Spinosaurus mirabilis, new species with a scimitar skull crest

[Ben Creisler]

Ben Creisler

bcre...@gmail.com

A new paper:

Spinosaurus mirabilis sp. nov.

Paul C. Sereno, Daniel Vidal, Nathan P. Myhrvold, Evan Johnson-Ransom, María Ciudad Real, Stephanie L. Baumgart, Noelia Sánchez Fontela, Todd L. Green, Evan T. Saitta, Boubé Adamou, Lauren L. Bop, Tyler M. Keillor, Erin C. Fitzgerald, Didier B. Dutheil, Robert A. S. Laroche, Alexandre V. Demers-Potvin, Álvaro Simarro, Francesc Gascó-Lluna, Ana Lázaro, Arturo Gamonal, Charles V. Beightol, Vincent Reneleau, Rachel Vautrin, Filippo Bertozzo, Alejandro Granados, Grace Kinney-Broderick, Jordan C. Mallon, Rafael M. Lindoso, and Jahandar Ramezani (2026)
Scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation.
Science 391(6787): eadx5486
DOI:10.1126/science.adx5486
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx5486

Editor’s summary

Recent descriptions of and debates about the massive, fish-eating dinosaur Spinosaurus have brought this striking predator to the forefront of the dinosaur pantheon. Its huge size and distinctive morphology have stimulated much debate about the degree to which it lived an aquatic lifestyle. Sereno et al. describe a crested fossil Spinosaurus found in northern Africa as a new species. The researchers argue that this group of dinosaurs underwent three phases of evolution with increasing aquatic adaptations and existence in habitats around the Tethys Sea. —Sacha Vignieri

Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The fossils of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, a giant sail-backed, fish-eating theropod dinosaur from northern Africa, have inspired competing lifestyle interpretations, either as a semiaquatic ambush predator stalking shorelines and shallows or a fully aquatic predator in pursuit of prey underwater. Its bones and teeth have been found only in coastal deposits near marine margins, a locale potentially consistent with either lifestyle interpretation.

RATIONALE

In the central Sahara, a new fossiliferous area (Jenguebi) was discovered in beds equivalent in age [Farak Formation; Cenomanian ~95 million years ago (Mya)] to those yielding fossil remains of S. aegyptiacus. We describe from this area a new species, Spinosaurus mirabilis sp. nov., which is very similar to S. aegyptiacus in skeletal form but with a much taller, scimitar-shaped cranial crest. Two new sauropods were found in close association with the new spinosaurid buried in fluvial sediments indicative of an inland riparian habitat.

RESULTS

S. mirabilis sp. nov. is distinguished by the low profile of its snout, a hypertrophied nasal-prefrontal crest, greater spacing of posterior maxillary teeth, and other features. Its features highlight the extraordinary specializations of both species of the genus Spinosaurus, including interdigitating upper and lower teeth. Principal component analysis of body proportions places spinosaurids between semiaquatic waders (e.g., herons) and aquatic divers (e.g., darters) distant from all other predatory dinosaurs. A time-calibrated phylogenetic analysis resolves three evolutionary phases: an initial Jurassic radiation when their distinctive elongate fish-snaring skull evolved and split into two distinctive designs, baryonychine and spinosaurine; an Early Cretaceous circum-Tethyan diversification when both reigned as dominant predators; and a final early Late Cretaceous phase when spinosaurines attained maximum body size as shallow water ambush specialists limited geographically to northern Africa and South America.

CONCLUSION

The discovery of the tall-crested S. mirabilis sp. nov. in a riparian setting within an inland basin supports a lifestyle interpretation of a wading, shoreline predator with visual display an important aspect of its biology. At the end of the Cenomanian about 95 million years ago, an abrupt eustatic rise in sea level and the attendant climate change brought the spinosaurid radiation to an end.

*****
News:

https://www.sci.news/paleontology/spinosaurus-mirabilis-14571.html

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-scimitar-crested-spinosaurus-species-central.html

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/spinosaurus-scimitar-head-crest

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/newly-discovered-horned-dinosaur-was-like-a-unicorn-from-hell/

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/new-dinosaur-discovered-sahara-spinosaurus-mirabilis

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/dinosaurs/spinosaurus-mirabilis

[Mike Taylor]

Oh yes, I definitely am 100% convinced that it took twenty-nine authors to write this ten-page paper, and that a new species is certainly warranted, and that the best way to deal with the two new sauropods is to mention them in two sentences and then ignore them. This is definitely the way to do science.

-- Mike.

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[Thomas Richard Holtz]

Ignoring the sauropod aspect (much like the authors did... :-) ), one of the first things I thought when I saw a draft of the paper was: "Do they not know that in the Systematic Paleontology section of a paper, you are obligated to list ALL authors in in the statement? You aren't allowed to "et al." it!"

> Oh yes, I definitely am 100% convinced that it took twenty-nine authors to write this ten-page paper, and that a new species is certainly warranted, and that the best way to 

> deal with the two new sauropods is to mention them in two sentences and then ignore them. This is definitely the way to do science.

> -- Mike.

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Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
Email: tho...@umd.edu         Phone: 301-405-4084
Principal Lecturer, Vertebrate Paleontology

Office: CHEM 1225B, 8051 Regents Dr., College Park MD 20742

Dept. of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, University of Maryland
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/

Phone: 301-405-6965
Fax: 301-314-9661              

Faculty Director, Science & Global Change Program, College Park Scholars

Office: Centreville 1216, 4243 Valley Dr., College Park MD 20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/sgc
Fax: 301-314-9843

Mailing Address: 

                        Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                        Department of Geological,

                            Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
                        Building 237, Room 1117

                        8000 Regents Drive
                        University of Maryland
                        College Park, MD 20742-4211 USA

[Ben Creisler]

Some additional items:

‘Hell-heron’ dinosaur discovered in the central Sahara
A UChicago-led team unearthed ‘Spinosaurus mirabilis,’ a fish-eating giant and the first new species of its kind in a century, where nothing like it was supposed to exist

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/hell-heron-dinosaur-discovered-central-sahara

====

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Videos:

Tall-Crested Spinosaurus Discovered! with Daniel Videl
People Are Fish
49 min.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HlsB3dn7sk&t=193s

====

NEW Spinosaurus Species! S. mirabilis Enters the Chat
Fossil Crates (video)
10 min.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DdtXoGIiNk

====
New 'hell heron' dinosaur discovered in the Sahara
The University of Chicago
4 min.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1QAVYa3JWM

====

[Gregory Paul]

Interesting paper and the main point is correct. A true diving dinosaur is not going to have pneumatic elements and a drag inducing sail (sailfish drop theirs at speed). 

Science would not consider publication of a paper on run-of-the-mill sauropods, the journal requires a hot-topic subject for a paper to be sent out for PR, that being testing the "Spinosaurus" lifestyle controversy in this case. 

I am disappointed that this does not do much to resolve the issue of the length of Spinosaurus hindlimbs and other proprtional issues. In the restored skeleton the T/F ratio of ~1.24 is higher than any nonavian theropod, something close to equal would be more likely for such a large and not all that fast beast. So this is not a sound basis for a restoration. If the femur is about as long as the tibia as is likely, then leg length would be much more normal relative to the rest of the skeleton in this taxon. And the pelvis considerably larger. I have always been way skeptical of the restoration of the Moroccan material the proportions being so bizarre -- does not meet the Carl Sagan metric -- had I tried to get the same restoration using the same data published little doubt it would have been PR rejected, and if I did get it through PR it would have then been widely and sharply criticized as it well should be LoL. (Nor is it likely I could get a criticism of current restorations through PR the PM seeming to have settled on the dinky legged version.) And the connection between the Moroccan and Egyptian material remains inadequate. A reliable restoration of "Spinosaurus" cannot yet be done, which is why I have not attempted such, the information not meeting my paleoartistic standards. We need better skeletal remains, especially from the Bahariya. 

GSPaul

[Mickey Mortimer]

Is it just me, or could the most sensational feature of this species, the scimitar crest, also be present in S. aegyptiacus but merely unpreserved? The known portions as shown in the composite (Fig. 2D) lack any dorsal edge, and the transverse thickness at its base is similar to mirabilis based on that figure.

Mickey Mortimer

[Thomas Richard Holtz]

Additionally, with our poor sample size, we can't say for certain what the distribution of crest case is within any given species of Spinosaurus: is there sexual dimorphism? ontogenetic changes? good old-fashioned individual variation?

That said, the authors do give other, more subtle differences between S. aegyptiacus and S. mirabilis that might justify their separation, even if it turned out that (for a hypothetical case) adult males in both species had scimitar crests and females lobate ones.

Also, with regards to Greg Paul's comments about the use of the skeletal reconstruction with its aberrant limb proportions: definitely agree there!!

> Is it just me, or could the most sensational feature of this species, the scimitar crest, also be present in S. aegyptiacus but merely unpreserved? 

> The known portions as shown in the composite (Fig. 2D) lack any dorsal edge, and the transverse thickness at its base is similar to mirabilis based on that figure.

>

> Mickey Mortimer

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[Miguel Moreno-Azanza]

After reading/watching all the surrounding media that comes with the article, it feels that a large count of those 29 authors is the field crew that spent 3 months in the desert hunting for the dinosaur bones. To be fair, this is a more real picture of how many people works behind a paper than most of the one-to-three co-authored papers that we where used to twenty years ago

. 

Fieldwork is key for our discipline, and will be the answer to many of the ongoing discussions, and is mostly done by unpaid volunteers and students. Talking from experience, I am working on a couple of dino nesting sites at the moment and around 20-30 people has put hours in each of them, and my grants did have just enough money for food and lodging, never paid crews... I think is fair that, if you are an early career palaeontologist and decide to sacrifice tree months of paper/grant writing to go on an expedition for others, being part of the paper partially justifies your efforts. Also, note that the CRediT section of the paper clearly states what are each person contributions, and it reads more truthful than most of the CRedit sections where everyone has done everything...

All the above said, making a two authored section where the taxonomy is resolved, as its done sometimes in invertebrate palaeo and palaeobotany would have help A LOT to get this animal getting cited in future taxonomic discussions, because it is going to be a nightmare. 

