Canadian Amber, Fin-Tailed Dinosaurs, and a Despairing Blogger

Science, as a process, promotes an adversarial system. A scientist poses an hypothesis from an observation, then attempts to refute this hypothesis through further observations arrived at from experimentation and testing, and poses a further hypothesis from the results; if it stands, he can make a claim that a thing is, or isn’t. Another scientist comes along and attempts to refute that finding, and so on and so forth. We can presume that scientist A and scientist B are both using the same data or are merely increasing the data used to make observations, and that the same data is included by further authors, thus merely expanding the perspective. But it seems there are adversaries, and there are enemies. Some scientists, against seeming logic, will not even regard the same datasets offered, and use this as refutation of previous datasets or observations. Science, we presume, is not served when workers talk past one another, or make claims that a thing simply is, without any substantiation for why.

Enquilled

It’s kinda of a mystery, and I’m not sure I can solve it, but…

Dinosaurs of the Morrison Had No Lips … or Did They?

Just a minor post. I wanted to present a portion of a larger project on attempting to illustrate typical dinosaurs (especially ornithischians), and I thought “What better method than that well-sampled and intriguing Morrison Formation and its remarkable diversity?” So I started using a minimalistic stippling technique to draw the “busts” of the Morrison paleofauna, focusing on ornithischians. This has the advantage of allowing me to approach well-studied, well-photographed, and decently accessible taxa from the Morrison Formation. This runs into a small problem, that of the composition of the Morrison “fauna,” which is in fact comprised of several temporal (and apparently regional) faunae. To simplify things, I am ignoring all of that.

Ornithischians with “Dinofuzz”

This isn’t really that much of a post — for now. I’m preempting a longer unprepared post on the topic, which will not detail any views I may or may not have on the purpose of filamentous integument in a small group of ornithischians. But that’s what this post will talk about.