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Squizzle posted:actually im a pale epistemologist Let us journey into a magical portal to the world of David Peters, paleoartist, amateur paleontologist, and lord high captain supreme of Dunningkrugerland. The most insane things have been highlighted for your pleasure. Darren Naish posted:Stage 1. Starting in 1995, Dave began publishing arguments and hypotheses in the technical literature. He started with a brief letter in Nature (Peters 1995) where he suggested that previous authors (Unwin & Bakhurina 1994) had erred in their interpretation of a particular pterosaur’s wing membranes (that particular pterosaur was Sordes pilosus, a small, long-tailed form from Kazakhstan). What happened in that 1995 article set the course for everything that was to follow: Dave looked at published photos of the pterosaur concerned, thought he could see something that the original authors (and everyone else who’d looked at the actual fossil) had missed, and based his whole argument on the re-imagining of an image (Peters 1995). In their response to Dave’s article, Unwin & Bakhurina (1995) noted that “Peters’… reconstruction… is based on a highly unreliable technique, interpretation of photographs” (p. 316). Darren Naish posted:Stage 3. The Longisquama holotype consists of the front half of the animal, preserved on a slab of matrix. It seems that the adjacent chunks of matrix are known, but they’ve rarely been figured in the literature. By using a special photo-tracing technique [read on] on both the front half of the specimen, and on the additional segments of matrix, Dave claimed some time round about 2003 that he (and everyone else) had previously understated the weirdness of Longisquama. He claimed to find the whole back end of the animal – the hips, the hindlimbs, the tail, and a whole bunch of additional, giant appendages. And hitherto-overlooked baby specimens of Longisquama were preserved on the slabs as well. Darren Naish posted:[...]What I’m getting at here is that people who come along and properly instigate paradigm shifts or convincingly overturn long-held models are exceptional, and either incredibly gifted, incredibly lucky, incredibly hard-working, or incredibly rich… or some or all of the above. Darren Naish posted:[...]In additional to this phylogenetic re-shuffling, and in addition to those many new details of anatomy that he claims he’s discovered (more on that in a moment), Dave also thinks that he’s discovered some crucial new stuff about the biology and behaviour of pterosaurs and other fossil tetrapods. Using the digital tracing technique, he claims to have discovered flightless pterosaurs, vampiric pterosaurs that bit dinosaurs, widespread evidence of super-narrow wing membranes, and even prey items (like insects) preserved within the mouths of some animals. Pterosaurs have generally been assumed to be egg-layers, an inference based mostly on their hypothesised position among archosaurs. Recent finds of baby pterosaurs preserved within eggs (Chiappe et al. 2004, Ji et al. 2004, Wang & Zhou 2004), and of an egg preserved right next to the pelvis of a particular pterosaur specimen (Lü et al. 2011), provide compelling support for that assumption. Darren Naish posted:Dave thinks that a number of small pterosaur specimens – interpreted by everyone else as juveniles of Pterodactylus and other taxa – are actually miniature adults. His interpretations are dependent on his digital tracing technique, and on the incorporation of the characters he finds via digital tracing into his phylogenetic analyses. Given that he interprets these tiny animals as adults, and given that he contends that growth in pterosaurs was isometric, he proposes that the babies of these miniature pterosaurs were less than 10 mm long. Yes, less than 10 mm long. Darren Naish posted:[...]Dave is a bit of a contradiction on this front. He’s thrown a million radically strange new discoveries out there at a phenomenally rapid pace, and indeed the rate at which his ‘discoveries’ occur is unprecedented. Dave proclaims frequently that he changes his ideas when he’s wrong, and indeed he invites others to test his claims. So far so good. But, when others don’t see what he sees, when they criticise his interpretations and his methods, he remains steadfast in his opinion that they’re wrong because they’re biased, because they’re refusing to use the same method that he does (read on), or because they can’t provide a superior hypothesis. For more david peters, simply google 'david peters pterosaurs' for articles outlining why he's insane, (and sometimes him leaving plaintive comments on other people's papers asking why his incredibly important research hasn't been used as their foundation). Often he will show up in the comments to personally explain how incredibly unowned he is, and also that btw he's being 'blackwashed' by Big Paleo. You can also find him on his blog, the pterosaur heresies, where he daily outlines his many important phylogenetic discoveries, each of which overturns decades if not centuries of work by blinkered and ignorant fools, like that toothed and baleen whales descend from completely separate groups of mammals and toothed whales specifically evolved from tenrecs. Alternatively, if you'd like to see crazy people with too much time on their hands that don't bother with even faux-humility, you can look up John V. Jackson, aka 'strangetruther', who randomly erupts across the internet whenever someone dares contradict his completely sane and absolutely accurate self-published science, with coherent arguments like John V. Jackson posted:Yeah... only I covered this in my book published 4 years ago: "The Secret Dinobird Story". I notice my name doesn't appear in this blog page so you've managed to find a reason to airbrush the person who has made the greatest contribution to the understanding of Drepanosaurs. John V. Jackson posted:Silvio may have mentioned gliding for drepanosaurs in 2010 but I'd already covered the idea pretty expansively on either the vertpaleo list or the palaeo list over five years earlier, both of which Silvio subscribed and posted to, and, on the one I'm referring to, actually on the subject of drepanosaurs and at the time of my posting.
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Apr 6, 2020 16:50
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Bilirubin posted:Oh God what are you doing you will summon him that way
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Apr 6, 2020 18:58
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