How to buy a dinosaur

Following from my previous post on buying and selling fossils, here's the text of a piece I wrote at David Hone's invitation for his blog hosted by The Guardian, for any that missed it:

Taking delivery of a dinosaur skeleton is not an everyday event – even at the Natural History Museum (NHM). So, when the opportunity arose to obtain a spectacular new specimen of Stegosaurus, the museum embarked on a project that took nearly two years from its conception to the appearance of this iconic dinosaur centre-stage in our Earth Hall. Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the original discovery of the specimen, and the skeleton itself, but here I’ve decided to give an insight into how and why the NHM acquired it.

The NHM's new Stegosaurus skeleton, nicknamed 'Sophie', photographed prior to its public display. Photograph copyright The Natural History Museum, London.

We first heard about the Stegosaurus when my colleagues Martin Munt, Tim Ewin and I attended the Tucson Rock and Mineral Fair in early 2012 – an annual event that is the largest commercial fossil fair in the world. During the fair, professional fossil collectors and dealers from all over the world buy and sell everything ranging from tiny trilobites to mammoths, exchanging information with each other and with professional palaeontologists. Buyers include retail outlets, private individuals and museums. While searching through the displays for interesting new material, we were impressed by a full-sized cast of a Stegosaurus and were surprised to learn that the original was for sale. Further discussions revealed that not only was it available, but also the best skeleton of this amazing dinosaur yet found. It had been discovered in 2003, by fossil collector Bob Simon in the Late Jurassic rocks of the Morrison Formation from Red Canyon Ranch, near Shell, Wyoming, and had been excavated and cleaned of its surrounding rock by a, Swiss/German team of professional fossil collectors headed by Kirby Siber of the Saurier Museum Aathal in Zürich. The completeness and high quality of the specimen made an immediate impression in terms of its potential for new science and a new dinosaur display. On returning to the NHM Martin and I began discussions with our colleagues to determine how feasible a purchase might be, how and where we might display the Stegosaurus, how we could use it for education and public outreach and, most importantly, what new science would result if we were lucky enough to secure it.

Some palaeontologists strongly oppose the buying and selling of fossils for a variety of reasons. Many countries have laws that specifically prohibit trade in fossils, as they want to retain these objects as part of their own cultural and scientific heritage. However, unscrupulous dealers and collectors have frequently poached fossils from these areas, exporting and selling them illegally, often without the contextual information on the fossil site that is necessary to exploit the specimen’s full scientific potential. Moreover, some illegal collectors have also ravaged and severely damaged scientifically important sites. Nevertheless, these unlawful collectors are in the minority and many professional fossil collectors and dealers have strong, positive relationships with museums and universities, and often collect to very high professional standards. Since its foundation the NHM has been strongly engaged with both amateur and commercial collectors. One of our duties is to bring scientifically significant material into the public trust, which we do by collecting ourselves, encouraging donations and by purchase – as long as the material we acquire has been obtained in line the highest legal and ethical standards. By bringing these specimens into the public domain we can make new scientific information available, which would otherwise be lost, and enable access to the specimen for other scientists in perpetuity. Equally importantly, we also use these specimens to inspire generations of visitors to the museum who see the material on display in our galleries.

The benefits of obtaining the skeleton were clear and it was an easy sell to get the project approved internally – at least in principle. A trickier question was how to raise the necessary funds – the NHM does not currently benefit from a large endowment to support the purchase of new material for the collection, so a donor had to be found. Luckily, our fundraisers are a tenacious bunch and after a few months were able to propose the idea to a private individual, Mr Jeremy Herrmann, who generously undertook to be the lead donor on the project and to find other donors to help support the purchase. With his support we began the process of trying to acquire it. Colleagues and I went to view the original bones, in order to check their quality and authenticity, which involved urgent trips to Salt Lake City to see the skeleton (as it was in a facility there where the frame on which it is mounted was being built) and Zürich to see the skull (where the skull bones had been cast and moulded to make replicas). Once the relevant legal niceties had been checked and double-checked, NHM Director, Sir Michael Dixon, was able to pick up the telephone and make an offer that secured the Stegosaurus. After a few more weeks of waiting for the frame to be finished, the Stegosaurus arrived at the NHM in December 2013.

