Never name a new species of an existing dinosaur genus
January 16, 2026
I’m still making my way through Brian Curtice’s excellent and detailed post on Greg Paul’s (2025) recent erection of a new titanosaur genus (Curtice 2025), but I just want to comment on this one passing thought of Brian’s:
The species tells me where it was found if named by “Old Timers,” the genus almost can do that if named by “New Kids on the Block” as they almost never add species names to existing genera (recent tyrannosaur excepted :-)).
The new kids are right.
You should never[1] name a new species of an existing dinosaur genus. Here’s why. Suppose you have two genera, A and B, which are sister taxa in your phylogeny:
Genus A
/
\
Genus B
Now you discover a new specimen, X, which your phylogenetic analysis says is more closely related to Genus A than than to any other named genus:
Genus A
/
/\
/ Specimen X
\
\
\
Genus B
The smart play is to name it genus X. But suppose you say “Oh, but it’s really quite similar to genus A, it can’t be separated at the genus level”, and you instead name it as a new species, A. x. You go merrily on your way congratulating yourself on not being one of those filthy splitters, and all is well until someone else runs a different phylogenetic analysis with more characters, better taxon sampling, a better weighting algorithm, whatever. And it comes out like this:
Genus A
/
/
/
\ Specimen X
\/
\
Genus B
Now the new author has to say something like “The species x is hereby removed into the genus B yielding the new combination B. x.”
And now your taxon’s name has changed. That’s really bad. The whole purpose of a name is to be a fixed, permanent label that consistently refers to the same thing. But Linnaeus’s terrible mistake, the Linnean binomial, is a “name” that encodes a specific phylogenetic hypothesis, and which implodes when that hypothesis is considered false.
Naming a new species x of a genus A is a nomenclatural enshrining of your phylogenetic hypothethesis that specimen X is more closely related to the genoholotype of genus A than to that of any other genus. It’s a bet that has no upside if you turn out to be right, but makes you look like a dummy if you’re wrong. There is absolutely no need to make such a bet.
Names are for naming things. Phylogenetic analyses are for analysing things. Don’t confuse them. And don’t reify that confusion in nomenclature.,
Note 1. As so often when one writes “never”, we really mean “hardly ever”. I don’t discount the possibility that there may be some very special circumstances when a new species within an existing genus is warranted, but I bet that your example of such a very special circumstance doesn’t qualify.
References
- Curtice, Brian. 2025. Et Tu Ut Te (Titan)? Thoughts on Alamosaurus and more. Fossil Crates, 5. https://www.fossilcrates.com/blogs/news/alamosaurus
- Paul, Gregory S. 2025. Stratigraphic and anatomical evidence for multiple titanosaurid dinosaur taxa in the Late Cretaceous (Campanian-Maastrichtian) of southwestern North America. Geology of the Intermountain West 12:201-220., doi: 10.31711/giw.v12.pp201-220.
Things: The Surprising Power of Stuff That Exists
July 27, 2025
In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form:
[NOUN]
Learn how this amazing [whatsit] allowed the rise of civilization, informs every aspect of our daily lives, and may hold the key to our future.
where the noun in question might be salt or wood or math or clouds or daydreaming or whatever. It’s not enough to write an engaging book on Topic X without somehow, by tortuously overreaching, making it the underpinning of life itself.
If we ever do an SV-POW! book, I’ll be sorely tempted to put on the back cover: “Could understanding diapophyseal laminae improve the health of your spleen? Open this book to find out!”
This cast of a juvenile apatosaur femur really does hold the key to your future: get your eyes back on the dang road!
I say, I say, I say! How many palaeontologists does it take to write a paper? Twenty-four (if it’s in Nature)!
July 16, 2025
Today sees the publication of what is, OK, an interesting paper on how the serrated trailing edge of the flippers of the ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus may have enabled it to generate less turbulence, enhancing its abilities as a stealth predator:
- Lindgren, Johan, Dean R. Lomax, Robert-Zoltán Szász, Miguel Marx, Johan Revstedt, Georg Göltz, Sven Sachs, Randolph G. De La Garza, Miriam Heingård, Martin Jarenmark, Kristina Ydström, Peter Sjövall, Frank Osbæck, Stephen A. Hall, Michiel Op de Beeck, Mats E. Eriksson, Carl Alwmark, Federica Marone, Alexander Liptak, Robert Atwood, Genoveva Burca, Per Uvdal, Per Persson and Dan-Eric Nilsson. 2025. Adaptations for stealth in the wing-like flippers of a large ichthyosaur. Nature, published online 16 July 2025. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09271-w
Lindgren et al. 2025: figure 1. a–c, Photographs of the part section of SSN8DOR11 under polarized (a) and ultraviolet (longpass cut-off 455 nm) (b) light, respectively, together with a diagrammatic representation of the forelimb in planform view (c). Note that the individual blocks have been re-assembled in their original position (the stippled line delineates the end of sediment that has been digitally removed to show underlying bones). Arrow indicates anterior. Extended Data Figs. 1 and 2 depict the counterpart section.
