Tutorial 48: my museum collections kit
November 26, 2025
I was on the road for most of August, September, and October, and in particular I made a ton of museum collections visits. When I visit a museum collection, I bring a specific set of gear that helps me get the photos, notes, and measurements that I want. All of this is YMMV — I’m not trying to predict what will work best for you, but to explain what has worked for me, and why. I’m reasonably happy with my current setup, but even after 28 years of museum visits, I’m still finding ways to improve it. Hence this post, which will hopefully serve as a vehicle for sharing tips and tricks.
A word about my program when I visit a collection, because not everyone needs or wants to do things my way. The closest museums with extensive sauropod collections are states away from where I live and work. If I’m in those collections at all, I’m traveling, and therefore on the clock. Time in collections is a zero-sum game: if I have the time to take 20 pages of notes, that could be 4 pages of notes of each of 5 specimens, 2 pages on 10, 1 page on 20, half a page on 40, etc. In practice, I usually make expansive notes early in the visit, one or two spreads per specimen with detailed sketches and exhaustive measurements of the most publication-worthy elements. I grade toward brevity over the course of the visit, and end with a mad desperate rush, throwing in crude sketches and rudimentary notes on as many newly-discovered (by me) specimens as possible. My collections visits are Discovery Time and Gathering Time, trying to get all the measurements and photographs I’ll want for the next year, or five, or forever. And, to the extent that I can suppress them, not Analysis Time or Graphing Time or Writing Time — I can do those things after hours and in my office back home, IF and only if I’ve spent my collections time efficiently gathering all the information I’ll need later.
The very first thing I do in any collection is a walking survey, to make sure I know roughly what specimens the collection contains and where to find them. For a sufficiently large collection — or even a single cabinet with 10 drawers of good stuff — I may draw a map in my notebook, on which I can note things I want to come back and document, and add new things as I find them.
Enough preamble, on to the gear. The first two or three entries here are in strict priority order, and after that things get very fuzzy and approximate.
1. Research Notebook
Seems obvious, right? Write stuff down, make sketches, capture the info that will be difficult or impossible to recapture later from photos. I have encountered people who don’t take a physical notebook, just a laptop or tablet, and take all their notes digitally. If that works for you, may a thousand gardens grow. For me, sketching is a fundamental activity — for fixing morphology in my mind, disciplining myself to see the whole object and its parts, creating a template on which to take further explanatory notes, and capturing the caveats, stray ideas, and odd connections that surround each specimen in a quantum fuzz in my mind (temporarily in my mind, hence the need for external capture). I also write priority lists in advance of specimens to document each day, and then cross them off, add new ones, and strike out duds with wild abandon in the heat of data collection.
I do a few specific things to increase the usefulness of my notebooks:
– Label the spines and covers with the notebook titles and years. These things live on the shelf directly over my desk, and I pull them down and rifle through them constantly. I also have notebooks for university service (committees, student advising, and so on), astronomical observations, and personal journaling, so “Research” is a useful tag for me.
– Number the pages, if they’re not already numbered, use the books chronologically from front to back, and create the table of contents retrospectively as I go — a tip I got from the Bullet Journal method.
– Paste a small envelope inside the back cover, if a pouch is not already built in, to hold all kinds of ephemera — index cards, scale bars, a bandage (just in case), stickers I acquire along the way, etc.
– Affix a section of measuring tape to the outer edge of the front or back cover. I got this tip from the naturalist John Muir Laws, whose Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is wonderfully useful and inspiring (UPDATE: that book is now covered in its own post, here). The scale-bar-permanently-affixed-to-research-notebook has been a game-changer for me. Do you know how many times I’ve accidentally left a scale bar on a museum shelf, and then gotten to my next stop and had to borrow or fabricate one? I myself lost count long ago. But never again. If I’m in a hurry, small specimens go straight onto the notebook to be photographed, like the baby apatosaurine tibia above, and the notebook itself goes into the frame with large specimens. (This comes up again — if possible, and it’s almost always possible, put the specimen label in the photo with the specimen. No reason not to, and sometimes a lifesaver later on.)
Behold the thinness of the eminently pocketable IKEA paper tape. Folding instructions, because this seems to bedevil some folks: hold up one end, fold in half by grabbing the other end and bring it up in front, then do that three more times. Finished product is 65mm long, 25.4mm wide, and about 1mm thick when folded crisply and left under a heavy book overnight.
2. Measuring tapes
I find the flexible kind much more convenient and useful than retractable metal tape measures. I like the 1-2mm thick plastic type used by tailors and fabric sellers, because they have just enough inertia to stay where I put them, or drop in a predictable fashion when draped over something sufficiently large, as when measuring midshaft circumference of a long bone.
I LOVE the little plasticized paper tapes that hang on racks, free for the taking, near the entrances of IKEA stores. I tear them off by the dozen when I go to IKEA, cram them in my pockets, fold them flat when I get home, and stash them everywhere, including in my wallet. A few specific reasons they’re great:
– Folded flat, they’re about the thickness of a credit card, so there’s just no reason to be without one. I usually have one in my wallet, another in the envelope at the back of my research notebook, a couple more stashed in my luggage, a couple more stashed in my car, desk, tookbox, nightstand, etc.
