometimes frustrating (was it ever not?) and I'll even
admit to being more sloppy than serious in my own work at times. Perhaps its
time to add more tools and techniques to the paleo-artist's bag of tricks, I
think there's an awful lot of grey areas between fossil drawings and silhouetted
skeletons and Wild Kingdom-style restorations that a good deal of paleontology
falls into.

Rambling & Thinking,
Matt.
mceleskey@cabq.gov