Some professional advice to armchair paleontologists and taxonomists

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

Greetings,

I hope the following is taken in the spirit that it is intended: that is, to
encourage enthusiastic individuals to redirect their energies into
potentially more productive ways.

First, an allegory:
Picture, if you will, an astronomy mailing list.  Picture a whole bunch of
intelligent, interested individuals who want to participate.  Picture some
of them posting their plans to reorganize all of the classification of stars
within constellations and within stellar classes.  Picture them doing so
without ever looking through a telescope or without every going to the
Astronomy section of a university library to look at the archived
photographs and research papers.  Picture them basing their classification
schemes almost exclusively on the general text descriptions of positions and
colors of stars posted by other people on the list, most of whom have also
never looked through a telescope or consulted the primary literature.

Now picture them expecting that astronomers and the general public should
take them seriously.

Okay, then.  Got the picture?

Do you have to have a degree to do paleontology?  Absolutely not.  Plenty of
excellent work has been done by non-Ph.D.s, or even non-Bachelors.

Must *all* research be done only on primary specimens?  No (although it
always helps to see the real thing!).  However, debating on whether a
certain structure is present or absent in a particular specimen, species, or
higher taxon is rather problematic if the person/people debating could not
pick that structure out of a line up, wouldn't you think?

Should people not post their ideas?  Obviously not.  Healthy speculation is
great.  However, if you are going to pretend that you are acting within the
realm of Science, prepare for some cherished speculations to go down in
flames when held up to the light of scrutiny.  As they say in "Young
Frankenstein", "If Science teaches us anything, it teaches us to accept our
failures, as well as our successes, with quiet dignity and grace....".  (And
of course we all react the same way as does Gene Wilder when the failures
come, but we're only human).

Anyone who holds onto an idea simply because it "feels right" or that they
"can't imagine any other way it could happen" should consider the following:
        *Say something "feels right" to you, but "feels wrong" to me.  Which 
should
a third party choose?  And since when was Nature constrained by our feelings
about it?
        *Say you "can't imagine any other way it could happen", but I can?  What
should a third party consider?  And do our two ideas comprise the whole of
the possibilities for the situation?

P.S. For the therizinosauroid fans out there: be warned that some rather
important new material is on its way to being published, hopefully within
2002.  Actually, 2002 (and early 2003) should be a very, very good year for
theropods large, medium, and small...

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796