– I can write on them. Especially handy if:
– I’ve torn off a section to serve as an impromptu scale bar. Which I never hesitate to do, because they’re free and I have dozens waiting in my toolbox and desk drawers at any one time. Torn off bits also make good bookmarks, classier, more cerebral, and less implicitly gross than the traditional folded square of toilet paper.
– I give them away to folks I’m traveling with, or that I meet in my travels, and they’re usually well-received.
I would NOT have figured out all these laminae if I hadn’t had a way to make them stand out.
3. Writing instruments in various colors
Up until about 2018 my notebooks were always monochrome pen or pencil. Then I realized that color is an extremely helpful differentiator for Future Matt, so now I highlight and color-annotate willy-nilly.
4. Calipers
I borrowed the digital calipers from Colin Boisvert to get the photo up top, having forgotten my own at home. As a sauropod worker, I don’t need sub-millimeter accuracy all the time. But digital calipers have three exceedingly useful functions: measuring the thickness of very thin laminae and bony septa; measuring the internal dimensions of small fossae and foramina; and measuring the depth of fossae and of concave articular surfaces. I also have a little titanium caliper on a lanyard that goes with me most places.
5. Small brush on a carabiner
This is the newest addition to the kit. I got the idea from Matthew Mossbrucker at the Morrison Museum in Morrison, Colorado. Colin and I visited him in September, immediately before our week-long stint in the collections at Dinosaur Journey. Matthew keeps a little brush carabinered to his belt at all times, and the utility was so instantly obvious that when Colin and I rolled into Fruita later that same day, I went to the hardware store and got my own. Cheap, weighs nothing, clips to anything, compact enough to cram in a pocket, good for lab and field alike. Genius!
6. Scale bar
Yes, I have my scale-bar-enhanced research notebook and my hoarder stash of IKEA paper tapes, but good old-fashioned scale bars are still useful, and I use them constantly. And lose them constantly, hence my multiple redundant backup mechanisms.
(Aside: I can’t explain why I hold onto some objects like grim death, but let others fall through my fingers like sand grains. I’ve only lost one notebook of any kind in my entire life — set it on top of the car while packing and then drove off [grrrr] — so I have no problem investing in nice notebooks and treating them like permanent fixtures. But I can’t hang onto pens and scale bars to save my life, hence my having gravitated to Bic sticks and IKEA paper tapes.)
7. Index cards
I try to get as much information into each photograph as possible. Ideally alongside the specimen I will have:
– a scale bar at the appropriate depth of field;
– the specimen tag with the number, locality, and other pertinent info;
– my notebook open to my sketch of the specimen, for easy correlation later (I don’t do this for every single view, just the ones that I think are particularly publication-worthy, or have info I’m likely to forget later);
– anything else I might want — serial position, anatomical directions, whether the photo is part of an anaglyph pair, and so on — written on an index card, which being a standard size will itself serve as an alternate/backup scale bar.
8. Pencil case
To hold all the smaller fiddly bits you see in the photo up top. I can’t now fathom why, but I resisted getting one of these for a loooong time. I was young and foolish then. Pretty useful all the time, absolutely clutch when it’s 4:58 pm and I’m throwing stuff in bags, caught between the Scylla of working as late as possible and the Charybdis of wanting to be polite to whatever kind, patient person is facilitating my visit. That is also when the pocket in the back of the notebook comes in especially handy.
Headlamp in action, casting low-angle light on a pneumatic fossa on the tuberculum of this sauropod rib. Note also the scale bar, elevated on a specimen box to be the same depth of field, and the notebook open to my sketch of the specimen.
9. Artificial lighting
This was another very late discovery for me — I don’t think I was regularly bringing my own lights prior to 2018. For me, portable, rechargeable lighting is useful in many circumstances and absolutely critical in two: casting low-angle light to pick out subtle pneumatic features, as in the photo above, and lighting up big specimens that I don’t have the time, energy, or space to pull off the shelves, as in the photo below.
I’m particularly taken with the big orange fan/light combo. It charges using a USB-C cable, has four settings for fan speed (handy when it’s hot, humid, or just oppressively still) and three for light intensity, a rotating hook that folds flat, and a USB power-out socket for charging phones, headlamps, fitness trackers, and what have you. I use it practically every day whether I’m on the road or not.
Magnetic flashlight hanging from steel shelving to illuminate Camarasaurus cervical vertebrae in the Utah Field House collections.
Whether it’s a hook or a magnet, some kind of mechanism for suspending a light at odd heights and angles is super useful. I usually have a strong flashlight with an integral seat-belt cutter and window-smasher in the door pocket of my car, and its magnetic base makes it omnidirectionally functional in collections spaces, which are usually liberally supplied with steel in the form of shelving and cabinets.
Haplocanthosaurus CM 879 caudal 2 in left lateral view, with rolled-up paper neural canal visualizer and scale-bar-stuck-to-flashlight.
Sometimes I use a bit of blue tack to stick a scale bar to a flashlight, to create a free-standing, truly vertical scale bar that I can rapidly place at different distances from the camera. Beats leaning the scale bar against a stack of empty specimen boxes or a block of ethofoam (which in turn beats nothing at all).
What else?
USUALLY — Laptop
Not for recording notes or measurements — all of that goes into the notebook, which I scan and upload new stuff from every evening. Mostly for displaying PDFs of descriptive monographs, and hugely useful in that regard.
