THE MOR DIARIES, ENTRY #6

At the end of two weeks of drawing nonstop are 85 line drawings that don't come even close to a complete documentation of the skeleton! Why on earth am I smiling?! Photograph by John Scannella.

 Part A: Progress Report

My trip to the MOR is now over and done with; in the end, I completed 85 line drawings in two weeks and the revisions bumped the ms up to 1,273 pages. Each day was so labor intensive that I was left mentally and physically exhausted to the extreme that I hadn’t the energy or motivation to post updates.

After the first a full week of making illustrations, it was clear to me that I had to narrow my focus on the articulated skull and exclude the disarticulated bones in the cabinets. Despite appearances, the articulated skull is in several sections that can be taken apart and reassembled. I want this trip to be the last (or second last) time that happens in order to minimize handling and stress upon the large, but delicate fossil. My plan was to fully illustrate the skull in its articulated and disarticulated conditions before I left.

As history turned out, I was able to illustrate nearly the entire skull and jaws, with the exception of much of the braincase and parts of the lower jaws. One of the main benefits of this trip was getting a handle on my weekly progress, which is approximately 43 line drawings a week. This will help me plan my next visit, during which I plan to complete the skull and jaws, and get a good start on the postcranium.

I approach each drawing in three steps, where (1) I draw the outline of the bone, or the outline of a set of articulated bones with a heavy line weight, (2) I then draw outlines of all of the damage, plaster, glue, and epoxy with a thin line weight, and finally (3) I draw in the topography of the bone with a light or medium weight line. In a collections room with diffuse light, I wear a small headlamp to illuminate the specimen. To stave off boredom, especially during the midafternoon, I usually have a maximum of three drawings in progress. In most cases I find that drawing the actual anatomical details gets accomplished very quickly, in contrast to drawing in all of the damage. Since there was such a high volume of illustrations to make for this project, I saved time by holding off the final task of varying the line weights for home except for highly damaged bones such as (in this case) the premaxilla.

Part B: Rationale & Justification for a Big Monograph

In this section I will answer the most frequent questions I get regarding this monograph, with the goal to flesh out my aims for embarking on this sizeable work, as well as that on Jane.

Q: Where do you plan on publishing such a large work?

A: There are several online journals (e.g., ZooKeys, Zootaxa) that do publish large works online, which is enabled by the digital format. There are traditional print journals (e.g., Palaeontology, Journal of Paleontology, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology) that publish large memoirs in addition to their regular issues. And there are publishers that that will print specialized works in book form (e.g., Springer). I therefore have several venues to consider once the final manuscript is produced.

Q: Why not just break up your monograph into several smaller articles? That way you can boost your publication record.

A: To my mind, a monograph is a single coherent reference work that saves fellow researchers the inconvenience of tracking down separate articles, and personal experience has shown me that a single work (or set of works between two covers) is simply easier to work with. I think the mode of publication ought to benefit the audience more than the author. Put another way, a monograph is a work that the reader can count on as delivering a maximum amount of information content in a single location. That’s the whole point.

Q: Why such a huge monograph on one species? Aren’t you just repeating previous works, like Brochu (2003)?

Why not a huge monograph on one species? Let’s take an honest look at the current landscape of publications on new dinosaur taxa: most articles in the premier journals are 30 pages long or less, and each bone is usually covered in a paragraph or two. How is that acceptable when we know that bones aren’t that simple and there is a huge volume of literature behind most groups of dinosaurs that needs adequate comparison with new fossils. I think we’re in an unfortunate historical moment where less information is seen as better than more; I suspect that this has more to do with publication costs of printed media than anything else.

With regard to the specific project at hand I am describing a growth series, which significantly bumps up the page length. This also helps make the argument for a large work, not against it; a monograph provides the opportunity to capture the variation of a taxon in detail. Again, my basic argument is the same: maximizing information content is better than minimization. Why leave people guessing?