A decision was made to keep the purchase confidential, to maximize the impact when Stegosaurus was revealed to the public and to give us a reasonable period in which to study the skeleton in detail, something that would be exceptionally difficult after it went on display. Keeping a dinosaur skeleton secret for nearly a year is no mean feat. The small number of external collaborators we asked to join the project for their expertise were asked to sign binding non-disclosure agreements and I wasn’t able to talk about the work with my closest friends and colleagues. The scientific work we carried out behind the scenes involved CT scans, 3D laser scans and thousands of photographs and measurements, as well as preparing a full anatomical description. Perhaps surprisingly, Stegosaurus is a rather rare dinosaur and has not received vast amounts of detailed attention, so the new skeleton was an exciting opportunity to bring our knowledge of its anatomy and biology bang up to date. All of these data are currently being analysed and compiled into a series of scientific papers, which will appear over the next couple of years. The first paper, on Sophie's body mass, has now been published and can be downloaded for free from the Royal Society's Biology Letters webpage. However, the science was only a part of the project. During this time we also had to consider where the skeleton would go, do some additional cleaning of the skeleton and make some adjustments to the frame, plan the removal of the former exhibits in the area chosen for the Stegosaurus, design and build the plinth and lighting for the display, work on the display panels and web content, and devise education and outreach activities and events, alongside many other critical tasks – all while carrying out the work in secret alongside the other work each member of the team had to do on a day-to-day basis. A dedicated project manager, Beca Jones, was needed to oversee and guide the entire scheme and did a sterling job in keeping us all on schedule, on budget and with every contingency accounted for – and this for a diverse team of scientists, builders, educators, designers, conservators, fund-raisers and artists. 

 Artwork created by Robert Nicholls that was commissioned  for the new display, with the proportions of the Stegosaurus modeled using Sophie's actual dimensions. Image copyright Robert Nicholls/The Natural History Museum, London.

This massive effort, involving over 100 people in total, finally came to fruition in December 2014, when we unveiled the skeleton to the public. For me, this came with a mix of emotions, notably a massive surge of relief – we’d delivered the exhibition on time with no mishaps. Moreover, I could now talk freely about something that had occupied a substantial portion of my time for nearly two years! I think everyone on the team feels justifiably proud of bringing this fabulous new dinosaur to the museum – and Stegosaurus will inspire our visitors for decades to come as well as adding significantly to our knowledge of dinosaurs and their world.

The trade in fossils: a practical position

I’m just back from a trip to the 2015 Tucson Rock and Mineral Fair, probably the largest commercial fossil fair in the world. I was there in my professional capacity, representing the museum along with my colleagues Martin Munt (our Head of Palaeobiology Collections) and Emma Bernard (our fossil fish curator). The museum has been sending mineralogical delegates to the show for many years whereas the palaeontologists have only been attending regularly for four years or so. This was my second time at the show. 

My colleague Martin Munt investigating one of the many stands at the Tucson Rock and Mineral Fair in February 2015

The logistics are impressive – the fair goes on for almost a full month and takes over much of Tucson. The fossil part of the fair covers several main sites (centred on hotels, giant marquees in convention centres, etc.) and there are numerous satellite shows that are set up in car lots and motels. The importance of the fair to the city is clear, from the numerous permanent rock shops in the city itself, to the large number of commercial dealers who live nearby and even in the murals on some of the town buildings. The palaeontological part of the fair forms only a small proportion of the total activity – most of it is devoted to rocks and minerals.

We were attending for two reasons: to purchase fossils and to maintain and develop our network of professional contacts within the legitimate fossil dealing trade. Many of my colleagues are strongly opposed to the buying and selling of fossils (more on that later), but museum policy at the NHM has always been to engage with professional fossil dealers with the aim of bringing scientifically important specimens into the public trust so that they can be cared for and studied in perpetuity. When purchasing a fossil we have a number of important criteria in mind: 1) Was the fossil collected legally and ethically; 2) Does it come with the relevant contextual information on geology and locality?; 3) It is scientifically significant?; 4) Does it add something else useful to our collection (does a fossil represent a taxon or locality our collections don’t currently include)?; and 5) Does it have potential for public engagement (i.e. exhibition, educational outreach, etc.).