MAYBE — Monographs
When I have the freedom (= baggage allowance) to do so, I find it handy to bring hardcopies of descriptive monographs, both for quick reference and so I can photograph specimens alongside the illustrations. Doesn’t even have to be the same specimens, just comparable elements. In the photo above, MWC 7257, a partial sacral centrum of Allosaurus from the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, is sitting next to a plate from Madsen (1976), illustrating the same vertebra in a specimen from Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. Thanks to Colin Boisvert for bringing the specimen to my attention — I’ve got a longstanding thing for sacrals — and for loaning me his copy of Madsen (1976) for this photo.
OUT — Camera and tripod
I suspect that some folks will shake their heads in mute horror, but after a couple of decades of lugging dedicated cameras and tripods everywhere, I stopped. For the past few years I’ve been rolling with just my phone, which is objectively better than any dedicated camera I owned for the first half of my career. Sometimes I brace it in an ad hoc fashion against a chair or shelf or cabinet, but mostly I just shoot freehand. For my purposes, it does fine, and any minor improvements in field curvature or whatever that I’d get from a dedicated camera don’t outweigh the logistical hassle. Again: YMMV!
Over to you
So, that’s what I roll with right now. It was different six months ago, and will almost certainly be a little different six months hence, hopefully as a result of people responding to this post. With all that said: what’s in your kit?
P.S. Many thanks to Matthew Mossbrucker and Julia McHugh for their hospitality and assistance in their collections, and to Colin Boisvert for being such a great travel companion, research sounding board, and generous loaner-of-things-I’d-forgotten. The Wedel-Boisvert Morrisonpocalypse 2025 deserves more blogging.
Click to embiggen
White rami are usually thicker than gray rami, and sometimes they are visibly different in color, but they are always the more lateral connections between the sympathetic chain and the intercostal nerves, and the ones you’ll see first when you peel off the parietal pleura. You may even see the white rami through the parietal pleura if it’s thin enough. Even if both rami have been exposed, just trace the one that’s more ventral and lateral (“in front” from your view peering into someone’s chest) and that’s the white ramus.
I’ve seen the white rami lie superior to the intercostal nerves in some cases and inferior to the intercostal nerves in others. Since that seems to be variable, I don’t rely on superio-inferior position at all in making my identifications. The mediolateral position of the rami will always steer you correctly, everything else is potentially subject to variation.
One thing to watch out for: the intercostal veins are often wrapping around the vertebrae to get to the azygous/hemiazygous/accessory hemiazygous veins, and those veins may pass behind the sympathetic chain and either obscure or mimic the appearance of the gray rami.
Remember that gray rami exist at every level of the sympathetic chain, including cervical, lumbar, and sacral, but the white rami are only present between T1 and L2, where sympathetic fibers are entering the chain from the spinal cord.
Tutorial 46: how to write an abstract
November 13, 2024
We live in stupid times. As I write this, Google Scholar’s front page is advertising “New! AI outlines in Scholar PDF Reader: skim per-section bullets, deep read what you need”. Yes: it’s using AI to provide a short summary of what’s in a paper. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of a profoundly fallible AI summary, we could read a summary written by the actual authors, who know the material inside out?
We can, of course. It’s called an abstract, and pretty much every paper has one. Back in ye[1] olden times, authors didn’t write them: they were created by third parties to summarise the main points of the article. These days, you — the author of a scholarly article — are expected to provide the abstract, typically 200-300 words or so, that in some sense represents the article.
But in what sense?
Too many abstracts represent their article by trying to whip up enthusiasm for it — not summarizing the findings but teasing the reader as though to pull them in like a clickbait headline. That’s really not how it should be, because the reality is that an order of magnitude more people — maybe two orders of magnitude more — will read your abstract than will read the paper it’s attached to. You can’t make people read your paper (especially if it’s behind a paywall), so you need to make the abstract count.
Here, then, are four simple rules for writing an abstract that gets the job done.
1. Summarize, do not introduce. I’ve written here before about how an abstract should be a surrogate for a paper, not an advertisement for it, and this remains the single most important thing to remember. For those 99 in 100 people who will read the abstract but not the paper, we need to make sure that the abstract tells them what they need to know. So don’t write:
The body size of the snake was estimated based on extant snakes with a morphometric affinity to Palaeophiidae. The cosmopolitan distribution of Pterosphenus schucherti is modelled based on the sea surface temperature (SST) constraints of the modern cosmopolitan snake Hydrophis platurus, and the known fossil localities of the species. The present findings provide crucial insights into the global paleoecological landscape of the Eocene
Instead tell us what what the body size[2] of the snake was, what cosmopolitan distribution you found, and what insights these findings provide in the global paleoecological landscape of the Eocene.
Otherwise people are going to read your abstract, and go away with the message “this snake had a body of some specific size, and had a distribution, and that provides some insights”. Is that what you want? Huh? Huh? No. Didn’t think so.
2. Do not assume specialist knowledge. This is difficult because we work in a specialist field and some amount of specialist terminology is inevitable. But we should still do our best to reduce the amount of background knowledge a reader needs to make sense of our abstracts — again, because the potential readership is so much wider than for our actual papers.
Needless to say (I hope), we should strive to make all our writing as comprehensible as possible — always writing “it flies fast” rather than “the taxon under consideration exhibits velocitous aerial locomotion”. But that goes double for abstracts. So for example, one might write:
The thickness of the articular cartilage between the centra of adjacent vertebrae affects posture. It extends (raises) the neck by an amount roughly proportional to the thickness of the cartilage.
