Reptile from the Petrified Forest of Chemnitz

In Early Permian volcaniclastic deposits of Chemnitz (Saxony, Germany) the partial skeleton of 30-cm-long basal reptile including a complete autopodium, further parts of the limbs, the vertebral column, thorax, and a fragmentary skull have been discovered last week by excavators from the Natural History Museum of Chemnitz.

This is the first tetrapod fossil from these deposits which are otherwise famous for their in situ silified tree stems ("Petrified Forest of Chemnitz").

Symposia Summer: Are posters for kids? I daresay yes.

My former room mate (a post-doc and Humboldt scholar) once said that poster presentations rapidly lose their appeal once you have reached the age of speaking. And perhaps he was right after all.

Inlcuding this year's SVP meeting contributions I made 10 posters and was co-painterauthor of further 6 during the last three years (about two thirds about paleontology and one third on structural geology). That's enough to paper the walls of my of and my neighbour's lab room, but what did I get apart from that?

Flooding of the publication list? - Yes, but 20 abstracts = 1 peer-reviewed paper. To get something published cheeply should surely not be the point of postermaking - also considering the overall time you are investing for a mere halfpage of printed text.

Becoming a whiz in vector graphics? - Perhaps, but this is also part of normal publishing, lecture-preparation and thesis-writing, so you would have learned that anyway...

Feedback from experts? Negligible. Sometimes you are lucky and the right people are present and really interested in what you have done - but if they are not and yours is one of 50 posters displayed don't be too optimistic. Some people are so frustrated about the (probable) lack of response that they have their posters pinned up by an oral presenter from their own faculty and save the travel costs.

Dialogue with my former supervisor about a poster of mine:
- "Luckily I can give this to Maria. Symposia are such a waste of time!"
- "Obviously, you don't have yet understood what this part of science is about..."
- "Of course, I know about the importance of communicating your science and stuff... I was only teasing." (Afterwards pretending it was only irony, but meaning every word I said at first.)

I forgot something important: the winning of the poster prize! You can try. You need high-resolution colour fotos, high quality drawings, mirror finish paper, a sense for symmetry and for the golden section, and a vanilla ice topic (like dinosaurs, trilobites, Cambrian explosion, human origins).

And afterwards you can fancy yourself as the king of the symposium junior scientists layouters. Three cheers for the PP winner!

Why an oral presentation is better

Preparing an oral presentation is more time-consuming than making a poster: you have not only to put figures on a (rather patient) sheet of paper and do some write-around. Giving a talk you are really forced to make sense of your premisses, methods, data, results, conclusions and arrange everything in a sequence (only one dimension - time; a poster has two dimensions so you can illustrate complex interrelationships more easily and thus be more confuse without notice).

All these aspects help you directly with your scientific work: A well-structured presentation can easily make a well-structured publication and vice versa. And if there is a catch or lapse in reasoning you may become aware of it in the course of trying to explain your model to others.

With an oral presentation you get a real audience: Even if no one is interested in your topic common politeness makes them stay still and gives you the power to waste 15 minutes of the life time of 50 or 100 or 200 listeners. What a feeling of might!

If you are provocative you can even stir up a reaction. Compare posters and talks to potted plants and dogs. A dog/presenter is barking at you if he wants attention and thus you feel pushed to show him his place, the poster/ potted plant is simply hanging/ standing around and withers...

So give a talk if you have the guts!

Fieldwork photo of the week

Some parts of the Madygen succession are particularly rich in plant remains inluding calamite stems accumulated in thin, sometimes coaly siltstone layers.

Contributing to Wikipedia as a paleontologist/ geoscientist

There was a time when Wikipedia articles on palaeobiological and geoscientific topics where almost exclusively abysmal, including unreferrenced children's-book-like fossil animal portrayals 30 years behind the state-of-the-art.

That there has been a change during the last years, is more or less the consequence of the infusion of expert or semi-expert knowledge. Compare this and this version of the English Wikipedia article on a famous fossil taxon and you may acknowledge that a 5 year riping process can result in a nice and relatively up-to-date encyclopedia article.