Colleagues that oppose trade in fossils have good reasons for doing so. Some have a strong philosophical perspective that fossils are part of humanity’s shared cultural property and regard trade in these objects as infringing that ideal. Others have more pragmatic concerns: some unscrupulous fossil dealers have looted and severely damaged important sites; others have engaged in unethical and illegal practices in the excavation and import/export of material; in many cases dealers have not collected important contextual information; and this practice has placed a monetary value on fossils. The latter is particularly pertinent to rare or spectacularly preserved fossils that may, therefore, sell at prices that prevent museums and other academic institutions from obtaining them: more than a few really nice fossils have disappeared into the mansions of wealthy private collectors, never to be worked on by scientists. All of these are legitimate concerns, which I share, and all of my colleagues (myself included) could list examples where the subject was not served well by the fossil trade.

However, there are also good reasons for engaging with professional fossil collectors rather than casting them as pariahs, as some of my colleagues often do. Firstly, there are simply more fossils than palaeontologists: if it were not for professional collectors (and they devote much of their time to this activity, not for the few weeks a year most palaeontologists can manage) many interesting fossils would simply never be found or erode away in the field. Thus, in some sense, a careful professional collector who records all of the relevant information and makes it available is doing the subject a service in recovering this material. Secondly, a constructive dialogue with professional collectors, such as discussing with them what information is important, can lead to collection practices that really enhance the information available. Indeed, many commercial collectors are often happy to take scientists into the field to see their sites and make observations. Thirdly, most of the commercial collectors I meet really care about their material – they can discuss it in detail and often aspire for it to go to museums and to be studied. They excavate it and prepare it to a high standard (its in their interest after all, they want to sell them) and so often produce really good material for study and exhibition.

There is an important flip side to this: as a community we should definitely not engage with those collectors that do not have the highest legal and ethical standards, nor with those who do not provide the necessary contextual information. There is evidence that this engagement and intervention is working: after the high profile Tarbosaurus trial, which led to the jailing of one fossil dealer and the repatriation of material to Mongolia, it’s obvious that the trade in this kind of material has dwindled. When I first visited Tucson a number of dealers exhibited Mongolian (and Chinese) material, but specimens from both countries were conspicuous by their almost total absence at the fair this year, a trend that I’m sure will continue. This is a phenomenon that was brought about by high profile community pressure (both from palaeontologists and from ethical dealers), rather than any change in legislation.

There are other nuances in this debate that are often glossed over but are worthy of discussion. If fossils are viewed as cultural or heritage objects, why is it OK to trade in antiques and old masters? These are also of great communal benefit and are limited resources. Some laws protect art, antiquities and anthropological artefacts from sale, but fossils are generally excluded. If palaeontologists want laws to try and get protected status for at least some fossils, discussions have to take place on how this might best be done and international agreements (not just national ones) have to be put in place. Also, many museum collections around the world are built partially on the purchase of material from professional dealers or private collections. For example, the NHM collection includes material purchased from Anning, Mantell, Nopcsa, the Sternbergs and Cutler, not to mention Archaeopteryx. Many North American museums include numerous specimens that were also purchased historically (e.g. AMNH, USNM, ROM, Field Museum), often with less locality information than a modern dealer would provide. Even those museums who claim to have ‘collected’ large numbers of specimens often engaged professional fossil hunters on their pay roll to do so (which is not really that different from buying from a dealer - the scientists themselves rarely went into the field on these expeditions for any significant length of time). Thus, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy in terms of condemning the sale of fossils, when this trade has actually formed the foundation of many major collections. Some of my colleagues have even opined that they would rather see specimens left to rot in the field than have them collected by a dealer (where there would be at least a chance they’d make it into a public collection), an attitude I find astonishing. Finally, let’s not forget that we are also talking about people’s livelihoods – in some parts of the world fossil collecting provides a much needed boost to local economies and provides jobs for numerous workers and there are many interesting conversations to be had on this theme alone.