For those versed in the neck-posture wars, it’s hardly necessary to point out that extension of the neck involves raising it (and flexion involves lowering it), but for the wider audience that reads an abstract it’s worth spelling out.
3. Omit needless words. This is, famously, one of Strunk and White‘s rules, and it remains excellent advice. As with “Do not assume specialist knowledge”, this is good advice for all writing but especially so for the abstract.
When I started my palaeo Masters (as it then was) at Portsmouth, I had a very bad habit of writing unnecessary double negatives of the kind the Sir Humphrey Appleby might use. Instead of saying “Taxon X resembles taxon Y”, I would say “is not dissimilar to”. I did this all the time. One of the best things Dave Martill (my supervisor) did for me was to red-pen all these circumlocutions. I hope I’m better now. You be better, too
(When I was doing the video to publicise Brontomerus in 2011, I mentioned Utahraptor near the end, and stupidly described it as “not unlike Velociraptor“. I was so mortified when I heard the first draft of the video that I got in touch with the videographer and begged him to snip out the “not un-“. He did a great job, and I bet you can’t hear the join.)
4. Write the abstract after the paper, not before. It’s so tempting, isn’t it? You have a new, blank document. You type in the title, your name and academic address, and the word “Abstract”. Then you go ahead and summarize what the paper is going to to say.
Except you don’t know what the paper is going to say. Sure, you have a sense in your head of how it’s going to run, but no project plan survives contact with data. In my experience, almost every paper ends up saying something I didn’t anticipate when I started, or leaving out something I did expect to say, or drawing a different conclusion from the one I expected. (When I started to write my 2009 paper on Giraffatitan brancai‘s generic separation from Brachiosaurus altithorax, it was with the intention of proving that “Brachiosaurus” brancai was a perfectly cromulent species of Brachiosaurus, and I ended up discovering the exact opposite.)
So now I leave the abstract till last, so there is no danger that the ghosts of its early version will haunt it. I have a paper in the works now that’s reached 25 single-spaced manuscript pages and 15 illustrations, which I hope to submit within a week — but it’s abstract currently reads as follows:
Abstract
XXX to follow.
Only when the paper is actually complete will I go back, read through it, and summarize as I go, trimming down to 250 words or so if necessary when I’m finished.
Go thou and do likewise.
Notes
- “Ye” should be pronounced “the”, as it was in the days when it used to be written. It was always and only an abbreviation, “y” standing in for the “th” letter-pair. Similarly, the “e” on the end of “olde” was silent. So if arrange to meet your friends at a pub called “Ye Olde Hostelrie”, you should pronounce it “the old hostelry”.
- “Body size” as opposed to what other kind of size? Soul size? When you write “size”, body is understood. Just write size. And while I’m at it, do not give your paper a title like “A new, large-bodied omnivorous bat” or, worse, “A new large-sized genus of Babinskaiidae”. Seriously — large-sized? Again, as opposed to what? Big-hearted?
Nearly a year ago, I got an email from Liam Shen, who was interested in getting seriously involved in palaeontology. He asked for advice on doing a Ph.D part time, and I realised what what I had to say in reply might be of broader interest. Here’s Liam’s question, lightly edited:
I’m currently a 3rd year Computer Science student, and as much as I love programming and Software Engineering as a whole, I’ve also always loved studying dinosaurs, and other specimens. I also have interest in potentially going for a PHD in paleontology one day to pursue this passion, which is why I wanted to ask for your opinion if it was possible to juggle both a full-time day job and a PHD program at the same time?
And my reply (which I did send to Liam the next day, but am only now getting around to posting here):
I never set out to do a Ph.D really. I just wanted an institutional affiliation so I could access online resources via the library, and it turns out that universities won’t (or at least 20 years ago they wouldn’t) just let you be an associate. So I signed up for a Masters, and that mutated into the Ph.D.
It actually wasn’t that hard, surprisingly — because you earn a Ph.D by doing research and I already wanted to do research and the Ph.D program was just a way to help me do that,
So my question for you is: do you really want to do research? If you do, then you probably can. You don’t get to year 3 of a CS degree without being a smart, analytical thinker, and your email tells me you’re a good communicator. The rest is all just stuff you learn: stuff about your taxon of choice, stuff about evolution, stuff about the various tools you can use for analysis and modelling.
But if you look deep inside yourself and decide that what you really want is to be the holder of a Ph.D, then forget it. If you don’t love the work for itself, you will soon grow to hate it. Then you become one of those dead-eyed zombie never-going-to-finish people. If down that path you start, destroy you it will.
So: it certainly is possible to juggle both a full-time day job and a Ph.D program at the same time. But I think you can only do it if either (A) you genuinely love both of them, or (B) you are truly exceptional.
So I have four pieces of advice.
1. Make sure you get a day-job that you love, not just tolerate. Don’t sign up for a Java factory to write enterprise beans for the enterprise just because the money is good. Find a job that lets you express all that creativity in building something of inherent value. You may have to sacrifice financially, but you’re at the perfect point in your life to make that choice, before you get hooked on the high-income lifestyle.
2. If you get onto a Ph.D program, make sure it’s one you love. For me that meant sauropods. For you, it might mean plesiosaurs or Permian synapsids or, for all I know, Miocene rodents. But don’t take an offer from a more prestigious institution just for the prestige: take on a research project that you actively want to do, and would do for the sheer fun of it even if you weren’t on the Ph.D program.