[Gregory Paul]

Back in 1969 or so I was delighted to find in the little Walden bookstore in the giant new Tysons Corners mall Zofia Kielan-Jaworowski's Hunting Dinosaurs (I was lucky to meet her in Warsaw in 81). I was thinking how cool it would be to be on one of their expeditions in deepest Mongolia. After getting some experience being in the field out west I decided not so much. I prefer being reasonably near civilization able to get root beer floats, pizza, showers etc. Ken Carpenter was a rough and ready field guy back in the day, but he learned. By the 90s he kept hi-class field camps. I was helping him shop in a grocery in Denver and when I came up to him with some items he send me back with instructions to get the higher grade versions. He was a very good field cook. When working in Garden Park (Cope Morrison) the locals provided the fab food, and we used the BLM showers in town every day:) At some SVP Sereno gave a talk on his latest expedition in the Sahara and I told him I was glad to not be on that. Much the same to the late great Norell about Mongolia. 

Not to worry about the taxonomy being discussed, there will be lots on that to come. 

GSPaul

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/DinosaurMailingGroup/6e9d868d-1cdc-4642-8251-388d9b4a5b19n%40googlegroups.com

.

[Eric Snively]

Good point by Miguel about fieldwork, discoveries,  and authorship. Although 29 authors seems like  a lot, look deeper and major individual contributions come into focus. Evan Johnson-Ransom's morphometrics are a big part of the paper's message, and a fraction of his epic mensurate research . Todd Green's unparalleled expertise + data on helmeted birds was essential, and so on.

[Luis Alcalá]

What about geological sample preparators, photographers, palaeoartists, local guides (and local guardians in remote areas), drivers, members of the institution whose guarantee or facilitate the budget and its administrative justification, communication managers, etc.?

Anyone who has carried out large projects knows that, apart from the research team members itself, there are usually dozens of people who are necessary for the success of the research. 

It is well known that there are several ways to recognise the invaluable work of the field team. The fact that these indispensable collaborators, when not involved in any other task, are rewarded as co-authors of a paper in a prestigious scientific journal deserves a couple of comments: 

- It is generally accepted that the authors of top-tier scientific papers are top-tier researchers, usually without further verification. This may no longer be the case. 

- If this situation becomes widespread, it could encourage beginners in palaeontology to demand in the future that they be considered top-tier researchers simply for participating in fieldwork.

LA

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[Jaime Headden]

There was a thesis put forward (no, not a paper the size of a book for a degree, the other sort) that argued that everyone who was involved in the collection, preparation of material for the purpose of eventually getting it to publication made contribution to the work, often preserving information, contributing special and trained knowledge to the effect of limiting or expanding the dig, identifying and collecting material deemed "valuable," including wrapping, containing the blocks to survive transport, then their eventual preservation. Techniques such as finding and then not destroying soft tissue critical material, exposing the sides of a block while keeping the delicate parts intact---

These are all critical to the description process, and are themselves deserving of a degree of recognition; usually, these people get stuck in the acknowledgements, but as their work not only precedes but coincides with the analytical process, including how best to reveal the entombed objects when CT is NOT an option (not everyone has a multi-millionnaire financier like Epstein associate Nathan Mhyrvold on your team, whose contributions garner third authorship despite Sereno's well-known predilection for alphabetizing these 20+ authored papers), one can find themselves needing that expertise and care in the process. And that's the key: expertise. Preparators are experts themselves, often having their own geological and biological knowledge to impart when working with material.

There's limited reason to exclude them other than convention, and an antiquated one at that, that only the people *writing* the paper or contributing directly to its word count should be included.

Cheers,

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--

Jaime A. Headden

The Bite Stuff: http://qilong.wordpress.com/

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth" - P. B. Medawar (1969)

[Jerry Harris]

Our 2004 paper naming Suuwassea actually stemmed from a graduate seminar examining the specimen. We tried very hard to put everyone from the class as an author on the paper, but the handling editor of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica at the time (I believe it was Halszka Osmólska, but could be misremembering) absolutely wasn't having it, being firmly dead-set against having that many authors on a paper (it would have been 15 IIRC). I can't remember what her reasoning behind that philosophy was, though, if it was even explained... We were relegated to putting most everyone into the acknowledgements, even though the lot of them deserved to be authors. But yes, I understand that in Systematic Paleo sections of papers, listing the names of everyone who was an author on a name gets reeeeeally cumbersome with more than 4–5...

[R. Pêgas]

It is worth pointing out that the ICZN does allow us to use "et al." for taxonomic authorities, so editors/journals should not oppose that.

https://code.iczn.org/authorship/article-51-citation-of-names-of-authors/?frame=1

Recommendation 51C. Citation of multiple authors. When three or more joint authors have been responsible for a name, then the citation of the name of the authors may be expressed by use of the term "et al." following the name of the first author, provided that all authors of the name are cited in full elsewhere in the same work, either in the text or in a bibliographic reference.

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[Thomas Richard Holtz]

I think this is part of the new edition, and it requires the bibliography lists ALL the authors, which not all journals allows.

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
Email: tho...@umd.edu         Phone: 301-405-4084
Principal Lecturer, Vertebrate Paleontology

Office: CHEM 1225B, 8051 Regents Dr., College Park MD 20742

Dept. of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, University of Maryland
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/

Phone: 301-405-6965
Fax: 301-314-9661              

Faculty Director, Science & Global Change Program, College Park Scholars

Office: Centreville 1216, 4243 Valley Dr., College Park MD 20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/sgc
Fax: 301-314-9843

Mailing Address: 

                        Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                        Department of Geological,

                            Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
                        Building 237, Room 1117

                        8000 Regents Drive
                        University of Maryland
                        College Park, MD 20742-4211 USA

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[R. Pêgas]

That's true, and that's even the case with Science itself! Thanks for pointing out.

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[Mickey Mortimer]

On the one hand, I agree we should be recognizing people involved with the recovery and preparation of specimens. There's a lot of important work being done out there, be it excavation, preparation, financing or in trips like this one into third world deserts, drivers, cooks, security, etc..

But I think the important aspect here is that we're discussing AUTHORship. Authors are who write papers, not who contributes to the recovery of what those papers discuss. When we say "Ostrom said Deinonychus has feature X" it makes sense because Ostrom actually thought that, but saying "Sereno and preparator said Spinosaurus has feature Y" is probably inaccurate, even if preparing the Spinosaurus bone was a necessary part in the process. After all, if we're going to count "Writing – review & editing" as authorship, why aren't the peer reviewers and journal editors coauthors? The Acknowledgements section exists for a reason.

Mickey Mortimer

[Jaime Headden]

If authorship only applied to who wrote the physical paper, a lot of classic papers would have been authored by women, instead of their husbands, bosses, etc. Now, I get that that's not the point of the comment, but it goes to the heart of the argument: 

Authorship and credit is the reason the Coen brothers stopped trying to say who wrote how much of what script, and who directed which part of which film. Indeed, it goes even further when you realize that directors of films sit atop a pile of unit directors and cinematographers who "direct" the film, also. But only one person gets credit, not because only one person *actually* directed the film, but because it's the convention. So too is it with authorship on papers.

There is a gaggle of people behind the scenes who push a paper out from data entry, and the physical typing and editing of the ten page product is the mere end-point of a massive, months or years long endeavor. If this were 100, even 50 years ago, Paul Sereno would have been the *only* author listed, while all the contributions would have stayed the same.

Cheers,

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[Mickey Mortimer]

I didn't mean who literally types the words, I mean who comes up with the information that is on the page/screen. For the Spinosaurus paper, besides Sereno actually writing the draft, that would also include the people listed under Conceptualization because their ideas were implemented, and those listed under Phylogenetic Analysis and PCA Analysis because they generated data that is included in the paper (e.g. Supp. Table 6 and the NEXUS and TNT files). I'd even be fine including artists, since they also generate data that is in the paper. But Funding Proposals? At that point why not make the European Commission an author for actually providing Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions Grant EvoSaurAf 101068861, since the funding proposal meant nothing without the actual funds being given? Data Curation? Why isn't MorphoSource a coauthor? Specimen Curation? So Benson gets to be a coauthor on any dinosaur paper using an AMNH specimen? Investigation - Fossils / Recent Specimens? So looking at and reporting on things? Any "pers. comm." is based on someone else's investigation, but they don't get to be (and shouldn't be) coauthors. And as mentioned before- if Review and Editing counts as worthy of authorship, why leave out "O. Zant for comments on the manuscript"? They did more to influence the actual paper than the field workers did.

"If this were 100, even 50 years ago, Paul Sereno would have been the *only* author listed, while all the contributions would have stayed the same."

I don't think that's true at all. Obviously the field workers, funding proposers and such would have been left out (as I argue they should be), but I think most dinosaur papers at least were genuinely conceptualized and generated by one or maybe two people, excluding the artist if it wasn't the author. At best you might have an extended quote from a geologist or neontologist relaying data the author lacks access to or knowledge of, which is basically a long personal communication. This trend of collaboration is AFAIK relatively new (1990s+?), I assume due to the internet allowing instant global communication and access to manuscripts, more specialized subdivisions in the field, and the emphasis on generating citations for perceived quality. The latter including both people who cynically attach themselves to papers they didn't have much to do with for clout, and professors including students to give them an edge when applying for positions. See also the recent trend of theses being written by coauthors including the professor in multiple chapters that are pre-formatted to be individual papers.

Mickey Mortimer

[Miguel Moreno-Azanza]

Good we sparked this conversation because it is something I always wanted to discuss at length. 

For me, the key point is that people need to be compensated for their work.. If the preparator. fieldcrew and artist got paid by the final authors for their contribution, I have no problem with them not being included in the author list. 

If someone paid me to run their phylogenetic analysis I would have no problem doing the computing stuff and not signing the paper (although maybe I would claim authorship in some of the scripts produced). And again, the CRediT is there for addressing this discussion, and I think, as long as we fill it right, is a good tool that works in many other disciplines. . 

--
Miguel Moreno-Azanza, PhD.

