Petite Paleoartist | Sauriazoicillus

already planning to cover this in a dedicated geololgy video!

hadnt considered any of these yet! good shout

-institutional level, but the community response solidified the strong need for change that sits restlessly inside the vast majority of us, let's continue to keep fighting for a more fair field and a more fair world!!! 2/2

before i forget to say it here: happy international women's day! women have always been a part of palaeontology but the community still is not truly safe for women. the response to the epstein files-among other things-have shown us that we still have a long way to go at an- 1/2

as you should as you should!!

oh this must feel SO vindicating lol

i already had other plans :P

ahh ok, yeah that was already planned to be explained

im kinda confused again because by nature of evolution all animals have a direct ancestor they can be traced back to

im not sure i understand the concept you're thinking of, are you just talking about the difference between branching evolution and anagenesis? i explained it on tumblr to someone else but anagenesis is a real thing that happens in nature. the wording is kinda confusing sorry

-like how many palaeontological theories arent "accurate" they're just more "informed" than others, so is the art we create to represent the culmination of the hypotheses we choose depict in our art

to answer question 2: all paleoart is speculation, even with things like melanosomes we still dont know the exact colours animals would've been, this is why im of the opinion that while some paleoart is more "accurate" than others, it would be better to say something akin to 'more informed'. just-

-just volunteering at a local museum that has a palaeontological collection and chatting with the in-house staff and visiting researchers. how the commission works depends on the artist and varies from artist to artist for sure though, there's no set standard way to do that

to answer question 1: 100% networking!! networking and credibility is what gets you commissions, you can be the "best artist ever" (whatever that means) and still get no commissions because people arent familiar with you, imo the best way to connect is to network at events like PDU or EVAP or even-

this one is admittedly more my opinion though, im sure older researchers who actually experienced this change would have more nuanced opinions than i have since i was born into this age of research and also im not a researcher myself yet

-invention of these softwares allows incredibly large character matrices with even larger sample sizes to exist that otherwise would take literal years of work to fully get through, the only work now being to actually code the matrices as oppose to comparing all of the characters

-network to do research unlike now where networking is still incredibly important but not necessarily a requirement imo

and 2. the invention of phylogenetic analysis software like TNT and PAUP which automated the process of comparing apomorphies and building phylogenetic trees. the-

-letters to the authorship and request a print from them as opposed to now where many papers are open access. this also meant that research was way more personal and collaborative in the past imo because you were basically forced to-

100%, the advancement of technology has had big effects on all research even outside of palaeontology, the two biggest ones i can think of are:

1. the invention of the internet, shook it up A LOT. before then, printing papers cost money, so the only way to get papers was to actually write-

-i see many people giving reptiles the mobility of mammals or fish the soft tissue of tetrapods and stating that their work is "accurate" (and my opinions of this practise is a whole other rant and also something i deem an issue!!)

but yeah, so i dont keep ranting, those are some big ones for me

-for nomen dubia to actually be diagnostic for a variety of reasons that dont actually make sense when you take into account how the status "diagnostic" is reached.

also i think a bigger issue is how many people dont actually understand anatomy and apply that misunderstanding to palaeoart because-

there are COUNTLESS large misconceptions in the non-researcher community that create many problems for science communication to resolve, but a big one i can think of is misunderstanding what makes different taxa diagnostic, you often see people arguing-

technology is more of an archaeological thing because archaeologists study material culture, artifacts, art, etc. while palaeontologists study geology, cladistics, anatomy, etc.. this is why when studying the anatomy or cladistics of ancient humans we call that palaeoanthropology

all a bunch of good questions that i think are a bit too advanced for a beginners lesson so ill answer them here

thank you!

of course! more than happy to answer any followup questions

Eosteus and Tanyka were only described recently! and up until recently Megamastax was only known from a jaw too so i dont blame you lol

this is also just the abridged version of the process, there's a lot more to consider obviously but this is just to give you the most bare-bones idea of the concept

let's say genus A is defined by 8 pointed cusps and an anterior serrated edge, ive found a―currently―indeterminate fossil that has 8 pointed cusps and an anterior serrated edge, that says to me that this is most likely genus A, then id look at the apomorphies of the various species to determine that

but for the exact wording "a new genus" that depends on how we're defining genera, if the apomorphies match the diagnosis for an existing genus but are different from the others in smaller ways id personally call it a species