Now this is good interdisciplinary work which would have legitimately required the involvement of several scientists with different specialisms, including morphology, exotic photography techniques, biomechanics and maybe fluid dynamics. I can easily see how it would have four authors, or five or even maybe six.
But, cards on the table, I find it very hard to believe that twenty-four people all made substantial contributions to this paper — substantial enough to be listed as authors.
So what are they all doing there? I can only surmise that the four or five legitimate authors all invited their friends along for the ride, on the basis that “he needs a Nature paper for his postdoc applications”.
And the tragedy of it is, they’re not wrong.
Many universities — most? Maybe even all? — do indeed recruit people to postdocs and permanent positions in part on whether they have a paper in Nature or Science. Even if their role is as seventeenth or eighteenth of twenty-four, and they actually did little or nothing towards the science. I have been told flatly by people in positions of influence that candidates without the Nature or Science stamp are likely to be filtered out of the recruitment process at Step Zero, and never even have their papers read, let alone make it to interview.
And for as long as that is true, it would be negligent of lab leaders not to slip their own grad-students, and any other students they know and like, into the authorship of such a paper if it happens to come their way.
What does this mean for the aspiring palaeontologist? It means that his or her most rational strategy for landing a job is to socially cultivate as many lab leaders as possible, especially those who work in strata likely to turn up preserved soft tissue, and hope to get in on a Nature or Science paper — so that their job applications get through to the stage where their actual work might get some scrutiny.
Can we all agree that this is idiotic?
Jisc should not buy services that it does not want
March 15, 2024
In the first of two disapointing scholarly-communication announcements last week, Jisc announced its report on progress towards open access in the UK. The key finding is:
Despite improvements – rapid growth in transitional agreements, sector savings and high levels of funder compliance – a full transition to open access will not happen soon.
But that’s not the part that disappoints me. Here’s the part that disappoints me:
Transitional agreements were envisioned as a temporary mechanism to support a transition to full open access. They set out to constrain costs for institutions and drive rapid growth of open access at a UK and global level.
However, the review suggests they are at risk of becoming the ‘norm’ and that the rate of transition is too slow.
Sometimes I think people don’t know what “transitional” means. Folks, a transitional agreement is by definition one that gets you from one place to another — in this case, from a subscription-based scholarly publishing ecosystem to an open-access one. It’s what a transitional agreement is for. If it does not do that, then it’s not transitional. In particular, a transitional agreement that becomes “the ‘norm'” is a stalled agreement. It is, unambiguously, a failure.
So that was the part that disappointed me. And here comes the part that infuriates me (quoted from Professor Stephen Decent, chair of the Jisc UUK Content Negotiation Strategy Group):
Despite significant sector-wide investment, the transition from the paywall system to full open access remains elusive. It’s clear that our open research scholarship objectives are out of step with many publishers’ commercial strategies.
Why does Jisc give a nematode’s anal sphincter about publishers’ commercial strategies? Has it forgotten that it’s the customer here? Jisc is not beholden to the preferences of publishers, publishers are required (or, in a sane world, would be) to provide what Jisc wants.
Look. If I go into Tesco to buy a cabbage, it may happen that I find that my cabbage-purchasing objectives are out of step with Tesco’s commercial strategy. But if that happens, I go and buy my cabbage from Sainsbury’s instead.
What I don’t do is buy a Tesco bath-towel instead, because selling bath-towels is their commercial strategy. Why not? Because I want a cabbage, not a bath towel.
I trust I do not need to spell this out, but I will anyway for avoidance of doubt: Jisc should not buy what these publishers are selling, but should instead find publishers that are selling what Jisc want to buy.
More on the disturbing plausibility of ChatGPT
April 12, 2023
Prompted by a post on Mastodon (which, like all Mastodon posts, I can no longer find), I asked ChatGPT to tell me about my own papers. The response started out well but quickly got much worse. I will indent my comments on its response.