Aragosaurus: Recursos Geológicos y Paleoambientes – IUCA

Área de Paleontología

Dept. Ciencias de la Tierra

Universidad de Zaragoza

Pedro Cerbuna 12

E50009 - Zaragoza

Departamento de Ciências da Terra,
Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia,
FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa,

Museu da Lourinhã

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[Thomas Yazbek]

This discussion has me thinking about a combination of 2 things, the so-called "Lindy effect", as defined by online personality Paul Skallas (don't shoot any messengers here, please, until you read my entire email) and "(G.K.) Chesterton's Fence". The Wikipedia articles for these two concepts don't link to each other, but I think they're related. For those who are unfamiliar with the Lindy principle, for our purposes think of it just as the idea that practices/ideas/technologies that have been around a long time tend to have a good reason for their longevity, and that newer ideas need to be viewed with more skepticism than the proven old ones. Chesterton's fence can be summed up as "don't reform some state of affairs without first understanding the reasoning behind that state of affairs". 

So, I think it's important to weigh the pros and cons of listing 30 authors on this (and any other) paper. It could be that this is the way the internet age dictates that we do things. But it could also be that the old way of keeping author lists short is better. I'm more inclined to agree with Mickey here, although I'm not in academia. There are a lot of crises affecting science right now, one of which is the 'publish-or-perish'/citation-chasing paradigm...these long author lists seem perhaps related to that (usually seen as unhealthy) paradigm. The desire to get your name on something is strong, no matter how small one's actual role was.

From my point of view, keeping science paper authorship limited does 2 beneficial things: one, it rewards the vision & seniority of the researcher(s) who put the concept in motion and did the most conceptual work, much like how movies are usually seen as their directors' babies; two, it also puts those senior authors out there as the 'face' of the research, to be easily identified by the curious media and also to shield junior or peripheral contributors from any criticism. It is interesting how filmmaking parallels this - in movies from say, 1940, only the most senior crew are acknowledged in the credits. As in science, both the absolute size of movie production crews and the number of them credited (in most cases, all of them) have grown a lot since then. But nobody expects the names of the most junior grips and assistant hair-stylists to come before the directors and writers. Again, I'm not a participant in scientific academia, but you can't help but wonder why most scientific papers in the modern age (not just in dino-world) went from primarily single-authored affairs to having dozens on occasion.

Thomas Yazbeck

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[Mickey Mortimer]

"Good we sparked this conversation because it is something I always wanted to discuss at length. 

For me, the key point is that people need to be compensated for their work.. If the preparator. fieldcrew and artist got paid by the final authors for their contribution, I have no problem with them not being included in the author list. 

If someone paid me to run their phylogenetic analysis I would have no problem doing the computing stuff and not signing the paper (although maybe I would claim authorship in some of the scripts produced). And again, the CRediT is there for addressing this discussion, and I think, as long as we fill it right, is a good tool that works in many other disciplines."

Ummm... this is paleontology. Authors do NOT get paid for writing papers. The only ones getting paid for their "contribution" in the Spinosaurus paper are the curators. I assume if they needed security driving through Niger, that person was paid as well.

This does raise an interesting issue though. As we know, authors of technical publications are "paid" in the form of expectation from their paid jobs to popularize their employer, recognition by the community, and publishing numbers that give them stats for negotiation, hiring, maybe an easy pass through peer review...  And this can be extended to other jobs I'd consider authors like creating analyses or figures. If you do a shitty analysis or notoriously poor drawings, it's hypothetically worse for your future hiring and publishing potential. But what does a preparator, field worker, curator, "investigator", etc. get out of it? No museum is going to be like "Wow, E. G. Preparator sure did a great job clearing sandstone from those Spinosaurus bones! We should hire them for this unpaid position!", or "Gee Willikers, F. Worker sure did a bang up job stabilizing those Spinosaurus bones, so I should choose them (unpaid) for my next exploration into Africa!" Because what they did is so disconnected with the paper's content and anonymous compared to the other preparators and field workers, there's no way to evaluate their quality even if they were competing for a paying job. And even the understandable desire for fame is undercut with more than two authors because you'll forever be part of "et al." except to those authors who choose to type complete references. You think F. L. Buckley is going down in history as a Spinosaurus mirabilis coauthor? Never in a million years because I just made that name up, but nobody even knew it since no reader has internalized all 29 names, or will ever, probably. So what's the upside to including them as authors instead of listing them in the Acknowledgements?

Mickey Mortimer

[Jaime Headden]

>  Ummm... this is paleontology. Authors do NOT get paid for writing papers. The only ones getting paid for their "contribution" in the Spinosaurus paper are the curators. I assume if they needed security driving through Niger, that person was paid as well.

Authors get tenure and esteem for publishing more papers and in higher profile journals, so the more sensational and more public that paper is, the more likely they are to get better paying jobs (or tenure) going forward in their lives. There's a non-zero correlation between "impact factor" and money. There may be other reasons why we've criticized short papers without detailed description in Science and Nature, but there is a financial incentive attached to them, too.

Cheers,

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[Thomas Yazbek]

Okay, but a random volunteer museum preparator or local field crewman doesn't get much out of appearing as an author on 12 papers beyond recognition & a sense of pride. Inflating their importance seems unwise given the simpler nature of their work, however essential.

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[Gregory Paul]

Mickey makes an interesting point about the crests. I don't really know how to restore the North African crests (similar to how we really don't know what the partial Q. lawsoni specimen crest looks like, much less the actual Q. n. which from what I understand is about to be removed from Q. -- and we don't know if Maastrichtian E. regalis, E. annectens and E. copei even had crests since the specimen with the soft crest is from the late Campanian and is not any of those species and maybe not the same genus, I am trying to figure out how to discuss and illustrate this in the ornithischian field guide). That the S. m. material is apparently a few million years younger and anatomical items does favor it being a distinct taxon at some level.

Had I reviewed the paper I would have approved of it because the main conclusion is viable and probably correct. I would have required that the skeletal be altered to make the femur about as long as the tibia as is always true in big theropods including the Moroccan skeleton. That in turn would require putting on a bigger pelvis because the Moroccan pelvis is normal in size relative to the hindlimb. That would give S. m. a more normal sized pelvis and leg. For some proportional paleofun I made the change while keeping the lower legs the same size relative to the rest of the remains in the attached (don't go distributing this in public locations beyond the list) -- what was an odd looking duck is transformed into the markedly more conventional theropod S. m. probably was. If instead the S. m. tibia were as short as that of S. a. then it would support the short legs. As it is the longer S. m. tibia does not settle the S. a. issues, but could challange it. Every once in awhile I have been masochistic enough to take a stab at the N. African material, but to settle that requires more remains, especially from Egypt. 

What has bothered me is all the analysis on Spinosaurus based on such problematic specimens combined from hither and yon. It all could be a waste of time. Like all that work using Jane as a juvie Tyrannosaurus, when it has a lighter skull, more numerous and bladed teeth, longer arms, and longer limbs than actual Tyrannosaurus of that size is in the science dumpster -- much more pertinent would be a comparison of the Jane and BM types to young Tyrannos, although that is difficult because not much of the latter is open to detailed research (from what I see Teen Rex is the best in that bunch, I assume the rancher owns it). Might be a good idea to tamp down some on the Spinosaurus research until we know more about their proportions and so forth. 

GSPaul

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[Jaime Headden]

I think the issue here is ascribing value and importance in the authorship that shouldn't ever have been there in the first place. Saying that the old system of having four or five people who actually wrote and organized the research get supplanted being the "ideal" system because it was older and has been used for so long doesn't make sense when that was used to suppress minority voices and researchers, whose mentors, teachers, husbands, or the case of some former slaves, former owner-associated persons and institutions, could keep them off the paper's authorship.

Yes, it's "cleaner," "neater," and more "elegant," to simply cite 2-3 names at most. But that's not an *accurate* depiction of the authorship of the paper, and I think this shift toward many-authored works (and not limited merely to the genetic studies framework, when literally everyone who works on the subject in the lab was included because the paper's subject was about their *work*).

Why exactly do we NEED to put 10-20 names into the BACK of the paper, when those people "contributed to the production and/or outcome of the paper"? Why CAN'T they be part of the authorship? Because it's more elegant to exclude them?

Cheers,

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[Thomas Yazbek]

I don't think that many "oppressed" individuals actually have gone unrecognized for notable intellectual contributions in paleontology, honestly. Besides local field crews, institutional assistants, and help with typing/manuscripts, I would think it rare that there were legions of people whose contributions needed to be elevated to authorship level but weren't. Most of the *science* was & is still done by the credentialed main author(s). 

Acknowledgement sections have been the norm for most of the 20th century & are perfectly suited for honoring the "support" people. It's misleading to count them as authors & possibly put in their contact info because journalists, for instance, really should (&want to) only talk to the main authors. 

It's certainly unfortunate that say, 100 years ago, Tendaguru papers didn't thank the native African excavators, or the wives/assistants of authors who helped with typing up. But we don't need to overcorrect and rank these people equally to main authors who make the whole work possible. In contemporary film & TV, we only see the most important - the least anonymous or interchangeable - cast & crew in the opening credits. 

It would not be right nor comfortable for viewers to list random extras or junior animators in the opening credits - they are saved for the end credits crawl. Nobody thinks the kid who gets Steven Spielberg donuts isn't essential, but also nobody considers him to be *as* irreplaceable & singularly important as the auteur.

TY

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[Ronald ORENSTEIN]

I should think that it ought to depend on whether or not an author credit would be of any use to the person being considered. If it is the cab driver who picked you up at the airport to drive you out to the fossil site, there is no possible use for that driver to be credited as an author, as opposed to in the acknowledgments. However, if there is some way in which having an authorship credit may further the career, or assist in some other way, a person who materially contributed to the work, then I don’t see any reason why you should not give them an authorship credit to help them along. 

Ronald Orenstein 1825 Shady Creek Court Mississauga, ON L5L 3W2 Canada ronorenstein.blogspot.com

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[Thomas Yazbek]

Yes, I think this is a reasonable position, although how valuable the authorship credit really is depends on the person & subjective judgements. I really wish it were more common practice for papers to list exactly who did what.

TY

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[Stephen Poropat]

I'd have to reread Maier's (2003) African Dinosaurs Unearthed (and other sources as well) to fully justify any argument regarding authorship on Tendaguru material, but adequate acknowledgment of Boheti bin Amrani at least (the overseer of a lot of the fieldwork) would probably have been coauthorship on a lot of Janensch's and Hennig's papers. It might have taken Janensch decades to monograph the specimens, but the fact he had the material to work on at all is a direct result of the efforts of hundreds of labourers under Boheti's direction.