In this case I think the subject would best be served by a large dose of pragmatism. The subject can benefit strongly from good relationships with those dealers that collect and prepare material to high ethical and professional standards, whereas the community should work together to exclude those that do not. 

Plates, spikes and a brain the size of a plum ...

At long last I can finally reveal to my friends and colleagues why it has taken me much longer than usual to respond to those emails, admin and specimen requests, and why my contributions to our joint grant and research projects have been somewhat tardy. For the past year, I’ve been heavily involved in a secret museum project: the acquisition of a spectacular new dinosaur specimen. With the publication of a piece in The Telegraph today, the embargo has come to an end, and I can now announce that the Natural History Museum has succeeded in acquiring a skeleton of the iconic Jurassic North American dinosaur Stegosaurus stenops, the most complete skeleton known for this species. The new skeleton is going on permanent public display in the NHM on 4th December 2014.

Our new Stegosaurus skeleton, laid out to show all of the elements together and giving an impression of its overall scale. Around 90% of the specimen is present, including an almost complete disarticulated skull and an essentially complete set of plates.

The specimen has been in London since late 2013. Since then, Charlotte Brassey, Susannah Maidment and I have been crawling over every inch of the skeleton to gather basic anatomical data using traditional methods, CT scans, 3-D laser scans and more. We’re currently preparing a series of papers on Stegosaurus anatomy and biology, the first of which are close to submission. This work is being carried out with a number of other colleagues, all of whom were sworn to secrecy (we’ve all been operating under non-disclosure agreements to save our thunder for the unveiling), and whose roles will be revealed as our papers start to come to fruition. Charlotte and I have also been very heavily involved in all other aspects of the project, which includes the specimen installation, interpretation and forthcoming public programme, so it will be great to finally see the skeleton in its full glory in a couple of weeks time. It’s been a hectic and exhausting, but exciting and rewarding, experience - especially while trying to conduct the work discreetly while fulfilling my various other duties at the museum and elsewhere.

Watch this space for more details. The specimen will be mounted in the Earth Hall (Exhibition Road entrance, at the base of the escalator leading into the large globe) and will greet visitors as they arrive. A big thank you to all of those that have helped so far and who have also indulged my delays on so many recent occasions! I'll reveal more over the course of the next few months.

Theropod envy?

When giving conference or public presentations, I often use the opportunity to take a swipe a theropods: after all, most of my career has been spent working on dinosaur herbivores, which often end up in the capacious guts of their carnivorous relatives. However, it's not because I genuinely hate theropods per se - some are amazing animals, and even though Tyrannosaurus is, without doubt, over-exposed and over-rated it is still a neat animal. I've even found myself working on theropods from time-to-time, though admittedly I still have a strong preference for the more diverse and disparate herbivores. The main reason I feel I have to insult theropods (and by extension theropod workers) is simply the hyperbole that surrounds these animals. A mouthful of sharp teeth, claws, and endless speculations over dino-celebrity death matches seems to get people weak at the knees, clouding all sensible judgement regarding new claims about their palaeobiology. Who really cares if one giant theropod was 50 cm longer than another? Such trivia has no real effect on our knowledge of theropod biology and evolution. Although the media might be blamed for fanning the flames of theropod adoration, this would be unfair - they simply give people what they want and there are plenty of people out there, both professionals and public, who idolize theropods in ways analogous to 'A'-list celebrities. This manifests every year at Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings, for example: theropod talks are often packed to the rafters (thanks mainly to work on feeding and behaviour: big fluffy killer death lizard syndrome), whereas the room feels distinctly emptier when similar talks start on herbivorous dinosaurs.