Q. What are some articles written by Michael P. Taylor?
A. Michael P. Taylor is a vertebrate paleontologist and open science advocate. He has written numerous articles and papers on topics such as the taxonomy and systematics of sauropod dinosaurs, open access publishing, and scholarly communication.
So far, so good. In general, LLMs seem to be good at synthesizing overviews. It’s specific facts that trip them up.
Here are a few examples of his articles:
Taylor, M. P. (2009). A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914) (Dinosauria, Sauropoda). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 29(3), 787-806.
The first one it gives is pretty good. The only mistake is that it’s oddly appended “(Dinosauria, Sauropoda)” to the end of the article title. The journal, volume, issue and page-numbers are all correct.
Taylor, M. P. (2011). Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review. In A. W. A. Kellner, & D. A. S. Silva (Eds.), Vertebrate paleontology and sedimentology of the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary in the northern and central parts of the Lusitanian Basin, Portugal (pp. 11-43). Sociedade de Geologia de Portugal.
I did write a book-chapter titled “Sauropod dinosaur research: a historical review”. But it came out in 2010, not 2011. And it ran from pages 361–386, not 11-43. And it was in Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: a Historical Perspective, not Vertebrate paleontology and sedimentology of the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary in the northern and central parts of the Lusitanian Basin, Portugal (which doesn’t exist). Which was edited by Richard T. J. Moody, Eric Buffetaut, Darren Naish and David M. Martill, not A. W. A. Kellner & D. A. S. Silva. And published by the Geological Society of London, not Sociedade de Geologia de Portugal.
Taylor, M. P., & Wedel, M. J. (2018). Why sauropods had long necks; and why giraffes have short necks. PeerJ Preprints, 6, e27537v1.
I and Matt did co-write a paper with this title in PeerJ. But it came out in 2013, not 2018. And it was in PeerJ proper, not PeerJ Preprints.
Taylor, M. P. (2020). The open-access wars: How to free science from academic paywalls. Wired.
I never wrote any such paper. There is an article out there whose HTML title is the one given here, though the visible title is completely different: “The war to free science”. It’s in Vox, not Wired; it came out in 2019, not 2020. And it’s by Brian Resnick and Julia Belluz.
Taylor, M. P., & Knope, M. L. (2021). The future of scholarly publishing is in our hands. The Conversation.
As far as I recall, I never wrote anything for The Conversation. There seems to be no article named “The future of scholarly publishing is in our hands”. And I have never met or corresponded with, far less co-authored with, anyone with the surname Knope.
All in all, a pretty horrible performance — but, and this is the scary part, one that even someone pretty familiar with my work could very easily have swallowed.
I made a very similar point a few months ago in These new “artificial intelligence” programs don’t know what they’re talking about. If the responses were obviously wrong, there wouldn’t be too much of a problem here. But this is close enough to fool most people most of the time.
As more and more of what we read is likely to be written by LLMs in the next years, I am concerned that we’re going to be dealing with an awful lot of this kind of thing. The ability to pan gold out of the stream of lies is going to become really important.
I’m sure you’ve seen things like ChatGPT in the news: programs that can carry out pretty convincing conversations. They are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and are frequently referred to as being Artificial Intelligence (AI) — but I really don’t like that designation as it implies some understanding.
To try this out, I asked OpenAI Chat this question: “What are the contenders for the title of Biggest Dinosaur, and what is the basis for their various claims?” I picked that because I know a bit about the answer, and in fact wrote an answer myself back in 2015.
Here’s what it came up with:
There are several contenders for the title of “biggest dinosaur,” and their claims are based on different pieces of evidence. The most commonly cited contenders are:
- Argentinosaurus: This is considered to be one of the largest known dinosaurs, with estimates of its length ranging from 110-130 feet (33-40 meters) and a weight of around 100-110 tons. Its size is based on a few fragmented bones, including vertebrae and limb bones, which were found in Argentina.
- Brachiosaurus: This dinosaur is estimated to have been around 85 feet (26 meters) long and weighed around 80-100 tons. Its size is based on several well-preserved specimens that have been found in North America, including a nearly complete skeleton.
- Puertasaurus: This dinosaur is estimated to have been around 85-100 feet (26-30 meters) long and weighed around 80-100 tons. Its size is based on a few bones, including a femur, that were found in Argentina.
- Supersaurus: This dinosaur is estimated to have been around 110-125 feet (33-38 meters) long and weighed around 80-100 tons. Its size is based on a single specimen, a set of vertebrae, that was found in the US.
- Diplodocus: This dinosaur is estimated to have been around 90-115 feet (27-35 meters) long and weighed around 20-40 tons. Its size is based on several well-preserved specimens that have been found in North America.