Remes (2007), in naming Australodocus bohetti, indicates that Janensch did acknowledge Boheti's contribution in at least one paper published in 1914, although I am not sure it was the one he specifically cited (Janensch, W., 1914. Übersicht über die Wirbeltierfauna der Tendaguru-Schichten, nebst einer kurzen Charakterisierung der neu aufgeführten Arten von Sauropoden. Archiv für Biontologie 3, 81–110), since I can find no mention of Boheti therein (at least on a quick skim). It might be in another Janensch 1914 paper of which I do not have a copy (Janensch, W., 1914. Bericht über den Verlauf der Tendaguru-Expedition. Archiv für Biontologie 3, 15–58); admittedly, I haven't tried in earnest to track it down yet, but if anyone has a copy already, I would be most grateful to receive it.

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--

Dr Stephen F. Poropat

Deputy Director

Western Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre

School of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Curtin University

Bentley, Western Australia

Australia 6102

https://stephenporopat.weebly.com/

[Gregory Paul]

Many, many, many moons ago Peter Galton and Bob Bakker were doing a joint paper on Anchisaurus, early 80s. They needed a detailed shaded drawing on fhe skull as preserved. I had two choices. Do it for free and be a co-author, or for payment and not be an author. I opted for the latter. Which was fine. Of course you all remember the fine illustration I did, I was quite proud of it. 

No you don't. Bakker dithered and the paper never got done. So the nifty pic has never been seen and never will be:(:(:(:(:( I don't have a copy of it, those were primitive times reproduction wise. That is what bugs me about that situation. 

The human evolution paleoanthropology boys were notorious for not crediting women, sometimes wives, and natives for the discoveries they made. I believe that happened to Mary wife of Louis. although she became fairly well known over time, especially after he died. The general situation has improved since then from what I know. 

GSPaul

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[Jaime Headden]

But we're talking people who contribute to the knowledge in the paper itself. Preparators are not cab drivers, and the comparison seems stretched. Next thing we do, when we have our students do morphometric analyses, they can be omitted despite their work, because the COMPUTER is doing the output. We shouldn't even need to cite which program anymore. We can stretch this premise as far as we need to, to demonstrate that people who do active work on the project, its premises, its testing and retesting and re-analyses, its conclusions, and its preservation and handling, have all actively contributed to the work in the way an "author" would have. These aren't notes, where someone exclaims they say X bug in Y forest, or heard a particular birdsong in an area where such things aren't normally, which can be attributed to ONE person.

Very few people write a paper alone; it's the nature of a thesis rather than you demonstrate your capability in doing so, but even then, there's a useful place for the support system that keeps you doing that: acknowledgements. But a full on paper requiring, not just benefitting from, the input of a diverse group of discussion, proposition, analyses? Too often only one person gets credit for a mountain, and it doesn't matter what miniscule credit you think a person might receive from such a small value mention, that being a qualification none of us should be making; that fact is, they ARE an author. Not in the classical sense, where again a man could take the writings of his wife and publish them as his own (think implications that Gideon Mantell stole from his own wife on the matter of Megalosaurus et al.), but I think that's all to the good.

Cheers,

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[Gregory Paul]

I was going to post this item from Tracey Ford's weekly new publication list, it certainly is related to this discussion. 

Bohm, L., 2026, Worlds that were: the Tendaguru Dinosarus and the imperial past in (post) colonial Germany: Central European History, published online, 21pp.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/central-european-history/article/worlds-that-were-the-tendaguru-dinosaurs-and-the-imperial-past-in-postcolonial-germany/41FFB4B378E65320090A6E09A3C1AF11

I have always been a HUGE fan of the Tendaguru -- my prime travel location when they get the time machines up and running -- and of course of Giraffatitan (=Brachiosaurus) brancai. I would later be delighted to relaize it was necessary to come up with the new name for the fab genus (and start a trend without even trying). Back in the day I had no notion of how the German's practiced some of their genocidal policies before Adolf prior to the Great War in their colonies, he did not come up with it all on his own. So that was not a surprise. I did learn that so many local were employed in part because tsetse flies had just wiped out most of the animals of burden. 

My renaming was itself somewhat male white colonialist. I used a Euroname for the African dinosaur. I should have named it Twigatitan, look up the first half. But I would have not been able to look such up back in 88 even had I thought of it which I did not.  

From what I have read the Tanzanian government wanted those fossils back and build a museum around them. They set up a commission and it concluded the idea was not viable it being too expensive and they lacking the expertise. 

GSPaul

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[Thomas Yazbek]

I'm not sure I would agree that Boheti should have been counted as an author. I just threw Tendaguru out as an example, and I'm probably more ignorant about it than you are - should read the book. But unless he did valuable *scientific* work, and/or contributed to the text, it seems strange to count him as an author. It probably would have been better to honor him with a binomial back in 1914 rather than 2007, in any case.

TY

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[Paul Penkalski]

Authorship is for anyone who makes a substantial contribution to a paper. Is doing the cladistic analysis substantial? Sure. Is collecting and preparing a specimen substantial? Well, sure, but it didn't contribute to the paper; it contributed to having a prepared dinosaur skeleton for the gallery, or for someone to study. That is to say, a paper and a prepared skeleton are different products. Some preparator jobs do explicitly state that you'll have the opportunity to help describe specimens or do research, i.e. to co-author, but most are not research positions. If it's not in the contract, then it's not expected.

"If the preparator. fieldcrew and artist got paid by the final authors for their
contribution, I have no problem with them not being included in the author list."

Presumably they got paid for their preparation, fieldwork, or artwork. If not, then they ought to renegotiate their contract. Or maybe they got something else out of it, like experience they can list to help them get into grad school.

Interestingly, the Stegouros paper which came out in 2021 has 19 co-authors including collectors, preparators, technicians, and artists. The footnote also says that "All of the authors collected data and contributed to the writing, discussion and conclusions". Hmm, some more than others, I'd guess. But I'd also guess that there was an agreement in advance as to who would be listed as a co-author.

Mickey also brings up a good point. Many top professionals, e.g. certain professors and head curators, do get their name on papers largely because of their position, although they generally contribute with their expertise. Even if they didn't write the text, they almost certainly read and critiqued it. As most know, the Author Contributions section has become standard in most journals. It exists in part to discourage papers with a hundred co-authors--no way are you going to be able to list anything sensible for that many individuals. Another way to cut author lists might be to award citations more appropriately. On a paper with, say, 19 co-authors, when that paper is cited, each co-author gets a full citation in google scholar. In reality, each should get 1/19 of a citation. That would cut author lists way down.

And about that Suuwassea article....

[Jaime Headden]

I'm reading a bit of splitting hairs when it comes to "contributes to the paper." "Some more than others, I guess." Like we're weighing their value on a scale against one another. Didn't tip too far? Off into the acknowledgements you go. Is this right? Perhaps a bit too cynical of a viewpoint for even my tastes.

Cheers,

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[Russell Engelman]

> Presumably they got paid for their preparation, fieldwork, or artwork. If not, then they ought to renegotiate their contract. Or maybe they got something else out of it, like experience they can list to help them get into grad school.

Yeah, that's often not how it works. As a lot of grad students can attest nowadays, quite often people are required to do a lot of extra work for their advisor without any reward of payment or even co-authorship on papers. Not doing favors requested by an advisor can mean not getting a good letter of recommendation or getting passed over for research opportunities and potential co-authorships and unless that behavior is really egregious university administration usually won't step in. Some PIs are better about this than ofhers. It's not how the system is supposed to work but that is how it very often does. Someone like a specialized, professional preparator or paleoartist might be different because they're getting paid for it but even that can be iffy.

The link below is about the experience of being a grad student in classical history, but I find a lot of the experiences listed there are pretty applicable to the typical paleontology grad student experience. Except maybe the part about institutional asymmetry in graduate student success, I want to say...Plotnick et al. 2025 pointed out we're not quite as bad as history departments in that respect. The part of the blogpost that really sticks out here is the part about being perpetually asked to do favors gratis to stay in an advisor's good graces.

https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/

[Mickey Mortimer]

"Yeah, that's often not how it works."

Indeed, I've been under the impression field work and preparation are usually volunteer positions by themselves, though of course someone paid to be a curator or professor might be expected to do them as part of their job. Is this inaccurate?

"I'm reading a bit of splitting hairs when it comes to "contributes to the paper." "Some more than others, I guess." Like we're weighing their value on a scale against one another. Didn't tip too far? Off into the acknowledgements you go. Is this right?"

Necessarily, yes. There's an endless stream of people who gave some input that influenced what's in the paper, but as I argued above, only so many of these are AUTHORS. The AUTHORSHIP of a paper is not a list of contributors. Or else we would be arguing about contributorship. Now if you want to relegate authorship to some CRedIT note at the back of the paper and start citing contributorships instead, that's a different question. But if so, everything's going to be an et al. with tens of names, most of who don't reflect the content of the paper. And that's not to look down on field workers, fund proposers, etc., but authorship is a thing that is different from what those people do, so with papers being the final product of authorship, IMO only authors deserve to be the primary cited people in them.

"Another way to cut author lists might be to award citations more appropriately. On a paper with, say, 19 co-authors, when that paper is cited, each co-author gets a full citation in google scholar. In reality, each should get 1/19 of a citation. That would cut author lists way down"

haha. I was thinking of this myself. If everyone is an author, then no one is an author. Whatever "top tier paper" means to a hiring board, if even field workers, curators, etc. that never influenced that paper's content/style/topic are being cited, then citation count suddenly becomes even more meaningless than it is today. And once systems that cost money and effort to maintain stop being beneficial, they tend to be discontinued. So looking at it that way, by all means let's start using contributorships instead and get rid of this publish or parish, Least Publishable Unit, Impact Factor BS! Destroy the system by making citation unrelated to paper quality! ;) 

Finally, from a personal perspective, if I were someone who e.g. wrote half of one paper describing a specimen and got rejected for an academic position in favor of someone who was a field worker excavating that specimen which was discussed in three papers, so they had a citation count of 3 vs. my 1, I'd be upset.