A cast of Giganotosaurus in the Museo "Carmen Funes" Plaza Huicul, Argentina

More seriously, this idolatry extends to scientific publication too. I'm frequently teased by colleagues in other disciplines about how easy it must be to get dinosaur papers into top journals like Nature and Science - after all, dinosaur papers appear in both venues regularly, despite the fact that dinosaur workers represent only a tiny fraction of scientists worldwide. However, while vertebrate palaeontology clearly punches above its weight in this regard, there is a bias - almost all dinosaur papers in these journals are on theropods, while the other two-thirds of dinosaur diversity do far less well (and analytical papers dealing with dinosaurs as a whole are exceptionally rare). These theropod papers generally fall into two categories - announcements of new dinosaurs with feathers, or some other aspect of the dinosaur/bird link - or discoveries of non-feathered theropods with potentially interesting palaeobiological features or geographical/temporal range extensions.

This is perhaps exemplified by the new paper in Science published last week on the iconic North African theropod Spinosaurus (Ibrahim et al., 2014). In this widely reported paper, the authors describe a new articulated skeleton of this animal and use it to update various aspects of the animal's anatomy. The hook for the paper was that Spinosaurus might have been a largely aquatic animal - and when not aquatic might have been quadrupedal - an unusual (and potentially interesting) adaptation for a theropod. This news flashed around the world on the media, Facebook and Twitter, with few critical voices. However, the hype generated by the release (in no small measure due to the heavy involvement of National Geographic) overlooks some important details.

Importantly, most dinosaur workers had already accepted that spinosaurs were probably unusual dinosaurs that did spend a lot of time in water. This was based on numerous lines of evidence:
1. Snout and tooth morphology: convergently looking like a crocodile and potentially engaged in croc-like feeding behaviour. Those teeth aren't for slashing, but could have been good at holding slippery prey;
2. Weird forelimbs: the big claws have long been suggested as tools for gaffing fish from the water, and it has even been suggested that the robust humerus might have been associated with quadrupedality;
3. Gut contents: the British spinosaur Baryonyx has fish remains in its gut contents (the only gut content known for a spinosaurid);
4. Oxygen isotopes: these suggest that spinosaurs ate far more aquatic prey than other dinosaurs and may have spent more time in/near water as a result;
5. Palaeoenvironments: the North African localities yielding Spinosaurus have long been though to be very wet - with wide meandering channels, which, coincidentally are full of big tasty fish.

This work was all done previously by palaeontologists going back to Strömer, most notably by Angela Milner, Alan Charig, Andrew Cuff, Emily Rayfield and colleagues in their work on Baryonyx and Spinosaurus (Charig & Milner, 1986, 1997; Cuff & Rayfield, 2013) and by the isotopic work of Romain Amiot and colleagues on Spinosaurus (Amiot et al., 2010), as well as numerous other less detailed accounts. Although these papers are cited in the recent Science contribution, they are not given due credit for establishing the idea of aquatic spinosaurs – the new observations made on the additional material are really only the icing on the cake for the story of spinosaur habitat preference. Moreover, doubts have emerged over the proportions of the new skeleton (see the excellent blog entry by Scott Hartman) and given the vagaries associated with the collection of the material (which was  collected by professional fossil dealers who did not  keep or provide detailed field notes to corroborate the association of the skeleton) additional assurances are needed to support the claims of the authors in the Science article. If the new specimen is genuinely associated and the problems noted thus far can be accounted for this would be a neat discovery (even if it is a theropod): a new, good specimen of an animal known otherwise from published images and isolated material. However, extraordinary claims merit extraordinary levels of evidence.


Given the foregoing I'm left wondering why the editors thought that this might be suitable for Science - a journal that wants to publish transformative research. Is it a new taxon? No. Does it tell us something distinctive about evolution or dinosaurs that we didn't know before? No. This is really a specialist paper, updating our knowledge of a single taxon that was named nearly a century ago, although one with an interesting history. My theory? It's a big scary theropod ... I doubt very much that anyone working on a new sauropod or ornithischian skeleton belonging to a named taxon would stand much chance of getting similar papers published. That's why I'm envious of theropods ...