It’s worth noting that the size of these dinosaurs is approximate and there’s still debate among paleontologists. Also, the weight of these dinosaurs is based on estimations, not real measurements.
At first glance this is a decent answer. It’s certainly better than just saying “Argentinosaurus weighed 100 tons”. But if you know your sauropods, you’ll immediately recognise that this answer is riddled with inaccuracies:
- The Argentinosaurus entry is actually pretty good, although I’ve never seen a 110 ton mass estimate and modern estimates tend to be rather lower than the specified range.
- The Brachiosaurus mass estimate is way off, two or three times as high as it should be.
- More importantly, no remotely complete Brachiosaurus specimen has ever been described, and size estimates are based primarily on its Tanzanian relative Giraffatitan.
- There is no known femur of Puertasaurus. (When I corrected the AI on this, it told me instead that there is a pubis known. There is not.)
- Supersaurus is not based on a single specimen, and both of the main specimens that have been described contain plenty of appendicular material.
- The Diplodocus length estimate is a bit inflated, but otherwise not bad. But it’s not clear what it’s doing in a list of five biggest dinosaurs.
- The answer omits some very strong contenders, including Dreadnoughtus and Patagotitan.
- It doesn’t really address the second part of my question — e.g. Supersaurus has a good claim to be longer, but not heaviest; the converse is likely true for Argentinosaurus.
Now here is the real problem: the LLM does well enough to fool people. If it was nonsense from start to end, there would be nothing to fear here, but the plausibility of the answers and the authoritative tone in which they are given lends the many mistakes a credibility that they do not deserve.
Having seen this sort-of-convincing-but-very-wrong reply in a field that I know something about, I would be very very cautious about trusting an LLM to teach me about a field I don’t already know. I’m guessing its replies about space flight, quantum physics and Medieval French literature are going to be similarly flawed (but also, worryingly, similarly convincing to those such as myself who don’t know better.)
There is a very fundamental reason for all these mistakes: as I implied above, LLMs do not understand anything. They just know what phrases occur close to other phrases. They can do amazing things with that one trick, and I can see them being useful as discovery tools. But we’ll go badly wrong when we start trusting them as anything more than a bright but ignorant kid offering suggestions.
So for all the talk of AI having taken huge leaps forward in the last couple of years, I don’t think any such thing has happened. We’ve just got much better at generating plausible text. But there’s no advance in actual understanding.
Tutorial 39: how not to conclude a talk or paper
March 19, 2021
“And in conclusion, this new fossil/analysis shows that Lineageomorpha was more [here fill in the blank]:
- diverse
- morphologically varied
- widely distributed geographically
- widely distributed stratigraphically
…than previously appreciated.”
Yes, congratulations, you’ve correctly identified that time moves forward linearly and that information accumulates. New fossils that make a group less diverse, varied, or widely distributed–now that’s a real trick.
Okay, that was snarky to the point of being mean, and here I must clarify that (1) I haven’t been to a conference in more than a year, so hopefully no-one thinks I’m picking on them, which is good, because (2) I myself have ended talks this way, so I’m really sniping at Old Matt.
And, yeah, new fossils are nice. But for new fossils or new analyses to expand what we know is expected. It’s almost the null hypothesis for science communication–if something doesn’t expand what we know, why are we talking about it? So that find X or analysis Y takes our knowledge beyond what was “previously appreciated” is good, but it’s not a particularly interesting thing to say out loud, and it’s a really weak conclusion.
(Some cases where just being new is enough: being surprisingly new, big expansions [like hypothetically finding a tyrannosaur in Argentina], and new world records.)
Don’t be Old Matt. Find at least one thing to say about your topic that is more interesting or consequential than the utterly pedestrian observation that it added information that was not “previously appreciated”. The audience already suspected that before you began, or they wouldn’t be here.
I showed this post to Mike before I published it, and he said, “What first made you want to work on this project? That’s your punchline: the thing that was cool enough that you decided to invest months of effort into it.” Yes! Don’t just tell the audience that new information exists, tell them why it is awesome.
Cool URIs don’t change
November 26, 2020
It’s now 22 years since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote the classic document Cool URIs don’t change [1]. It’s core message is simple, and the title summarises it. Once an organization brings a URI into existence, it should keep it working forever. If the document at that URI moves, then the old URI should become a redirect to the new. This really is Web 101 — absolute basics.
So imagine my irritation when I went to point a friend to Matt’s and my 2013 paper on whether neural-spine bifurcation is an ontogenetic character (spoiler: no), only to find that the paper no longer exists.