Mickey Mortimer

[Mickey Mortimer]

So here's an actual idea for how to resolve this issue- Keep authorship lists to who has historically been cited, BUT move the acknowledged people and groups to be listed on the front page right beneath the authors. So under the list of people who conceptualized and wrote the paper, did the analyses and illustrations, etc., have "Field work by ...", then the next line "Funding by ...", then the next line "Curation by ...", "Peer review by...", "Special thanks to ... for their comments." 

This would make them as visible as authors, but keep them separate from the actual authorship to keep the latter reflective of the paper's contents, not bloat our bibliographies, not interfere with hiring considerations, etc.. What does everyone think?

Mickey Mortimer

[Thomas Yazbek]

The way a lot of papers are formatted is with title, then authors, above the abstract, followed by the first page of body. It'd be kind of annoying to make people read/scroll through long contributor lists to get to the meat of the piece. If they're right below the authors, then the abstract is behind all of it. 

Better to analogize with books, where a preface or acknowledgement page comes right after the title page. So, keep the traditional abstract, only listing the citable authors, but put a prose acknowledgements section, listing contributors by category, ahead of the usual Introduction. It'll still slightly annoy those who just want to *read* the paper, but it keeps the all-important abstract page uncluttered. Perhaps this is indeed what you meant, but I just am trying to visualize it.


Thomas

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[Ronald ORENSTEIN]

Long authority lists have long been par for the course in biochemistry (I have seen papers with over 100 authors!).  Paleontology seems comparatively new at this game. 

I would agree that preparators may not be good candidates for authorship, but I suspect that this is a case-by-case matter.  Perhaps the test should be whether a person contributed in any way to the intellectual content of the paper, but I admit that there may be a broad grey area here.

Ronald Orenstein 1825 Shady Creek Court Mississauga, ON L5L 3W2 Canada ronorenstein.blogspot.com

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[Mike Taylor]

This is the best idea I've heard.

BTW., the elephant in the room here is that there gigantic author lists (Spinosaurus mirabilis, Stegouros) only ever turn up on papers in Science and Nature. You never see 29 authors on a paper in JVP or APP. Funny, that.

-- Mike.

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[Tyler Holmes]

That's an interesting point, Mike; I wonder what the cause is. Is this a situation where they going for a "more prestigious" venue, so they bring along more people to get that all important "top tier journal" on their CV? Or is this a situation where trying to get into a more exclusive journal means you bring more coauthors so it looks like a large "important" multi-dicipline project? Or maybe both?

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[Mike Taylor]

I assumed the former; the latter hadn't even occurred to me, but now you say it feels like a credible component.

-- Mike.

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[Jura]

You can blame the former here. It's well established that postdocs and early career researchers will get tacked onto high impact factor journals for no other reason than to help their future job prospects. This is the main driver for 100+ coauthor papers in physics and chemistry. Of course, gaming the system like this does lead to rebalancing. A newly minted chemist needs several high impact factor publications to warrant a good job, vs. the one high impact journal that can land a paleo or ecologist job.

There was an interesting Reddit thread about this last year. https://www.reddit.com/r/postdoc/comments/1m7fuhe/how_do_you_determine_you_have_enough_papers_to/

[Mike Taylor]

I still can't wrap my head around the mentality on hiring boards that being 19th author on a two-page extended abstract in Nature is a better indication of candidate quality than a sole-authored 20-pager in a real journal.

-- Mike.

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[Russell Engelman]

Yeah, Jura is absolutely right. Getting papers in Nature and Science (as well as that all-important NSF grant) is often what makes or breaks someone having a successful career in paleontology. Roy Plotnick in Explorers of Deep Time describes a situation where he very nearly missed getting approved for tenureship if it hadn't been for some high-profile publications and an NSF grant coming in at the last minute.

Of course this ends up exacerbating the pre-existing problem where only certain kinds of paleontologists are able to get jobs based on what they study. Sensationalized work on big, snarling megafaunal dinosaurs is much more likely to catch the eye of Nature and Science editors than more rigorous work on something less spectacular. And while I love that dinosaurs aren't considered useless evolutionary dead-ends anymore, it can't be denied that a lot of these Nature and Science papers on dinosaurs are being accepted more on the basis of "big monster" and dino-mania rather than what they contribute to our understanding of nature as a whole. I.e., what would be considered more within the stated scope of Nature/Science, a theropod paper related to the question of bird origins versus "big, toothy megatheropod #123".

The issue is there are a lot of clades (I would argue most) that just can't break the sensationalist ceiling to get published in Nature or Science. Just to give one example, sparassodonts (another charismatic predator taxon) managed to break into Nature or Science a grand total of once, in 1994. A student working on something like oreodonts, or phytosaurs, or palaeoniscoid fishes, or (heaven forbid) invertebrates basically has no chance unless they get insanely lucky. Which means they basically go into the job market handicapped compared to the student who comes from the lab writing papers on theropods with 20+ coauthors, because their CV is much less impressive. I've had a lot of conversations with colleagues about how paleontology is almost a caste system where your career opportunities (and to some degree how your colleagues perceive your worth as a researcher within the field) is dependent on what group you study.

Which then creates a system where only labs focusing on dinosaurs can really produce successful grad students with some regularity, and then those students often "trickle-down" the pre-existing scala naturae into other fields. This is already becoming an issue in fish paleontology where a lot of researchers are retiring without having trained successors simply because they could not get job positions where they could take students. A non-negligible proportion of the researchers in fish paleontology are immigrants from one or more of the tetrapod groups. But that's probably a bit of a digression.

To use myself as an example, I have been told point blank that my current CV (which for context includes 17 first-authored papers) is not enough to be competitive for the current paleontology job market, as multiple other colleagues in the same age cohort with similar rates of publication and research impact can't find jobs. And the thing is...they're right. While my CV may have tons of papers on it, having one co-authorship on a 20+ author Nature/Science paper on dinosaurs (esp. megatheropods) would probably make my CV more competitive than 17 first-authored papers on other taxa in lower-profile journals. Heck, some of these other colleagues in the same cohort with better CVs are working on much higher profile taxa than I work on like dinosaurs or megalodon and they still can't find jobs. The field of paleontology is a lot more brutal than even those advisors trying to give their students "the talk" will tell you.

The point of this isn't to sound bitter but to highlight for better or worse putting the names of 20+ students on a Spinosaurus paper was probably the best option here for the students and the advisor. Having a co-authorship on a high-profile Nature/Science paper on theropods (especially Spinosaurus) is going to be a huge deal for any of these students going forward, even if they only provided moral support. If you were an advisor this is the best thing you could do to make sure your students have a fighting chance to get a job and continue in the field. It's a less than ideal and somewhat ethically gray solution, but it's more a case of a messy solution being the best answer to a messed-up system.

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[Mike Taylor]

"Which means they basically go into the job market handicapped compared to the student who comes from the lab writing papers on theropods with 20+ coauthors, because their CV is much less impressive."

It's not more impressive, of course.

But are in an ecosystem where, for whatever idiot reason, we've all agree to behave as though it were.

-- Mike.

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[Russell Engelman]

You are correct, but in a world where no one can be familiar with every extinct taxon at once, people often default to whatever is the most popular or recognizable. It's the same thing as name-recognition bias in elections or what historical events tend to occupy public consciousness. Everyone has heard of Rome, no one has heard of the Khwarazmids, the O'odham, or the Country Lords of Carchemish.

It's very much a situation where despite our protests to the contrary, a system is what it does, not what its mission statement claims.

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[Mike Taylor]

On Mon, 2 Mar 2026 at 18:47, Russell Engelman <neovena...@gmail.com> wrote:

You are correct, but in a world where no one can be familiar with every extinct taxon at once, people often default to whatever is the most popular or recognizable. It's the same thing as name-recognition bias in elections.

Yes. But we're supposed to be scientists. We're meant to be better than that.

-- Mike.

[Tyler Holmes]

Sure, but scientists aren't really the ones building and maintaining these systems. University staff, elected officials who decide funding, publishers, those are all the people who benefit from this system and seek to maintain it. 

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[Heinrich Mallison]

Tyler, I wish you were correct! But I have seen Berufungskomissionen in Germany where exactly the people who should have known better, i.e. full professors from the very field someone was sought for, completely went for the impact factor game. 

_______________________________________________________
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[Russell Engelman]

@Mike

[W]e're supposed to be scientists. We're meant to be better than that.

Meant to be. But we aren't.

Indeed often scientists can be worse about these things than average, because our belief that we and our colleagues are supposed to operate from a logical perspective means we overlook when they are not.

@Tyler

I wish you were right as well, but this isn't the case. There are many, many cases of researchers either playing into existing systems or outright codifying them. At SVP meetings there is an unspoken culture where your worth as a researcher and your social rank is determined by how sensationalized your study taxon is. I've had colleagues at SVP tell me they're effectively socially ostracized because they study a taxon no one else is interested in.

Or, when the "some paleontologists are more equal than others" SVP abstract of Thomas et al. (2023) was a controversial discussion topic, I pointed out the takeaway from their results is that we as researchers on other groups should be more proactive in promoting why our study subject is interesting to the general public. After all, dinosaurs weren't deemed inherently interesting  from their onset but really became so because of the Bone Wars, Osborn's astroturfing of Tyrannosaurus and similar taxa to promote the nascent AMNH, and the popularity of the Dinosaur Renaissance feeding into Jurassic Park. In response, I had a prominent worker on large theropods tell me it was pointless to try and I should just accept that popular media is only interested in promoting dinosaurs and that whatever groups the rest of us worked on would never achieve broader visibility. Which came across like a wealthy Victorian aristocrat telling paupers they should know their place and it was God's plan for them to be poor.

And to agree with Heinrich, a lot of researchers really do benefit from the system as is.

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[Gregory Paul]

And while all this is going on, the other fields of paleontology resent all the pop focus on the one clade of archosaurs of which the survivors are birds. 

Where is the film franchise Pliocene Park? Which could be pretty cool with saber tooths and short faced bears roaming about causing all sorts of trouble. 

