I won a thing! From someone I admire!

It is a measure of how scattershot our blogging is that we haven’t mentioned Adam Mastroianni or his blog Experimental History before now. Mike and I enjoy a lot of freedom from institutional oversight of our research and publishing, and we do make some use of it. We like to try new publication outlets — we published the first paleo papers in Qeios, Academia Letters, and, most notably and satisfyingly, PeerJ — and we occasionally like to imagine a world of scientific inquiry that was less encumbered by the cruft of bureaucracy, tradition, peer review, the perversion of impact factors, and the deliberate roadblocks thrown up by barrier-based publishers.

Mike and I both admire Adam Mastroianni because he just went and freakin’ did it. Quit his academic job to live off his Substack subscriptions, published a paper by posting it freely to the web (along with the supporting data [and yes, I know he’s not the first to do this; it’s still cool]), and not only envisioned a new way of doing science (Science House!), but actually implemented it.

Oh, and we also admire him because he thinks interesting thoughts and his writing style is right up our alley — light-but-direct, conversational, self-deprecating, insightful, and often wickedly funny. He makes it look easy, which is virtually always the visible result of a lot of hard work. (Unfortunately, it is also possible to work hard without making anything look easy.)

Lest you think I’m ladling on the compliments because of what’s coming up, I’ve probably made a nuisance of myself among my close friends and colleagues by forwarding Adam’s posts a LOT this past year. I’m now having conversations with friends of the form, “Have I sent you anything by Adam Mastroia-” “YES.”

ANYWAY, earlier this summer Adam announced a blog-writing contest, for the lovely purpose of helping him find new reading material. That announcement led to the following exchange.

Matt: Thinking this might be the prod I need to finish “We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon”.

Mike: That’s a good call. Maybe a bit TOO obviously Mastroianni-bait?

Matt (somewhat later): Apparently just the right amount of Mastroianni-bait — he just wrote to tell me that post won the contest!

I did make one tiny change from the version submitted on Google Docs and the version posted here — I added a sentence about the new neural canal ridges paper (Atterholt et al. 2024, this post, and this one), a paper which nicely illustrates the thesis of the new anatomy post. It’s all come together very satisfactorily: at SVPCA in 2019, Jessie gave a talk on neural canal ridges, and my talk, which I think came immediately after hers, was about how to make new discoveries in human anatomy. Here we are five years later to the month, and the neural canal ridges paper and the long-in-development blog post about new anatomy are both finally out within a fortnight of each other.

Congratulations to the other winners! I’m looking forward to digging into the spring tide of interesting reading that Adam’s contest aggregated, listening to new voices, and having new thoughts. The excerpts and descriptions in Adam’s reveal post are beyond intriguing — go check ’em out.

And a huge thank you to Adam — for writing Experimental History in the first place, for showing the rest of us that there are alternatives to the Way Things Have Always Been Done (hint: “Always” in that formulation is a much shorter period of time than most people think), for running the contest and introducing so many interesting writers to each other and the world, and, of course, for choosing my entry. The world gives me a lot of positive feedback already, but mostly for the “official” stuff like publishing and teaching. It’s really nice to get recognized for blogging, especially out of such a rich field of entrants.

If anyone’s curious, I’m going to use the prize money to fund my research. I drew out my startup money for a loooong time but it’s finally gone, I don’t have a current grant and applying for grants is a not-fun way to gamble weeks or months I could use to write papers, and the little pot of annual travel and research money from my department only goes so far. The prize money will let me keep finding and reporting on new anatomy. Probably mostly in sauropods, but who knows — I’m publishing (and blogging!) on freakin’ fish these days, so anything’s possible. Stay tuned! (And welcome, Experimental History readers!)

All right, that’s plenty of navel blogging. Back to the good stuff in the next couple of posts.

Reference

• Atterholt, J., Wedel, M.J., Tykoski, R., Fiorillo, A.R., Holwerda, F., Nalley, T.K., Lepore, T., and Yasmer, J. 2024. Neural canal ridges: a novel osteological correlate of postcranial neuroanatomy in dinosaurs. The Anatomical Record, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.25558

Source: https://svpow.com/2024/09/10/i-won-a-thing-from-someone-i-admire/