Re: ;(Long) Paleontologist and artist (or worst, editorial policy)

[Silvio Renesto <renesto@mailserver.unimi.it>]

At 13.33 11/12/01 -0800, you wrote:

> I've a sort of burning question.
>
> I was just talking to someone about this and wonder if some paleontologist
> really care about it? Are they more interested in the skeletons and not the
> outlook of them?

Being very sensible  to the subject of divulgation , I wish to share some 
opinions, in the hope to be not boring neither offensive. It is long, so 
those who are not interested may delete it  before reading.
Obviously there are  excellent books in which you find good quality both in 
the text and in the artwork (and many of them have been presented and 
discussed in this list) but to have this high quality you must put together 
good authors AND good artists. If you are a publisher you must  pay for 
what you get.
The desire to save money or to be quick in publishing sometimes may lead to 
bad products:
In my experience I have met both cases: A) well written books with bad 
artwork and B) well illustrated books with horrible text (and I must admit, 
there is C where you find awful text with horrible artwork! but This is not 
on the point here):
Experience tells me that in A the authors are usually renowned paleo-guys 
but the illustrations are crap picked out from  the publisher archives to 
save money. In B artwork has been purchased  from good paleoartists or at 
least accurate ones,  but the text has been written by people with a vague, 
if any, affinity with the subject . A reason for B is that, since the 
illustrations were expensive, the text has been commissioned to the first 
one  who was just able to keep a pen in his hands (or put fingers on a 
keyboard)  for near to nothing.
Unfortunately, it is not love (for science, divulgation or knowledge in 
this case) which moves the World, but money. I AM NOT STATING  that ALL 
editors work in this way, but l say that there are  SOME, HOPEFULLY FEW, 
that work under  these economical constraints.
I remember a 1990 small ,colour-illustrated, semi-popular book : the author 
was a renowned vertebrate paleontologist . Not only some artwork,  but also 
diagrams (e. g.:  in the pattern of the archosaur tarsi,  the AM Advanced 
Mesotarsal joint, is figured with the line of flexion between the 
astragalus-calcaneun AND the crus, thus breaking the ascending process of 
the astragalus at every step)  and some specimens figured in photos were 
wrongly identified  (e. g. : a skeleton of a Jurassic Pleurosaurus is 
labeleled as a Triassic Askeptosaurus, and a skeleton of  a 
?placodont-like  Helveticosaurus is labeled as the large nothosaur 
Ceresiosaurus ....). Once, I met the author and  eventually asked him about 
these gross mistakes and he replied to me:
Sorry, but I was not involved in editing, I was simply asked to sit at my 
computer writing the text, then everything was in the hands of the 
editorial staff.
That's (almost) all,  folks


                                        Silvio  Renesto



_
"The Wise Man is like a bamboo tree;
                simple, upright, and useful, but hollow inside"

                                                Lao Tzu

Silvio Renesto

Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra
Università degli Studi di Milano
Via Mangiagalli 34
I 20133 Milano
Italy
phone +39-02-58355511
fax     +39-02-58355494

e-mail:  renesto@mailserver.unimi.it
        Silvio.Renesto@unimi.it
have a look at our Triassic  website at
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