Used to be those old clunky extinct dinosaurs were the paleo sideshow to draw the crowds into the museums where the vertpaleos were largely mammal etc. people. When Osborn died Ned Colbert had the extinct reptiles job dumped into his proboscidean paleontogist's lap -- and I just realized I never thought to ask him how that happened, what a dumb ass I was:( Only NatGeo article was in 1942 by Knight on prehistoric animals with dinosuars as a subset, not till 78 did they have the Ostrom article (I was out west in Wyoming with Ken Carpenter and Mike Brett-Surman in the Pierre Shale when that came out). First major TV doc on dinos was 1977. The Dino Natl Park brontosaur sent by the CM to the LACM to be mounted ended up largely in one of the paleomammalogist's driveway as fill. 

Then came along Dr Bob and Spielberg. 

What is the rate at which nondinosaur vrtpaleo papers get into Science/Nature compared to those on dinosaurs? 

I am not sure how this has impacted research funding -- is is harder for nondinosaur paleos to get money than the dino people these days? I have no idea, is an interesting question.  

Is there a paleomammalogist's discussion group? Fish? Birds? 

There is one area of paleo that is even more popular than dinosaurs. Human origins.

GSPaul

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.

[Ethan Schoales]

Have you seen the Ice Age movies? I think mammoths, sabretooths, and the like still get a reasonable amount of attention.

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[Christopher Griffin]

Given this discussion, it may be of interest that Brian Gee investigated what new species have been published in Nature and Science by clade/grade between 2010 and 2026. 

It seems placentals and early mammaliaforms win out, followed by arthropods. Non-avian saurischians are fourth, and it appears birds and fish are tied for fifth.

Bluesky thread: https://bsky.app/profile/koskinonodon.bsky.social/post/3mfu42dyk3c2k

Github: https://github.com/bryanmgee/new-taxa-in-fancy-journals

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[Ethan Schoales]

Poor crocodilians…

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[Russell Engelman]

It would be interesting to see how those placental mammals break down. I would suspect a lot of those placental mammals are either primates or whales, and skimming the raw data that does indeed appear to be the case. Pretty much every placental recognizable by name is some kind of primate, along with Perucetus/Livyatan, some stem Mesozoic eutherians or near-eutherians (Ambolestes) and maybe a few others (there's a Diskokeryx in there for some reason)? I would assume stem eutherians were filtered out based on the criteria used.

The field of fossil Primates is a completely different animal from the rest of mammalian paleontology (or indeed, paleontology as a whole). Fossil Primates are extremely high-profile due to their relationship to human origins and the field behaves a lot more like paleoanthropology. Indeed, many fossil primate paleontologists describe themselves as paleoanthropologists even if they work on platyrrhines or apes.

The number still seems a bit high though. Unfortunately the .csv doesn't list what categories each taxon was classified in because that was automated in Python and it's not possible to read what Brian's conclusions on his data was on BlueSky.

Arthropods might also need a bit of an asterisk by them, because a lot of them seem to be Cambrian weirdos, which are almost treated as their own subject ever since Gould and Wonderful Life. Though I was surprised to see several Carboniferous insects and a few flies.

My co-authors and I found something similar when conducting that review of charismatic taxa of unusual size (Gayford et al. 2024), though we ended up sitting on it. Papers describing taxa of unusual size had an average impact factor two or more times that of an "average" paleontology paper (based on JVP), even if controlling for the unusually high IF of Nature and Science. If you include Nature and Science papers it's like 10 higher, but that seems like an unreasonable comparison because Nature and Science have impact factors around ~50. Taxa of unusual size were rarely published in lower impact journals, with a few exceptions like Utahraptor, Stupendemys, and Argentinosaurus.

We ended up sitting on it because it was too difficult to figure out how to handle taxa published before impact factor was a big deal, in defunct journals, or when journal prestige changed a lot over time. E.g., Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History and American Museum Novitates used to be much more prominent than they are now simply because there were few other regularly published journals. So taxa like Deinosuchus, Tyrannosaurus, or Andrewsarchus being published in those journals would have been considered a much bigger deal than it is today.

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[Ethan Schoales]

Does “misc. fish” include stuff like non-tetrapod sarcopterygians and jawless fish? Strange to see them get more attention than sharks or ray-finned fish, although the connection to tetrapods might help for sarcopterygians…

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[Gregory Paul]

Interesting. 

I do note that the Mesozoic dinosaur total would be higher with saurischians and ornithischians combined as seems logical. 

As for placentals, does that include early humans? And how many of them are described in Nat/Sci? 

What are all those non-therian mammaliaforms? 

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[Thomas Yazbek]

I'm surprised actinopterygians aren't the lowest on the chart. Almost nobody cares about Meso-Cenozoic teleosts in pop-paleo. Also strange to me that turtles aren't their own category...not sure where they are counted.

Thomas Yazbeck

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[Thomas Yazbek]

Some think multituberculates belong there. Otherwise, things like docodonts, morganucodonts, haramiyids, symmetrodonts, triconodonts...

The Dinosaur Renaissance really changed paleo. 

Thomas Yazbeck

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[Gregory Paul]

Good point, although that's the Pleistocene, not the Pliocene;) That got me curious and it seems the JP franchise is over 50% larger than IA, and the latter is even less realistic and far more comedic -- everyone loves Scrat! 

GSPaul 

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[Ethan Schoales]

Had living species been included, I bet the results would be at least a bit different…

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[Russell Engelman]

@ Ethan

Good point. Sarcopterygians tend to get a lot more attention than other fishes due to interest in tetrapod origins.

@ Greg

Almost all of the placentals are primates. There are a number of monkeys (Panamacebus, Archicebus, Perupithecus), but also some stem apes (Rukwapithecus, Nsungwepithecus, Danuvius, Pliobates), stem anthropoids (Afrotarsius, Talahpithecus, Oligotarsius) and hominins (Australopithecus deyiremeda, Australopithecus sediba, Homo luzonensis).

The non-therian mammaliaforms are a mix. Zhe-Xi Luo and his lab have a tendency to get Chinese Mesozoic mammal skeletons published in Nature/Science, so a lot of them are theirs. There are euharamiydans, multis, eutriconodonts, stem therians, the whole bunch.

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[Gregory Paul]

Blame Dr Bob. Or credit him. Of course his mentor Ostrom played an important role (Deinonychus, birds are dinos, cannot use polar dinosaurs as warm climate indicators cause they might have been endotherms). 

GSPaul

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[Gregory Paul]

Interesting. 

GSPaul

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[Thomas Yazbek]

The teleost family tree is gigantic and has gone through some huge revisions after molecular studies. You'd think that'd cause a rush to test those hypotheses with the fossil record...probably people are doing it, but you won't hear much about it. I'm ignorant of it and I don't understand the literature.

Neontologically, it makes very little difference how monophyletic Perciformes is, besides causing nomenclatural headaches. Fossil crown teleosts aren't seen as that exciting, although the fossil trade loves them bc they are often beautifully preserved in Lagerstatten. It's a shame, because it'd be nice to know how far back many speciose modern groups like catfish or gobies go. The molecular clock estimates do not match observed fossils.

TY

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[Russell Engelman]

@ Thomas

Isn't there actual debate as to whether catfish are a truly distinct group or if they're nested within Characiformes? That sounds wild.

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[Bryan Gee]

Hi all,

I will just hop in with my two cents since my pet project is making the rounds. First, I should mention for those not on Bluesky who can't see my post that this isn't (wasn't?) really intended to be a research project aimed at being published - it was just prompted by a tweet from Davey Wright about charismatic taxa having a lower entry bar to prestigious journals and that the description of a single species is not of broad paleobiological significance (his words, not mine) and then a reply to his tweet that someone should see what clades show up most often in new species descriptions. All things considered, it didn't take too much time, and I am mostly just showing data, not trying to make too much of it (there are a lot of confounds, including our favorite, low sample size, that make hypothesis testing hard around bibliometric/scientometric analyses). It is an interesting subset of a broader question around how paleontologists publish though, and there is a lot of interest, so maybe I will continue working on this in my free time. I now have data back through 2000 for Nature/Science, which will I will probably put up on GitHub and post about again on Bluesky later this week (with the numbers on which individual paleontologists are authoring these papers the most often), as well as data for Current Bio back through 2006, for JVP through 2020 (that's already on GitHub), and Palaeontology through 2010.

Second, I would urge caution with the finer-grained parts of the taxonomy that I mostly raked from the PBDB. I only really intended to be looking at clades at a high-level like dinosaurs and mammals, which is why the categories in the graph shared by Chris (spell my name right, man!) are definitely not hewing to Linnean ranks nor are they equivalent to each other (sorry protostomes). 'Fish (misc.)', for example, is any vertebrate that isn't a tetrapod and that wasn't subsequently categorized as an actinopt or a chondrichthyan, so it can include things as disparate as lungfish and the most tetrapod-ish tetrapodomorph. Part of the coarseness was to get around the fact that at least some of these taxa have disputed placement (e.g., on the stem vs. in the crown; a lot of the Chinese Mesozoic mammalian/mammaliaform taxa are sort of in that part of the tree). The other is that I don't really have a high opinion of the PBDB for either quality or completeness (I had to manually input rank information for some fairly high-profile taxa like Mirasaura and the Discokeryx that Russell mentioned earlier), but as I noted in the README, I wanted a relatively complete and standardized source of taxonomic information, for which probably the only other real alternative is Wikipedia/Wikidata, which I also have middling opinions of as far as taxonomy goes (I contribute to both the PBDB and Wikipedia, mostly by cleaning up other people's bad entries).  The PBDB is reliable for things like whether something is an archosaur or not, but all the unranked clades and inconsistent attention to maintaining PBDB data contribute to a lot of heterogeneity. Because amniotes, let alone mammals and dinosaurs, are not my actual research forte, I didn't want to end up reading 30 papers just to figure out whether the taxonomy from the original naming paper has held / reached consensus / what to do if it's not at consensus. As some of you know, I have a completely different day job, so I can only work on this when I have free time, and, nothing against mammals, don't really want to spend too much of that reading about mammals.

Again, this is not (yet) a research project with the goal of publishing an article, but it seems to be interesting to many people. Suggestions for improvements are always welcome - Russell made a good point about not seeing which of these categories each taxon went into; I will add that to the output file in the next iteration (and will probably be updating these custom categories and making the graphs better). If you use GitHub, you can post any bugs or requests in GitHub Issues, but no promises that I'll get to it soon!

