My first palaeo paper is 20 years old today!

One of the things that comes up over and over — on this blog, at conferences like DinoCon, on Q&A websites — is how to become a palaeontologist. As I’ve said before (at some length) the way to become a published palaeontologist is to publish papers about palaeontology.

But that’s a very general, broad-stroke recipe, and some details might be interesting. Today is 20th anniversity of my own first published palaeontology paper, and I’m going to say a little bit about how it came about. Maybe there are broader lessons to be learned.

I started reading the old Dinosaur Mailing List (now the Dinosaur Mailing Group) around 2000, and that led me to the published literature.

By 2003 I’d read enough papers to have a sense of what was good and what was not. One day (on a transatlantic flight for my day-job, if memory serves), I read one particular paper that was so obviously flawed, I thought even I could do better. So it was in my mind that writing a paper might not be an unrealistic goal. But I had no particular topic in mind, so the idea just sat quietly in the back of my mind, percolating.

Then, on 6 October 2003, Matt Wedel asked me a fateful question in an email: “Do you know how dino diversity breaks down by clade, i.e. how many genera or spp. each of theropods, sauropodomorphs, and the various  ornithischian groups?” I’m a computer programmer by trade, so my immediate impulse was to write a program to compute this. I replied: “the best I could do would be to download the raw XML data from Mike Keesey’s [now sadly defunct] Dinosauricon web-site and analyse that by clade”.

So I did. Having come that far, there were other obvious analyses to run on the data. That project grew into a paper with all those different analyses of the relevant data, and by the time I was ready to submit it I’d replaced the original data-set with one drawn from Don Glut’s Dinosaurs: The Encyclopaedia and its supplements. (Fiona read the relevant data out to me and I typed it in.) Confident that this paper was going to be my debut, and I sent three double-spaced printed copies off to Acta Palaeontologica Polonica on 24 October 2024. A couple of weeks later I got a letter back in the post telling me it had been rejected without review. (As of 2014, the manuscript of that paper is available as a “preprint”.)

So that crashed and burned. But once I’d got into the process of writing it, I started feeling like the kind of person who wrote papers, so I was open to starting other projects.

In May 2004, I’d started to feel a bit itchy about the way some papers used the name Diplodocoidea and other used Diplodocimorpha, and about the way these two names had several similar-but-not-identical definitions. At this point I had no intention of writing that up, I was just chasing down the definitions for my own interest. There’s an archived copy of the Dinosaur Mailing List thread for those who want the gritty detail.

Among those who weighed in on the thread was Darren Naish, and he and I somehow arrived at the idea that this little nomenclatural question was complex enough, and touched on enough other names, that it was worth writing up. I started a file just called “text” on 3 June, which got promoted to an OpenOffice document on 7 September, shortly before the Leicester SVPCA. On the train to Leicester, I met up with Darren and we went through the manuscript together, figuring out what needing moving around, what was missing, what was redundant, and so on.

When I got home after the conference (where I gave a talk on the diversity work that I thought was still alive), I revised the paper and Darren and I batted versions back and forth for a while. Darren also contributed the illustration above, as I’d not learned to use a graphics editor at this point.

On 10 October, we posted it to the Journal of Paleontology (again as hard copy). It came back in late January (yes, three and a half months later), rejected with, I thought, a couple of fairly harsh reviews.

In my memory, we turned it around pretty quickly for submission elsewhere, but my records show it was actually more than four months before we sent a somewhat revised version to PaleoBios — this time by email, proving that Modern Times began at some point between October 2004 and May 2005.

This time we lucked out on the reviewers[1]: we got Matt (who at that point of course had never published with either Darren or me, so there was no evident conflict of interests), and Jerry Harris (who is the best, most pedantic and constructive of reviewers). The paper was accepted on 5 July, subject to some small changes. We made these, received, read and corrected page proofs, and the paper was published on 15 September 2005 — twenty years ago to the day. You are welcome to read it (Taylor and Naish 2005): PaleoBios was then a print-only paper, but I put the PDF on my own website, as I do with all my papers.

[1] Yes, I do think it’s honest to say that who you get allocated as a reviewer makes a big difference. Neither Matt not Jerry is a pushover — they had their criticisms. But both of them approach the task of review with the primary attitude of, what would make this paper really good? Whereas certain other reviewers see their jobs much more as being gatekeepers.

It’s a short paper — seven pages in total, including a half-page illustration, a full-page table and two pages of references. We didn’t expect it to set the world alight, just to be helpful to a few specialists who wanted certainty about the same nomenclatural issue that had bothered me at the outset. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised: according to Google Scholar it’s been cited 43 times, and it seems still to be slowly but surely racking up the citations. (It is just outside my top ten most-cited papers, by a single point.)

What have we learned?

By the time I came to write the early drafts of what became Taylor and Naish 2005, I had (I now realise) a lot of useful experience behind me:

• I’d learned to write good prose.
• I’d come roughly up to speed with the current state of dinosaur palaeontology, thanks to the Dinosaur Mailing List and the various books I’d read.
• I’d got used to reading the technical literature, and had a feel for what makes a good paper.
• I’d accumulated enough self-confidence to think, heck, why shouldn’t I make a contribution?
• I’d made contact with useful collaborators: not just Darren, who became my co-author, but Matt, who asked me the question that provoked my first submitted paper.
• I’d had the experience of submitting and being rejected, so that when it later happened with the paper in question it wasn’t crushing.
• I’d got interested in a specific, small problem, which I wanted to solve for myself.
• I was part of a community (the DML again) where I could spray questions around and get useful references to relevant literature.

These are all useful things to have on your side, and if you want to be a palaeontologist, I encourage you to find and develop analogous advantages. (Mostly: do a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and plant yourself in a community.)

Then in putting this particular paper together, two more things went my way:

• I got some in-person time with my principal collaborator at just the right time.
• On the second roll of the dice, we got sympathetic reviewers.

You could say I was lucky with these last two things; but then to some extent you make your own good-luck events by keeping on rolling the dice until they come up sixes. Keep rolling the dice.

As we come to the end of a longish post, I hope I’ve demystified the process a bit. What you should take away from all this is that there’s nothing particularly special about me. What I’ve done in the world of palaeontology, others can do. A surprising amount of it comes down to just keeping of doing the work.

References

• Taylor, Michael P., and Darren Naish. 2005. The Phylogenetic Taxonomy of Diplodocoidea (Dinosauria: Sauropoda). PaleoBios 25(2):1-7.

Source: https://svpow.com/2025/09/15/my-first-palaeo-paper-is-20-years-old-today/