3. Consider doing a research Masters. It’s much less of an investment in time, money and effort, and will help you figure out whether you actually love doing this. It’s probably also easier to get onto a Masters, as you won’t be asking your supervisor to take such a big gamble on someone who’s doing it part time. If you can survive for an unpaid year after you graduate in CS, you could do a full-time Masters in a year; otherwise you can do it over a longer period as you work. (The University of Bristol is really good for this: you can do a one-year course that’s mostly research and which gives you a wide range of possible projects.)
4. Consider whether you need a higher degree at all. John McIntosh, the greatest of all sauropod palaeontologists, had no formal qualification in palaeontology (though he did have a doctorate in physics). That was in a time when it was hard to get access to the literature outside of formal programs, but that’s not true any more. If what you really want is to do research, then maybe just do the research? There is tons on this in the SV-POW! tutorial section. (And, again: if what you really want is not to do research then you will probably hate, and flunk out of, a Ph.D anyway.)
At that point Matt chipped in with more advice, which I’m including here:
My additions will be few.
Read Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on, if you haven’t already. Pick a topic, or find an advisor (official or otherwise) who will inflict one on you, then do this: Tutorial 38: little projects as footsteps toward understanding.
Then just keep doing that. If it leads to anything presented or published, yay, you’re doing science (it’s not science until it’s communicated, until then it’s just self-improvement). If it leads to a degree — and if that’s what you want, can afford, and are willing to make space for in your life — great! But the degree should arise out of the research, and not the other way around.
At least, that’s how it was for me. I got the opportunity to do research as an undergrad, and just kept going after I graduated. I was in a Master’s program, but my planned thesis topic didn’t pan out — which was the best possible outcome — so my actual MS thesis ended up being something organically spun out of my undergrad research. Then I got into a PhD program, but none of the things I planned to do panned out — which was, again, the best possible outcome — so my actual dissertation ended up being something organically spun out of my Master’s research.
Looking back, my personal research program was the continuously existing, actually important thing, and the theses for the various degree requirements were just chunks of that continuous whole that I extracted and submitted (to degree-granting institutions, and also to journals, but chunked differently) at the dramatically appropriate moments. And that has continued to work right up until now. I don’t need to turn in the segments for degree requirements anymore, now they can just be blog posts, abstracts, and papers.
If you have a day job you’ll end up doing paleo on weekends and evenings, but hell, I spend most of my day time teaching or in meetings, and a huge chunk of my research gets done on weekends and evenings, so I don’t know that you’re much worse off than most folks trying to make progress in this field.
Whatever happens, good luck, and as Mike said, follow the things you love, because that’s the only way you’ll stick with them.
The world is full of wonderful animals, both extant and extinct, and they all have names. As a result, it’s fairly common for newly named animals to be given names already in use — as for example with the giant Miocene sperm whale “Leviathan“ (now Livyatan). BUt there are ways to avoid walking into this problem, and in a helpful post on the Dinosaur Mailing Group, Ben Creisler recently posted a summary. I’m reproducing it here, with his permission, for posterity.
The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology website recently posted an article that describes a new taxon. Unfortunately, the new generic name was preoccupied and I contacted the lead author. As a reminder, there are a number of ways that authors, reviewers, and editors can check online if a proposed new name has been used before in zoological literature. Even if a generic name is not in current use (it’s a junior synonym), it still counts for zoological nomenclature if it was published in a way that makes it an available name according to ICZN requirements.
A good first place to check a name is: Index to Organism Names (ION). This database is kept up-to-date with the Zoological Record. Queries can be exact letter-for-letter or end in * to bring up partial matches after the first letters. The * query feature will not work at the beginning of a name, however. So cerat* works as a query but not *ceratops.
The queries will bring up a name or the first part of a name (when a * is used) that has been used for a species and for a genus (which may require scrolling through the names because of species matches).
If a queried name does not show up as a generic name in the ION, it is not a guarantee that a name has not been used before, and a good policy would be to double-check a number of other online resources.
The Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera (IRMNG) has the advantage of being limited to generic names, but is not exhaustive. Still worth checking.
GBIF | Global Biodiversity Information Facility
The recent problem with the preoccupied dinosaur name Jingia (replaced with Jingiella) highlights some of the content issues with each of these databases. Jingia Chen, 1983 (a moth) shows up in the GBIF and the Tree of Life, but not in the ION or the IRMNG. It’s a good idea to check all of them.
Note that I will happily check new names for people for preoccupied status or for questions on meaning or formation.
… And in a followup comment, Tyler Greenfield also recommended the Nomenclator Zoologicus and Index Animalium as great resources for checking historical names.
So now you know! No more excuses: check your new names for preoccupation.
Tutorial 43: how to do creative work
March 19, 2024
I was struck by a Mastodon post where classic game developer Ron Gilbert quoted film critic Roger Ebert as follows:
The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don’t wait for her.
And Gilbert commented:
I am constantly forgetting this as I procrastinate writing only to discover her again once I start.
In a reply, Gretchen Anderson said her favourite version of this is:
When the muse comes to visit, she better find you working.