-Bryan

[Thomas Yazbek]

I haven't heard about that, but it's possible. The Siluriformes & Gymnotiformes are usually considered sister groups, and together are sister to Characiformes. Probably this group has origins in South America in the Cretaceous, but the question of how they got there is unanswered...Both the Cypriniformes and the characiphysian orders are not native to Africa but only there do they coexist.

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[Gregory Paul]

Some ideas --

Unite nonavian dinosaurs into one. 

Take primates out of placentals because we primates are obsessed with our group and prone to emphasize study of them. 

Doing those two things will make the mammal versus dinosaur chase more comparable. 

Paleomammalogists do have the advantage of a much larger sample of Cenozoic fossil remains to tap into. 

GSPaul

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.

[Thomas Yazbek]

It's good that somebody is at least doing some back-of-the-napkin analysis on who's publishing about what. I think it's wise to try and see where and why the imbalances are. I think for the last 30-ish years maybe there's been sort of an unquestioned assumption that dinosaurs/protobirds should have equal footing with the mammals/protomammals (unquestionably the stars of paleontology during the middle 20th century), but maybe we need to step back and see whether this is hurting compelling work on other taxa. I don't think you can excise the human impulse to be most interested in ourselves (i.e. primates) and animals that we have close contact/positive identification with (other endothermic vertebrates). But there's a lot we don't know about the origins of some of the most speciose and successful taxa, like insects, ray-finned fishes, or lissamphibians. Or many plant groups for that matter. In terms of paleo, my impression is that the gulf in research attention between neontology+modern diversity and paleontology is particularly yawning with the teleosts and the insects. I don't have numbers to back me up though, so correct me if that's wrong.

TY

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[Thomas Yazbek]

Probably also a good idea to reduce the number of nebulous 'non-' categories, or at least rename them so that the chart looks less ugly. Maybe just get more specific - separate out lissamphibians, squamates, testudines, 'euryapsids' from the reptile/amphibian categories, use some more specific invert groups like lophotrochozoans, coelenterates, etc. (I am using outdated terms on purpose here since they still have utility as shorthand). It would be nice to get a more detailed picture.

I agree strongly about the primate thing. Not sure if research on plesiadapiforms or prosimians should be different from research on australopthecines, but I would err on the side of lumping them together.

TY

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[Milo Gaillard]

I’d credit Baker and Ostrom. Those two were probably the most important figures in increasing the research interest in dinosaurs. Of course, even though I haven’t read your 1987 book (PDotW), I did hear that it helped quite a bit in that. In the decades prior, dinosaurs were seen as stupid, sluggish, cold-blooded, savage evolutionary failures. Dead ends, that were supposedly inferior to the “superior” mammals.

I’ve said this many times before, but it really does say something how humans (the only animals who claimed that mammals were so “superior” to every other major clade) are mammals themselves.

In fact, read these parts from Mark Witton's King Tyrant book. Tyrannosaurus as a “dark, savage, imitation of humanity?” I was surprised that many people were self-centered enough to believe that.

Just felt like saying all of that. That’s all.

-Milo

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 2, 2026, at 14:03, 'Gregory Paul' via Dinosaur Mailing Group <DinosaurMa...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



Blame Dr Bob. Or credit him. Of course his mentor Ostrom played an important role (Deinonychus, birds are dinos, cannot use polar dinosaurs as warm climate indicators cause they might have been endotherms). 

GSPaul

On Monday, March 2, 2026 at 04:58:11 PM EST, Thomas Yazbek <yazbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

Some think multituberculates belong there. Otherwise, things like docodonts, morganucodonts, haramiyids, symmetrodonts, triconodonts...

The Dinosaur Renaissance really changed paleo. 

Thomas Yazbeck

On Mon, Mar 2, 2026, 4:49 PM 'Gregory Paul' via Dinosaur Mailing Group <DinosaurMa...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Interesting. 

I do note that the Mesozoic dinosaur total would be higher with saurischians and ornithischians combined as seems logical. 

As for placentals, does that include early humans? And how many of them are described in Nat/Sci? 

What are all those non-therian mammaliaforms? 

On Monday, March 2, 2026 at 04:02:18 PM EST, Christopher Griffin <ctg...@vt.edu> wrote:

Given this discussion, it may be of interest that Brian Gee investigated what new species have been published in Nature and Science by clade/grade between 2010 and 2026. 

It seems placentals and early mammaliaforms win out, followed by arthropods. Non-avian saurischians are fourth, and it appears birds and fish are tied for fifth.

Bluesky thread: https://bsky.app/profile/koskinonodon.bsky.social/post/3mfu42dyk3c2k

Github: https://github.com/bryanmgee/new-taxa-in-fancy-journals

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[Thomas Yazbek]

Well, humans are superior. The thing a lot of scientists & science fans do where they say "humans are just another animal! we're insignificant!" always bugs me, because it's clear that we are special. Maybe it helps some people be better stewards of the planet, but even Darwin would admit man's supreme power over the world and solitude as the only creature that can "think". Maybe when we locate intelligent alien life, we can justify this self-deprecation. My money is on that never occurring.

I do think we *can* have a debate about whether non-human mammals or birds are "better"...while there are mammal superstars like apes, elephants, or dolphins, the birds are quite intelligent too, more speciose, volant, and energetically efficient. No mammals except us can talk, but birds can. 

Re: dino renaissance - I would say that the recognition of birds as evolving from theropods had to be behind the surge in research. Endothermy is secondary to that, but still also a big research avenue. Theropod research dwarfs sauropod/ornithischian work and I doubt that's just because of how cool T.rex is.

What was nice about when the Renaissance happened was the great improvement in techniques & interdisciplinary work. With computers, you could start doing stuff like biomechanics, CT scanning of fossils, computational phylogenetics, etc. I think that's an underappreciated topic - by bringing in other disciplines, it helps keep paleo more relevant, and provides a "fun" demonstration of physics, computing, or whatever discipline is involved. So, I think the technical limitations for demonstrating dinosaur dynamism mattered as much as the cultural or conceptual ones. It also took a while for important subfields like ecology or plate tectonics to emerge, which I think are prerequisites for Bakker's ideas in particular.

Thomas 

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[Dawid Mazurek]

Well, it is the elephants that are superior:

- it's clear that they are special

- they have features no other organism have

- they communicate in ways humans can't

- they are more speciose than humans

- in the category of trunk length, humans have no chances

[Thomas Yazbek]

They also don't have a social structure conducive to civilization-building...male elephants go into musth, and live on their own. Humans are successful because many distantly-related adult males can live and work together without too many issues. E.O. Wilson compared us to ants, with their sterile armies of workers, but I think the self-domestication metaphor is maybe more explanatory for human behavior.

TY

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[Dawid Mazurek]

In the category of social structure, hard to compare ants and humans, as ants are clearly by far superior. As they are in the category of number of individuals. Biomass too, methinks.

Dawid

[Alexandre Guillaume]

Talking about ants, everyone should read Of Ants and Dinosaurs of Liu Cixin (the author of The Three-Body Problem). It may interest you and can resonate with the current discussion actually (the philosophical part, not the "which group is more published in Nature/Science" part).

Alex

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[Thomas Yazbek]

This old 'joke' isn't very funny. I have an actual, serious problem with scientists and science fanboys who think humans are 'just another animal' without any irony. It's certainly a very old idea in world religions (esp. those originating in India) that modern people are just one link in the chain...but modern science doesn't come from those traditions. I don't think we need to demoralize humanity into trying to protect or understand nature by belittling the rich uniqueness and power of our species. 

Certainly this canard is completely ignored in developing countries who are currently stripping nature bare to make space for their growing populations (although this stage might be coming to an end as birth rates crash). The last thing you want to say to people who are finally beating nature's curses in Africa is that their lives are worth only as much as a bug's.

Trust me, I know all about animal superlatives. None of them have minds or language. None of their (individual) lives have as much value as that of the wickedest men - that is the basis of humanism, as I see it. 

I'm not sure how much science popularizers are pushing the 'insignificant humans' message these days, but I think in an age when AI threatens our own sense of usefulness and identity, it might be wise to pivot to reminding people of their value and uniqueness.

TY

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[Mickey Mortimer]

This has gotten extremely off topic, but the push-back to your claim of human "superiority", Thomas, is the subjectivity of that term. No one's arguing humans aren't powerful or unique among Earth organisms, but superiority has a moral quality that you can't just claim as fact. As does the worth of a life. Maybe I think (and I do) that a morally innocent e.g. cat's life has more value than a human's life who has knowingly and deliberately committed acts I would define as evil. Can't say I'm factually wrong about that unless you have an objective value-o-meter. Similarly, obviously humans have more capacity to shape our universe than any other Earth organism, and far more capacity to do so purposefully, but is that "better" than any other feature like the aforementioned trunk or biomass? Good luck proving it objectively. I will however partially agree with you that this capacity means humans are clearly not insignificant on a planetary scale, but again importance is not superiority.

Mickey Mortimer

[Thomas Yazbek]

I agree it's dangerously off topic, but I'll cap it off by stating that, as a maximal Darwinist, I simply have to be a chauvinist for my own species. If there's any objective meaning of life, it's very likely reproduction is a huge part, or all, of it. The gene is very selfish. So, to me, there is no question of how much better or worse we are than other species; I *know* we are "best". You don't have to think that way, and non-reproduction does apparently come with fair compensation in our societies, if you seek it, but I don't see any reason to put nonhumans ahead of ourselves.

Maybe if other *Homo* species were still around, I'd change my mind...IDK. Consciousness right now has a sample size of 1. Mostly, I just am tired of people talking about which critters "mog" us (search that one on Urban Dictionary, I'm younger than most of you). It's just a demoralizing nihilist argument, like reminding somebody that one day Earth will be destroyed by the Sun's red giant phase, or the heat death of the universe. We should not let it taint our fascination with deep time and evolution; we should feel lucky to study alongside fellow researchers who feel that evolution has a pro-human teleology. I don't know if I agree with them, but it's one path around the nihilism.

(If the debate has to get kiboshed here, I apologize, and anybody who wishes to continue it should not reply to DMG.)

TY

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[Dawid Mazurek]

In biology, this is obviously a false statement.

Dawid

[Milo Gaillard]

I think Mickey here is on point.