References:

Amiot, R. et al. (2010). Oxygen isotope evidence for semi-aquatic habits among spinosaurid theropods. Geology 38: 139–142 doi:10.1130/G30402.1.
Charig, A. J. & Milner, A. C. 1986. Baryonyx, a remarkable new theropod dinosaur. Nature 324: 359–361.
Charig, A. J. & Milner, A. C. (1997). Baryonyx walkeri, a fish-eating dinosaur from the Wealden of Surrey. Bulletin of the Natural History Museum London 53: 11–70.
Cuff, A. R. & Rayfield, E. J. (2013). Feeding mechanics in spinosaurid theropods and extant crocodilians. PLoS ONE 8(5): e65295. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065295.
Ibrahim, N. et al. (2014). Semiaquatic adaptations in a giant predatory dinosaur. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1258750.

Opening up on Open Access

I'm a huge admirer of the hard push we're currently witnessing to make published research freely accessible to all who need it. The move towards universal Open Access (OA) is going more slowly than some would like, but there has been a huge shift in perception among academics, publishers and funders, most of it positive. Many of the issues in this debate have already been aired extensively, but I have a few brief observations (well, mini-rants) based on my own biases and experiences, both as a journal editor (both for commercially and society published journals), someone with a hand in running academic societies, and as an author. This is going to be a stream of consciousness, so apologies in advance ...

1. OA costs authors money. Please don't lambast people for not publishing their papers with Gold OA - they may not be able to afford it. Average fees for Gold OA are high (around $2.5K on average in my field) and at a time when budgets are tighter and tighter finding money to support publications gets trickier. RCUK recently provided the institutions that they fund with block grants to pay for work done via their grants to be published OA. However, these block grants are inadequate: one recently completed NERC grant of mine (which was funded prior to the new rules coming in) generated nine papers - the costs of making each of these Gold OA would have exceeded my institution's entire RCUK annual block grant. In this case, the funding body has imposed a knee-jerk response to a call for more OA, without providing the people that it funds adequate resources to do so. The situation for people in small institutions in developing counties is likely to be even harder.

2. OA costs publishers money. It could be argued that OA fees should be lower (and some places like PLoS and PeerJ manage this, which is admirable), but there is a fixed minimum cost of publishing a paper in any format due to the need to employ people to run journals. Even online journals require IT  and editorial staff, as well as the staff needed to look after their pay and pensions, legal issues,  maintaining their offices, etc. Costs start to balloon further when printing physical copies and distributing them. Although many large commercial publishers might have slack in their accounting lines to offer lower fees, thanks to economies of scale, many smaller publishers will not. Let's not forget many excellent journals are published by small academic societies, which serve niche communities well, and that are entirely financed by membership dues or small investment portfolios. Many small academic societies could not exist or promote new work without the revenues generated by publications, which are usually fed back to benefit the members of those societies directly. Give these guys a break, at least.

3. Green OA is great. Authors retain copyright over the final versions of their publications in their original form - i.e. the non-formatted final version they submit to the publisher. Posting of this after an embargo period is free, legal and gets the data out. It might not allow access to the beautiful proofed version of the article, but it does the job. Although access to the article isn't instant - it's still free after a relatively short lag. Please remember OA and instant access are not necessarily the same thing. Except in a few very rare instances, does it really matter if you have to wait six months for public access to a paper? (Especially given point 4, below). Admittedly the world might benefit from rapid medical or technological advances based on immediate OA, but let's be honest - it's 99.9% likely that the people with the insight and training to make those advances will have instant access to it through an institutional library or professional network anyhow.

4. Rediscover some scholarly skills. To some extent, I regard the need for instant gratification with some amusement. I did my PhD at time when email was just starting to be used widely (I had to go to a university computer centre to use it!) and PDFs did not exist. Amazingly, I still managed to access all of the material I needed, essentially for free, through libraries, interlibrary loans, requesting reprints, and asking colleagues if they had copies of particularly hard to get publications that I could borrow from them. Getting away from Google and asking a human being for help might actually have some side benefits for your research. All of these are forms of free information exchange that existed for centuries before exchanging PDFs. Ask the author for a PDF of that paywalled paper. You might actually learn something else by accident.