I couldn’t find the original source for this, but as I was trying to track it down I ran into this, attributed to Pablo Picasso:
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
When I mentioned these observations to Matt, he sent me a longer-form exposition of the same phenomenon, from painter and visual artist Chuck Close. If the four pithy versions above strike you as a bit facile, the kind of thing you might find on a motivational poster, this may be more actionable:
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
All of this points back, of course, to the very snappiest version of this observation, attributed to William Wordworth and appearing in the previous tutorial:
To begin, begin.
Why should this be true? I don’t know why, but I know that it is. My best guess is that it’s the same principle by which you can only steer a moving boat. Without some kind of resistance to push against, your rudder can’t exert a useful force; without some raw material for it to work on, your creativity can’t get a toehold. You can’t be creative about nothing. You need something to be creative about.
So the substance of this tutorial is this: whatever project you’re procrastinating on — the novel that you can’t quite figure out the ending of, the paper on a subject that you’ve not read enough background information on, the song that you can’t bring yourself to write because it won’t be as good as a Paul Simon song[*] — just make a start. The worst-case scenario is that you’ll better understand where the real blockages are. A better case is that you’ll find there aren’t any. And the best case is that the very process of getting your hands dirty leads you to fresh new ideas.
I leave you with this brief reminiscence from Greg Gunther, who ran a mailing-list I used to be on for aspiring writers:
I was on an [email] list with Tom Clancy once. Mr. Clancy’s contribution to the list was, “Write the damn book”.
(I am pleased to see that we’ve quoted this at least twice before in SV-POW! tutorials: in my own Tutorial 10: how to become a palaeontologist; and in Matt’s Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on. It remains by some distance the very best advice I’ve ever heard on writing.)
[*] This last one is very much aimed at myself.
Tutorial 42: how to get a paper written
May 1, 2022
Yes, we’ve touched on a similar subject in a previous tutorial, but today I want to make a really important point about writing anything of substance, whether it’s a scientific paper, a novel or the manual for a piece of software. It’s this: you have to actually do the work. And the way you do that is by first doing a bit of the work, then doing a bit more, and iterating until it’s all done. This is the only way to complete a project.
Yes, this is very basic advice. Yes, it’s almost tautological. But I think it needs saying because it’s a lesson that we seem to be hardwired to avoid learning. This, I assume, is why so many wise sayings have been coined on the subject. Everyone has heard that “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, attributed to Lao Tzu in maybe the 5th Century BC. More pithily, I recently discovered that Williams Wordsworth is supposed to have said:
To begin, begin.
I love that. In just three words, it makes the point that there is no secret to be learned here, no special thing that you can do to make beginning easier. You just have to do it. Fire up your favourite word processor. Create a new document. Start typing.
And to Wordsworth’s injunction, I would add this:
To continue, continue
Because, again, there is no secret. You just have to do it.
Mounted skeleton of Diplodocus carnegii holotype CM 84 in the rare dorsal view.
At the moment I am working on four separate but related papers. Honestly, sometimes it’s hard even keeping them straight in my head. Sometimes I forget which one I am editing. It would be easy to get overwhelmed and … just not finish. I don’t mean it would be easy to give up: that would be a decision, and I don’t think I would do that. But if I listened to my inner sluggard, I would just keep on not making progress until the matter become moot.
So here is what I do instead:
- I pick one of the papers, which is the one I’m going to work on that evening, and I try not to think too much about the others.
- I figure out what needs to be in that paper, in what order.
- I write the headings into a document, and I put an empty paragraph below each, which just says “XXX”. That’s the marker I use to mean “work needed here”.
- I use my word-processor’s document-structuring facilities to set the style of each of the headings accordingly — 1st, 2nd or occasionally 3rd level.
- I auto-generate a table of contents so I can see if it all makes sense. If it doesn’t, I move my headings around and regenerate the table of contents, and I keep doing that until it does make sense.
- I now have a manuscript that is 100% complete except in the tiny detail that it has no content. This is a big step! Now all I have to do is write the content, and I’ll be finished.
- I write the content, one section at a time. I search for “XXX” to find an unwritten section, and I write it.
- When all the “XXX” markers have been replaced by text, the paper is done — or, at least, ready to be submitted.
Caveats:
First, that list makes it sound like I am really good at this. I’m not. I suck. I get distracted. For example, I am writing this blog-post as a distraction from writing a section of the paper I’m currently working on. I check what’s new on Tweetdeck. I read an article or two. I go and make myself a cup of tea. I play a bit of guitar. But then I go back and write a bit more. I could be a lot more efficient. But the thing is, if you keep writing a bit more over and over again, in the end you finish.
Second, the path is rarely linear. Often I’m not able to complete the section I want to work on because I am waiting on someone else to get back to me about some technical point, or I need to find relevant literature, or I realise I’m going to need to make a big digression. That’s fine. I just leave an “XXX” at each point that I know I’m going to have to revisit. Then when the email comes in, or I find the paper, or I figure out how to handle the digression, I return to the “XXX” and fix it up.
Third, sometimes writing a section blows up into something bigger. That’s OK. Just make a decision. That’s how I ended up working on these four papers at the moment. I started with one, but a section of it kept growing and I realised it really wanted to be its own paper — so I cut it out of the first one and made it its own project. But then a section of that one grew into a third paper, and then a section of that one grew into a fourth. Not a problem. Sometimes, that’s the best way to generate new ideas for what to work on: just see what comes spiralling out of what you’re already working on.