-Milo

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 4, 2026, at 05:24, Mickey Mortimer <therizino...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Paul Penkalski]

You can't drop a bomb like that and then say "But don't reply to the list". Do you honestly look at certain world leaders and think, "We're the best"..?! Their actions and the actions of many others show that humans are simply army ants. A lot is made of the role of altruism in shaping human evolution, but it's only been one factor, as it has with some other species too.

We got to chatting about this at dinner once--humans wiping out other species and so forth--and my brother-in-law, a religious guy, had this to say:  "One human life is worth more than all the gorillas in Africa". I practically spat out my food at that.

Are you sure that blue whales don't have minds? They don't have the hands needed to build a civilisation, but they might have minds. Have you ever looked into the eye of a whale? Do elephants think..? My guess is they do. Most mammals and maybe some birds have at least a rudimentary ability to think, i.e. to consider and then choose. And many people lack it, or they've lost their ability to keep an open mind.

Did dinosaurs think? That would be difficult to study.

[Gregory Paul]

The general consensus these days is that animals do and had a degree of consciousness and self awareness. Sort of like if a human grew up isolated and never knew about or learned a language. And with limited ability to anticipate and plan for the future long term. There was a recent Scientific American article on this. 

This is unlike the past when it was supposed to be assumed that animals are automatons unless shown otherwise. This was the once dominant Skinnerian view in which it was thought that since we cannot tell if other beings are conscious we should assume they do not. This got converted into a belief that was supposed to be scientific. My first college biology professor something along these lines. Was in part a response to the aren't they so cute Disney nature flicks including the 1950s docs we all watched in school anthropomorphizing the animals.

The lead person in breaking the belief was Jane Goodall. Leakey picked her because she was not a degreed biologist with their preconceived ideas of the era. It was obvious to JG that the chimps were thinking things through, and she became such a big force in the field that she began to break things down. She and others also noted that since we descended from apes rather than A&E, our minds should be an evolutionary development rather than a super special thing. Maybe Disney was not so far off. Nowadays with AI it's all up for grabs. 

Presumably dinosaurs had levels of thinking broadly similar to reptiles and some birds. Tom H has published on recent discourses on this of late. 

GSPaul

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.

[Thomas Yazbek]

Sorry. If you read what I wrote, my meaning was that Ben C. might squash the discussion, not that I didn't want to continue it.

Anyways,

I agree 100% with your brother-in-law. I don't think many humans actually agree with *you*. That level of concern for animals is quite rare in most premodern philosophical systems. However, there's nothing wrong with armed rangers shooting gorilla poachers.

TY

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[Thomas Richard Holtz]

Greetings,

Yes, I was part of a series of papers and response papers on dinosaurian cognition in recent years. The latest part is https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.70113 and you can use the citations on this to work back to the earlier parts.

Broadly speaking, the study of sauropsid cognition is still in its infancy (compared to mammal and bird behavioral studies), but we see that modern squamates, turtles, and crocs are more sophisticated than once people thought. That doesn't mean they could do differential equations off the top of their heads, but they weren't just automata (as Greg notes people once thought applied to all animals.)

Non-avian dinosaurs minimally would be expected to have the cognitive capability of extant sauropsids, with the more derived maniraptorans grading into the cognitive level of the least intelligent modern birds. (No reason to suspect they were as brainy as psittaciforms or corvids, which scale differently than the rest of modern birds in most measures of braininess).

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[Thomas Yazbek]

The key word is "a degree". There are myriad cognitive tests that apes fail or do surprisingly poorly at, while other less man-like species ace them. Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape described it well, I think, when he described humans as apes with canid-like cooperative psychology grafted on. 

but we still don't know what exactly dogs are thinking, and even how much conscious control they have over vocalization (are barks actually communication?). It's hard for me to imagine what thinking is like without language or an internal monologue. But animals seem to dream so perhaps their "mind's eye" sees things; perhaps an alert dog barking at imagined or real squirrels outside is seeing them in his mind.

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[Raven the troodontid]

I personally find the response from Paul P. to their brother-in-law reasonable. Being the minority does not invalidate an opinion presented to be an opinion.

I also want to respond to Thomas Y. that, in my opinion, being a “maximal Darwinist” while enjoying “pro-human teleology” do seem contradictory in the context of modern evolutionary biology.

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[Stephen Poropat]

If, by your “logic”, it’s ok for a gorilla poacher to be shot at for being a gorilla poacher, then clearly they are either not human (in your judgment), or their one human life isn’t worth more than that of the gorillas. 

Dr Stephen F. Poropat

Deputy Director

Western Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre

School of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Curtin University

Bentley, Western Australia

Australia 6102

https://stephenporopat.weebly.com/

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[Gregory Paul]

This issue does have a paleo connection, in that when Richard Leakey became head of the Kenya wildlife service he issued a shoot and kill policy against poachers, which effectively ranked threatened elephants and rhinos above humans conducting illegal activities in value. It was very controversial and probably could not be done today. I did work fairly well. 

GSPaul

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[Paul Penkalski]

Yes, good point. I had noticed that. It is difficult to put a value on any life, but there are roughly 25,000 humans for every gorilla in Africa--or 10 million humans for every mountain gorilla, so I would tend to agree that there's nothing wrong with armed rangers shooting poachers.

You're also right that most humans probably don't agree with me. Witness the average diet almost anywhere in the world. In some places it's whatever you can catch. You go to a market in Nigeria or Cameroon and you'll find bush meat. Anything you can imagine--elephant, monkey, chimp, bat, snake, etc.--whole animals or already filleted for you. Some is unidentifiable, so you ask what kind of meat it is, and the answer is "meat meat". Sometimes they don't even know.

Just cook it well. Of course, you can pick up some very nasty nematodes and toxins from certain vegetables too. What you should not do is look up how chicken is processed. You might be inclined to skip the "dinosaur meat" at the next SVP banquet.

[Ben Creisler]

Ben Creisler

bcre...@gmail.com

A new The Conversation article by Paul Sereno:

Paleontologists uncover a new Spinosaurus species by following a clue from a decades‑old book into the Sahara Desert by Paul Sereno

https://theconversation.com/paleontologists-uncover-a-new-spinosaurus-species-by-following-a-clue-from-a-decades-old-book-into-the-sahara-desert-274182

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 11:33 AM Ben Creisler <bcre...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ben Creisler

bcre...@gmail.com

A new paper:

Spinosaurus mirabilis sp. nov.

Paul C. Sereno, Daniel Vidal, Nathan P. Myhrvold, Evan Johnson-Ransom, María Ciudad Real, Stephanie L. Baumgart, Noelia Sánchez Fontela, Todd L. Green, Evan T. Saitta, Boubé Adamou, Lauren L. Bop, Tyler M. Keillor, Erin C. Fitzgerald, Didier B. Dutheil, Robert A. S. Laroche, Alexandre V. Demers-Potvin, Álvaro Simarro, Francesc Gascó-Lluna, Ana Lázaro, Arturo Gamonal, Charles V. Beightol, Vincent Reneleau, Rachel Vautrin, Filippo Bertozzo, Alejandro Granados, Grace Kinney-Broderick, Jordan C. Mallon, Rafael M. Lindoso, and Jahandar Ramezani (2026)
Scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation.
Science 391(6787): eadx5486
DOI:10.1126/science.adx5486
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx5486

Editor’s summary

Recent descriptions of and debates about the massive, fish-eating dinosaur Spinosaurus have brought this striking predator to the forefront of the dinosaur pantheon. Its huge size and distinctive morphology have stimulated much debate about the degree to which it lived an aquatic lifestyle. Sereno et al. describe a crested fossil Spinosaurus found in northern Africa as a new species. The researchers argue that this group of dinosaurs underwent three phases of evolution with increasing aquatic adaptations and existence in habitats around the Tethys Sea. —Sacha Vignieri

Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The fossils of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, a giant sail-backed, fish-eating theropod dinosaur from northern Africa, have inspired competing lifestyle interpretations, either as a semiaquatic ambush predator stalking shorelines and shallows or a fully aquatic predator in pursuit of prey underwater. Its bones and teeth have been found only in coastal deposits near marine margins, a locale potentially consistent with either lifestyle interpretation.

RATIONALE

In the central Sahara, a new fossiliferous area (Jenguebi) was discovered in beds equivalent in age [Farak Formation; Cenomanian ~95 million years ago (Mya)] to those yielding fossil remains of S. aegyptiacus. We describe from this area a new species, Spinosaurus mirabilis sp. nov., which is very similar to S. aegyptiacus in skeletal form but with a much taller, scimitar-shaped cranial crest. Two new sauropods were found in close association with the new spinosaurid buried in fluvial sediments indicative of an inland riparian habitat.

RESULTS

S. mirabilis sp. nov. is distinguished by the low profile of its snout, a hypertrophied nasal-prefrontal crest, greater spacing of posterior maxillary teeth, and other features. Its features highlight the extraordinary specializations of both species of the genus Spinosaurus, including interdigitating upper and lower teeth. Principal component analysis of body proportions places spinosaurids between semiaquatic waders (e.g., herons) and aquatic divers (e.g., darters) distant from all other predatory dinosaurs. A time-calibrated phylogenetic analysis resolves three evolutionary phases: an initial Jurassic radiation when their distinctive elongate fish-snaring skull evolved and split into two distinctive designs, baryonychine and spinosaurine; an Early Cretaceous circum-Tethyan diversification when both reigned as dominant predators; and a final early Late Cretaceous phase when spinosaurines attained maximum body size as shallow water ambush specialists limited geographically to northern Africa and South America.

CONCLUSION

The discovery of the tall-crested S. mirabilis sp. nov. in a riparian setting within an inland basin supports a lifestyle interpretation of a wading, shoreline predator with visual display an important aspect of its biology. At the end of the Cenomanian about 95 million years ago, an abrupt eustatic rise in sea level and the attendant climate change brought the spinosaurid radiation to an end.

*****
News:

https://www.sci.news/paleontology/spinosaurus-mirabilis-14571.html

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-scimitar-crested-spinosaurus-species-central.html

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/spinosaurus-scimitar-head-crest

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/newly-discovered-horned-dinosaur-was-like-a-unicorn-from-hell/

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/new-dinosaur-discovered-sahara-spinosaurus-mirabilis

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/dinosaurs/spinosaurus-mirabilis