Wedel and Taylor (2013b: figure 15). An isolated cervical of cf. Diplodocus MOR 790 8-10-96-204 (A) compared to D. carnegii CM 84/94 C5 (B), C9 (C), and C12 (D), all scaled to the same centrum length. Actual centrum lengths are 280 mm, 372 mm, 525 mm, and 627 mm for A-D respectively. MOR 790 8-10-96-204 modified from Woodruff & Fowler (2012: figure 2B), reversed left to right for ease of comparison; D. carnegii vertebrae from Hatcher (1901: plate 3).
Well — it’s not quite that bad. I was able to go to the web-site’s home page, navigate to the relavant volume and issue, and find the new location of our paper. So it does still exist, and I was able to update my online list of publications accordingly.
But seriously — this is a really bad thing to do. How many other links might be out there to our paper? All of them are now broken. Every time someone out there follows a link to a PalArch paper — maybe wondering whether that journal would be a good match for their own work — they are going to run into a 404 that says “We can’t run our website properly and can’t be trusted with your work”.
“But Mike, we need to re-organise our site, and —” Ut! No. Let’s allow Sir Tim to explain:
We just reorganized our website to make it better.
Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you will be able to keep then running after the next redesign.
Well, we found we had to move the files…
This is one of the lamest excuses. A lot of people don’t know that servers such as Apache give you a lot of control over a flexible relationship between the URI of an object and where a file which represents it actually is in a file system. Think of the URI space as an abstract space, perfectly organized. Then, make a mapping onto whatever reality you actually use to implement it. Then, tell your server.
If you are a responsible organization, then one of the things you are responsible for is ensuring that you don’t break inbound links. If you want to reorganize, fine — but add the redirects.
And look, I’m sorry, I really don’t want to pick on PalArch, which is an important journal. Our field really needs diamond OA journals: that is, venues where vertebrate paleontology articles are free to read and also free to authors. It’s a community-run journal that is not skimming money out of academia for shareholders, and Matt’s and my experience with their editorial handling was nothing but good. I recommend them, and will proabably publish there again (despite my current irritation). But seriously, folks.
And by the way, there are much worse offenders than PalArch. Remember Aetogate, the plagiarism-and-claim-jumping scandal in New Mexico that the SVP comprehensively fudged its investigation of? The documents that the SVP Ethics Committee produced, such they were, were posted on the SVP website in early 2008, and my blog-post linked to them. By July, they had moved, and I updated my links. By July 2013, they had moved again, and I updated my links again. By October 2015 they had moved for a third time: I both updated my links, and made my own copy in case they vanished. Sure enough, by February 2019 they had gone again — either moved for a fourth time or just quietly discarded. This is atrocious stewardship by the flagship society of our discipline, and they should be heartily ashamed that in 2020, anyone who wants to know what they concluded about the Aetogate affair has to go and find their documents on a third-party blog.
Seriously, people! We need to up our game on this!
Cool URIs don’t change.
[1] Why is this about URIs instead of URLs? In the end, no reason. Technically, URIs are a broader category than URLs, and include URNs. But since no-one anywhere in the universe has ever used a URN, in practice URL and URI are synonymous; and since TBL wrote his article in 1998, “URL” has clearly won the battle for hearts and minds and “URI” has diminished and gone into the West. If you like, mentally retitle the article “Cool URLs don’t change”.
I think we’ve all had enough of the Impact Factor as a way of measuring the quality of journals. From Ginny Barbour’s forensic account of negotiating PLoS Medicine’s IF back in 2006, via Stephen Curry’s measured rant back in 2012 (“if you use impact factors you are statistically illiterate”) and Björn Brembs’ survey of how very widespread IF negotations are in 2016, to all the recent negotiations with Clarivate about which journals should even have IFs, it’s become increasingly obvious that the Impact Factor is not a metric, it’s a negotiation.
And of course this means that the reason any journal has the particular IF it has is competely opaque.
The world needs a much more transparent metric of journal quality, and I am here to offer it! The Objective Quality Factor (QOF) is assigned in a wholly straightforward way that anyone can understand:
Your journal obtains an OQF of x by paying me x pounds.
That’s it. As soon as I acknowledge your payment, you have the right to display your OQF on the journal home page and in marketing materials.
If another journal in your field obtains a higher OQF than yours, and you need to regain your journal’s position at the top of the totem pole, all you need do is send me more money.
Payments via PayPal to ebay@miketaylor.org.uk please!
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 