The question of repetition strikes me as a little bizarre, since the taxon I’m working on isn’t an adult T. rex; the question implies that there’s so little difference between T. rex and its immediate relatives that there’s no reason to treat any of them in detail. But that would be to argue from ignorance of the tyrannosaurid literature, the history of the group, and variation in the clade; we really don’t know that much about tyrannosaurid osteology and variation, and we must take every opportunity we have to enrich our knowledge if we are to have any hope of understanding their biology and their place in Cretaceous ecosystems

I agree that Brochu (2003) is worthy of some discussion here. That is an exemplary work, and I have used it as a template for the Two Med tyrannosaurine monograph and for the Jane monograph. But it has to be kept in mind that more taxa and more information has been published since that time and we’re currently in a phase (perhaps perpetual) of catching up with new knowledge. For example, I’ve drafted below a table contrasting the information content of the maxilla in Brochu (2003) from that in the Two Med tyrannosaurine monograph by comparing the number of subheadings that correspond to primary osteological features. A quick glance shows a huge difference of information content, showing that my effort isn’t redundant by any measure, but rather it is complementary. The difference is primarily one of resolution. Also Brochu (2003) takes care of the maxilla in about three printed pages, whereas in my case, the maxilla is covered in 74 (double spaced) pages.

Brochu (2003)	Two Med tyrannosaurine monograph
General form	General form
Ventral margin of lateral alveolar process	Ventral margin of lateral alveolar process
Alveoli	Alveoli
Teeth, number and shape	Teeth, number and shape
Circumfenestral foramina	Circumfenestral foramina
Alveolar foramina	Alveolar foramina
Maxillary nerve channel	Maxillary nerve channel
Subnarial foramen	Subnarial foramen
Jugal ramus	Jugal ramus
Subcutaneous surface	Subcutaneous surface
Antorbital fossa	Antorbital fossa
Maxillary fenestra, size and shape	Maxillary fenestra, size and shape
Interfenestral strut	Interfenestral strut
Promaxillary recess	Promaxillary recess
Promaxillary fenestra, position and shape	Promaxillary fenestra, position and shape
Vestibular bulla	Vestibular bulla
Caudal antromaxillary fenestra	Caudal antromaxillary fenestra
Antorbital fenestra	Antorbital fenestra
Palatal process	Palatal process
Bony choana	Bony choana
Maxillary antrum	Maxillary antrum
Maxillary antrum, medial wall	Maxillary antrum, medial wall
Sutural contacts	Sutural contacts
-	Condition
	Horizontal ramus (excluding antorbital fossa)
	Horizontal ramus (including antorbital fossa)
	Interdental septa
	Sulci of the alveolar row of foramina
	Subnarial region
	Joint surface for the premaxilla
	Premaxillary buttress
	Narial fossa
	Circumfossa ridge
	Teeth, position
	Dorsal jugal process
	Ventral jugal process
	Caudal alveolar foramen
	Joint surface for the jugal
	Nasomaxillary suture
	Ascending ramus, lateral view
	Maxillolacrimal suture
	Ascending ramus, medial view
	Antorbital fossa, subordinate fossae and foramina
	Maxillary fenestra, position
	Maxillary position, form of edges
	Maxilla, medial surface
	Interdental plates, form
	Interdental plates, position and texture
	Medial alveolar process
	Dental pits
	Joint surface for the palatine
	Palatal process, form
	Palatal process, medial wall
	Palatal process, dorsal surface
	Maxillary sinus system
	Maxillary antrum, caudal region
	Maxillary antrum, epiantral recess
	Intermaxillary process
	Intermaxillary joint surface
	Intermaxillary process, foramina
	Medial surface above maxillary sinus system

It also has to be kept in mind how much our knowledge of tyrannosaurid osteology has come since 2003. Since then, different authors will describe features not mentioned by others, which has expanded the amount of anatomy to write up. The number of phylogenetic characters published for the clade is now well into the hundreds, which is additional incentive to expand the osteological descriptions and to describe how each feature varies. Therefore, a monograph that aims to capture all of that information will have a huge payoff for other researchers in that the full range and hierarchy of variaton is captured, including phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and individual.

References cited

Brochu, C. A. 2003. Osteology of Tyrannosaurus rex: insights from a nearly complete skeleton and high-resolution computed tomographic analysis of the skull. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir 7: 1-138.