None of these caveats changes the basic observation here, which is simply this: in order to get a piece of work completed, you first have to start, and then have to carry on until it’s done.
Tutorial 41: distinguishing nerves and arteries in dissection
October 27, 2021
- I made the infographic specifically for med students working with embalmed tissue. The colors in particular may be different in fresh tissue, and in my experience less vibrant and therefore harder to tell apart. The other factors are much less affected by the embalming process.
- Most of these differences break down to some extent in very small vessels and nerves. If you can track them back to larger, more proximal parent vessels or nerves, it’s easier to tell, but sometimes you run across a tiny little thread and can’t tell if it’s a tube or a wire — in which case, good luck.
Tutorial 39: how not to conclude a talk or paper
March 19, 2021
“And in conclusion, this new fossil/analysis shows that Lineageomorpha was more [here fill in the blank]:
- diverse
- morphologically varied
- widely distributed geographically
- widely distributed stratigraphically
…than previously appreciated.”
Yes, congratulations, you’ve correctly identified that time moves forward linearly and that information accumulates. New fossils that make a group less diverse, varied, or widely distributed–now that’s a real trick.
Okay, that was snarky to the point of being mean, and here I must clarify that (1) I haven’t been to a conference in more than a year, so hopefully no-one thinks I’m picking on them, which is good, because (2) I myself have ended talks this way, so I’m really sniping at Old Matt.
And, yeah, new fossils are nice. But for new fossils or new analyses to expand what we know is expected. It’s almost the null hypothesis for science communication–if something doesn’t expand what we know, why are we talking about it? So that find X or analysis Y takes our knowledge beyond what was “previously appreciated” is good, but it’s not a particularly interesting thing to say out loud, and it’s a really weak conclusion.
(Some cases where just being new is enough: being surprisingly new, big expansions [like hypothetically finding a tyrannosaur in Argentina], and new world records.)
Don’t be Old Matt. Find at least one thing to say about your topic that is more interesting or consequential than the utterly pedestrian observation that it added information that was not “previously appreciated”. The audience already suspected that before you began, or they wouldn’t be here.
I showed this post to Mike before I published it, and he said, “What first made you want to work on this project? That’s your punchline: the thing that was cool enough that you decided to invest months of effort into it.” Yes! Don’t just tell the audience that new information exists, tell them why it is awesome.
Tutorial 38: little projects as footsteps toward understanding
January 11, 2021
This is a very belated follow-up to “Tutorial 12: How to find problems to work on“, and it’s about how to turn Step 2, “Learn lots of stuff”, into concrete progress. I’m putting it here, now, because I frequently get asked by students about how to get started in research, and I’ve been sending them the same advice for a while. As with Tutorial 25, from now on I can direct the curious to this post, and spend more time talking with them about what they’re interested in, and less time yakking about nuts and bolts. But I hope the rest of you find this useful, too.
Assuming, per Tutorial 12, that you’ve picked something to investigate–or maybe you’re trying to pick among things to investigate–what next? You need a tractable way to get started, to organize the things you’re learning, and to create a little structure for yourself. My recommendation: do a little project, with the emphasis on little. Anyone can do this, in any area of human activity. Maybe your project will be creating a sculpture, shooting and editing a video, learning–or creating–a piece of music, or fixing a lawn mower engine. My central interest is how much we still have to discover about the natural world, so from here on I’m going to be writing as a researcher addressing other researchers, or aspiring researchers.
Arteries of the anterior leg, from Gray’s Anatomy (1918: fig. 553). Freely available courtesy of Bartleby.com.
I’ll start with a couple of examples, both from my own not-too-distant history. A few years ago I got to help some of my colleagues from the College of Podiatric Medicine with a research project on the perforating branch of the peroneal artery (Penera et al. 2014). I knew that vessel from textbooks and atlases and from having dissected a few out, but I had never read any of the primary (journal) literature on it. As the designated anatomist on the project, I needed to write up the anatomical background. So I hit the journals, tracked down what looked like the most useful papers, and wrote a little 2-page summary. We didn’t use all of it in the paper, and we didn’t use it all in one piece. Some sentences went into the Introduction, others into the Discussion, and still others got dropped entirely or cut way down. But it was still a tremendously useful exercise, and in cases like this, it’s really nice to have more written down than you actually need. Here’s that little writeup, in case you want to see what it looks like:
Wedel 2013 anatomy of the perforating branch of the peroneal artery
Pigeon spinal cord cross-section, from Necker (2006: fig. 4).
More recently, when I started working with Jessie Atterholt on weird neural canal stuff in dinosaurs, I realized that I needed to know more about glycogen bodies in birds, and about bird spinal cords generally. I expected that to be quick and easy: read a couple of papers, jot down the important bits, boom, done. Then I learned about lumbosacral canals, lobes of Lachi, the ‘ventral eminences’ of the spinal cord in ostriches, and more, a whole gnarly mess of complex anatomy that was completely new to me. I spent about a week just grokking all the weird crap that birds have going on in their neural canals, and realized that I needed to crystallize my understanding while I had the whole structure in my head. Otherwise I’d come back in a few months and have to learn it all over again. Because it was inherently visual material, this time I made a slide deck rather than a block of text, something I could use to get my coauthors up to speed on all this weirdness, as well as a reminder for my future self. Here’s that original slide deck:
Wedel 2018 Avian lumbosacral spinal cord specializations
If you’re already active in research, you may be thinking, “Yeah, duh, of course you write stuff down as you get a handle on it. That’s just learning.” And I agree. But although this may seem basic, it isn’t necessarily obvious to people who are just starting out. And even to the established, it may not be obvious that doing little projects like this is a good model for making progress generally. Each one is a piton driven into the mountainside that I’m trying to climb: useful for me, and assuming I get them out into the world, useful for anyone I’d like to come with me (which, for an educator and a scientist, means everyone).