5. A historical perspective is interesting. Originally all scientific publication was funded by private patronage - authors had to pay to publish their work, either directly (often via the historical equivalent of crowd-sourcing) or via high membership dues to a handful of elite societies. Handing over publication to commercial publishers actually removed the need for authors to pay - scientists swapped the initial cash outlay for the fact that commercial publishers would profit from their work. So, the rise of academic publishers allowed people who formerly couldn't pay to get their research published. Free to the author at the point of submission. We've now come full circle, with authors again expected to pay upfront for Gold OA. We're effectively arguing for a nineteenth century financial model, though admittedly a better version of it in which papers are much easier to find for everybody...

In conclusion, it would be great if we could publish everything instantly for everyone and - ulimately - I would be totally in favour of this approach. Where possible, I currently use Gold OA for some of my work but, frankly, pressures to publish in certain venues (in terms of career advancement and visibility) and lack of ready funds often prevents this. However, until we work out where the money to pay for Gold OA  will come from we will have an extended period with a mixed model of Green and Gold OA, as well as paywalls for some publishers that hold out for profits either because they want to or simply have to in order to survive. The main ways this might happen are reductions in OA fees associated with a total abandonment of print journals (saving on printing and posting), less reliance on editorial offices (e.g. less proofing - as happens with PLoS ONE - which has pros and cons), some unprecedented drops in expected profit margins for commercial publishers (good luck with the shareholders on that one), and/or governmental intervention to either cap profits on relevant publications or to provide the money to make up the shortfall between the two.

Publishing on private specimens

Martin Munt and I recently published a short letter in the august journal Nature, commenting on their publication of the beautiful, but privately-owned, eleventh Archaeopteryx specimen (Barrett & Munt, 2014). While we're grateful that Nature took our concerns seriously enough to publish on this issue (especially as our letter was intended as a direct criticism of their editorial policy in allowing a private specimen to be published) they heavily edited our original letter, so that the published version omits some of the more nuanced and general points that we wanted to make. Although Martin and I agreed readily to publication of the edited version - so that we could open the debate on this question more widely - I'd like to make the content of the original available here. As an aside, in the name of openness and full disclosure, Martin and I sent this original text to the authors of the Archaeopteryx paper: we have since had a constructive discussion with them and they paid us the same courtesy by sending the draft of a reply. Text of the original letter ran as follows:

"Collaborations between private fossil collectors and professional palaeontologists generate significant mutual benefits, facilitating access to productive localities and important specimens and remedying the overlooked scientific contributions of amateur collectors. Such collaborations should be encouraged where they bring new material and data into the public domain. However, publication of fossil specimens held in private collections is problematic due to issues surrounding future accessibility and the independent verification of published observations. Journals have a duty to ensure the repeatability of the observations forming the basis of new scientific interpretations prior to publication: for this reason, many journals refuse publication of specimens held in private collections. Foth et al. (Nature 511, 79–82; 2014) described the spectacular eleventh specimen of the earliest bird Archaeopteryx and documented features of the plumage that were previously unknown for this pivotal taxon. While we congratulate the authors and owner for making this information available, there is, however, no guarantee of access to this specimen for other researchers. This Archaeopteryx has been registered under the ‘Act to Prevent the Exodus of German Cultural Property’ (see http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_kultgschg/englisch_kultgschg.html), a positive move that requires its whereabouts to be recorded and that prevents the loss of German palaeontological patrimony. Nevertheless, this act has no provision guaranteeing access to future generations of researchers, with access remaining at the owner’s discretion. Without access, these published observations cannot be independently verified, reducing the utility of the specimen to the scientific community. We urge Nature, and other journals interested in such material, to consider these concerns more seriously and to ensure that all authors submitting to the journal can provide meaningful assurances regarding future access to the material on which they publish."