Scepticism from the scientific community had different causes:

(1) unreliability as a data source/ lack of references - these problems were mostly solved when the community of WP writers established higher standards and agreed on that all major points made by an article have to be supported by independent sources.

(2) WP-related plagiarism by students. I suppose this is merely a problem of teaching youngsters the difference between right/honest and wrong/inhonest use of source texts and nothing Wikipedia can be blamed for.

(3) potential influence by people with a special agenda. Mostly neutralized by the overload of sensible/ unbiased Wikipedia workers. In most cases the WP community has enough background knowledge - so that unsupported/biased statements are recognized and rejected/presented in a neutral way.

There is also the question of utility, especially from the expert's point of view...

Why writing WP articles can be a worthwhile operation...

(1) Your contribution will be read. Search engines mostly place Wikipedia articles very high on the list. Anyone searching your article's lemma will find your text and use it. Thus you will be the provider of primary insight into a specific scientific topic.

Your article may be helpful even for serious research - namely for scientists of related fields searching for the explanation of a term (and references to further technical literature/ online sources).

(2) You can bring rarely publicised aspects of your science to public awareness by the choice of the topics you are writing about. By creating a featured article on a rare species of ammonoids you can direct the focus of paleo-enthusiasts to an otherwise neglected field (you gain more publicity for what is really at the heart of your interest).

(3) Sometimes it is a good excercise to recount for a non-specialist audience what appeared plausible in the internal discourse among scientists of your field. You may find that some concepts are hard to explain (and perhaps don't make much sense when in the cold light of day...).

This list could be could be continued.

Hindrances for new expert authors?

Frequent misunderstandings about the Wikipedia project are listed under "What Wikipedia is not" - you should read this to prevent later disappointments.

There are some Wiki formats - mostly as easy or easier to handle than HTML codes - and you are facing a growing body of rules and conventions. A recipe is to copy and paste the style/format features of an existing article code and to fill in your new content.

Don't argue too much about styles and formats with established Wikipedia users. Your primary aim as a specialist should be to provide up-to-date information, scientific background and overview knowledge, and corrections on misconceptions/ misunderstandings which often arise from the popularization of science.

If you out yourself as an expert you will find that amateurs among the experienced Wikipedia users will give you much support at the beginning and back you up in discussions (which can arise if you are working on controversial topics).

My own Wikipedia experience

I had my first edits in the German Wikipedia in 2005 when I was still an undergrad. If English is not your mother tongue you may think about editing articles in your own language WP, but mostly in the en:WP there is more substance to start with.

In any case you will find that much work is to be done and that you have to be selective with your engagement. Look at the points that you believe are most important and easily done. If you have done a literature search for your professional work you may use some of the data again for a WP article. If you are a PhD student, be aware of the Wikipedia procrastination potential!

EAVP Meeting 2009 in Berlin, Germany

This week the European Associatuon of Vertebrate Paleontologists had its 7th annual meeting at the Humboldt University of Berlin Museum of Natural History, organized by Daniela Schwarz-Wings and her team.

Between Tuesday and Thursday about 34 oral presentations were held and 22 posters were displayed. Sorted systematically:

reptiles: 19.5 oral presentations (dinosaurs: 11) + 10.5 (7) posters
synapsids: 8.5 (mammals: 7) + 6.5 (6)
fish/ sharks: 3 + 3.5
anamniote tetrapods: 3 + 1.5

Apparently the EAVP is mostly a paleoherpetological society.

The two field trips organized for Friday covered the Rüdersdorf Muschelkalk Quarry (which yielded Nothosaurus, Placodus and others critters of the marine Middle Triassic) and the Pleistocene Rixdorf horizon of Niederlehme to the SW of Berlin.

Christian A. Meyer from Basel became new president of the EAVP, he takes the office over from Eric Buffetaut who is new editor-in-chief of the society's online-only journal Oryctos. Next year the meeting will be held in Aix-en-Provence in southern France, Greece is planned for 2011.