A view down the top of the vertebral column in the mounted skeleton of Apatosaurus louisae, CM 3018, showing the trough between the bifurcated neural spines.
If you’re not active in research, the idea of writing little term papers may sound like purgatory. But writing about something that you love, that fascinates you, is a very different proposition from writing about dead royalty or symbolism because you have to for a class.* I do these little projects for myself, to satisfy my curiosity, and it doesn’t feel like work. More like advanced play. When I’m really in the thick of learning a new thing–and not, say, hesitating on the edge before I plunge in–I am so happy that I tend to literally bounce around like a little kid, and the only thing that keeps me sitting still is the lure of learning the next thing. That I earn career beans for doing this still seems somewhat miraculous, like getting paid to eat ice cream.
* YMMV, history buffs and humanities folks. If dead royalty and symbolism rock your world but arteries and vertebrae leave you cold, follow your star, and may a thousand gardens grow.
Doing little projects is such a convenient and powerful way to make concrete progress that it has become my dominant mode. As with the piece that I wrote about the perforating branch of the peroneal artery, the products rarely get used wholesale in whatever conference presentation or research paper I end up putting together, but they’re never completely useless. First, there is the benefit to my understanding that I get from assembling them. Second, they’re useful for introducing other people to the sometimes-obscure stuff I work on, and nothing makes you really grapple with a problem like having to explain it to others. And third, these little writeups and slideshows become the Lego bricks from which I assemble future talks and papers. The bird neural canal slide deck became a decent chunk of our presentation on the Snowmass Haplocanthosaurus at the 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress (Wedel et al. 2018)–and it’s about to become something even better. (Four months later: it did!)
The operative word at the start of the last paragraph is ‘concrete’. I don’t think this was always the case, but now that I’m in my mid-40s ‘what I know’ is basically equivalent to ‘what I remember’, which is basically equivalent to ‘what I’ve written down’. (And sometimes not even then–Mike and I both run across old posts here on SV-POW! that we’ve forgotten all about, which is a bit scary, given how often we put novel observations and ideas into blog posts.) Anyway, this is why I like the expression ‘crystallize my understanding’: the towers of comprehension that I build in my head are sand castles, and if I don’t find a way to freeze them in place, they will be washed away by time and my increasingly unreliable cerebral machinery.
Really nice Stegosaurus plate on display at Dinosaur National Monument.
Also, if I divide my life into the things I could do and the things I have done, only the things in the latter category are useful. So if you are wondering if it’s worthwhile to write a page to your future self about valves in the cerebral arteries of rats, or all of the dinosaurs from islands smaller than Great Britain, or whatever strange thing has captured your attention, I say yes, go for it. Don’t worry about finding something novel to say; at the early stages you’re just trying to educate yourself (also, talks and papers need intro and background material, so you can still get credit for your efforts). I’ll bet that if you set yourself the goal of creating a few of these–say, one per year, or one per semester–you’ll find ways to leverage them once you’ve created them. If all else fails, start a blog. That might sound flip, but I don’t mean for it to. I got my gig writing for Sky & Telescope because I’d been posting little observing projects for the readers of my stargazing blog.
A final benefit of doing these little projects: they’re fast and cheap, like NASA’s Discovery missions. So they’re a good way to dip your toes into a new area before you commit to something more involved. The more things you try, the more chances you have to discover whatever it is that’s going to make you feel buoyantly happy.
You may have noticed that all of my examples in this post involved library research. That’s because I’m particularly interested in using little projects to get started in new lines of inquiry, and whenever you are starting out in a new area, you have to learn where the cutting edge is before you can move it forward (Tutorial 12 again). Also, as a practical consideration, most of us are stuck with library research right now because of the pandemic. Obviously this library research is no substitute for time in the lab or the field, but even cutters and diggers need to do their homework, and these little projects are the best way that I’ve found of doing that.
P.S. If you are a student, read this and do likewise. And, heck, everyone else who writes should do that, too. It is by far the advice I give most often as a journal editor and student advisor.
P.P.S. As long as you’re reading Paul Graham, read this piece, too–this whole post was inspired by the bit near the end about doing projects.
References
- Gray, Henry. 1918. Anatomy of the Human Body. Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia. Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/107/.
- Penera, K., Manji, K., Wedel, M., Shofler, D., and Labovitz, J. 2014. Ankle syndesmotic fixation using two screws: Risk of injury to the Perforating Branch of the Peroneal Artery. The Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery 53(5):534-8. DOI: 10.1053/j.jfas.2014.04.006
- Wedel, M.J., Atterholt, J., Macalino, J., Nalley, T., Wisser, G., and Yasmer, J. 2018. Reconstructing an unusual specimen of Haplocanthosaurus using a blend of physical and digital techniques. 1st Palaeontological Virtual Congress / PeerJ Preprints 6:e27431v1
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