Barrett, P. M. & Munt, M. 2014. Private collections hold back science. Nature 512, 28. (doi:10.1038/512028a)

An unexpected ornithischian

We know surprisingly little about the early evolutionary history of the ornithischian dinosaurs (Irmis et al. 2007). Indeed, the global record of Late Triassic ornithischians consists of only three partial specimens and all of these suffer from incompleteness and have suffered controversy over their exact geological ages and phylogenetic positions. The situation improves in the Early Jurassic with rich faunas from southern Africa and other material from Europe and North America. Nonetheless, few of these sites are well dated, meaning that they cannot place precise constraints on the timing of key events in Ornithischia.

Today, my colleagues and I were excited to announce the discovery of a new early ornithischian that sheds some much needed light on the early stages of their evolutionary history – Laquintasaura venezuelae. Laquintasaura was a small biped, around 1 m in total length, and is known on the basis of at least four individuals that were found together in a rich bonebed (Barrett et al. 2014). The name is based on the La Quinta Formation, from which the material comes, and the country of Venezuela, honouring the fact that Laquintasaura is the first Venezuelan dinosaur and, more broadly, the first to be named from the whole of northern South America. The first specimens were found in the early 1990s and continuing fieldwork by Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra and collaborators has led to the accumulation of a large collection of material, numbering many hundreds of individual bones. Marcelo and I first started working on this material together when he joined the staff of the Natural History Museum in the mid-2000s, but the pressures of other work and the need to find additional diagnostic material led to a long incubation period for the paper.

Laquintasaura provides us with several insights. Critically, we were able to use high-precision radiometric dating techniques to provide a maximum age for the bonebed of 200.9 Ma. This places the deposition of the bonebed within 1 million years of the end-Triassic extinction event, which has a number of implications. It could mean that ornithischians went through the extinction relatively unscathed and/or bounced back very quickly after the extinction. It might also indicate that ornithischians, which were previously rare, benefitted from some kind of ecological release in the wake of the extinction that allowed them to diversify and increase in abundance in a way that wasn’t possible prior to the extinction. Maybe key competitors or predators were wiped out or reduced in number, although such ideas are difficult to test.

The occurrence of at least four individuals in the bonebed – and probably many more (some material remains unprepared and there is still potential for further discoveries at the site) – is intriguing. It hints at the possibility that these little dinosaurs were living in a social group at the time they died. Histological work indicates that the smallest individual we found was around three years old, while the largest was 10–12 years in age. Could this have been a small multigenerational herd? If so, it would be a very early example of ornithischian sociality. More work is needed on the taphonomy of the site to establish exactly how it was formed to confirm or reject this proposal.

The provenance of the new dinosaur is also interesting. Very few dinosaur localities are known from so close to the palaeoequator – indeed it has been suggested that arid climatic belts either side of the equator might have prevented large animals from colonising this region. At a stroke, Laquintasaura shows that dinosaurs were capable of living in this area, whose climate is thought to have experienced seasonal semi-arid and moist intervals.

A quick word on the lovely reconstruction of Laquintasaura produced by Mark Witton. As some of you may know, I have a pet idea that many basal dinosaurs were omnivores, and I wanted this new image to show something other than the usual docile herbivore munching on a fern. The teeth of Laquintasaura are perhaps its most unusual feature as they possess many ‘carnivore-like’ features (they are long, slender and slightly recurved) – these features suggest to me that they were used not only for plants, but also for small animal prey (at least some of the time).

This paper was a big team effort and I’d like to thank all of the other team members: Richard Butler and Randy Irmis for their ornithischian expertise; Roland Mundil for conducting the radiometric analyses; Torsten Scheyer for working out just how old each individual was; and especially Marcelo for his invitation to work on this exciting material, sorting out all of the logistics, and for his constant reminders that I had to get on and finish the work. In addition, we also relied on the efforts of many preparators at several institutions (Scott Moore-Fay, J. Carillo and U. Oberli) and Mark Witton and Scott Hartman's artistic talents. Now on to the longer-term project that will be the full description …

Barrett, P. M. et al. 2014. A palaeoequatorial ornithischian and new constraints on early dinosaur diversification. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281, 20141147. (doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.1147)

Irmis, R. B. et al. 2007. Early ornithischian dinosaurs: the Triassic record. Historical Biology 19, 3–22. (doi:10.1080/08912960600719988)