/sci/ - Science & Math

By the way, even if you aren't involved at all you could probably provide useful information to me and any other fresh-to-academia person like me.

I would really like to join a dig over the summer or one of my school breaks, if not only for shits and giggles but to connect with people outside of my intended field and to get some cool experience thinking way outside of the box. Would it be a bad idea to email a paleontologist who has recently published research, even if I have no prior relationship to them? This goes for any other field too.

Thanks!

>>6312185
>Would it be a bad idea to email a paleontologist who has recently published research, even if I have no prior relationship to them?
Cold calls aren't necessarily a bad idea, but they often don't work.
You're in physics, right? Know any physics profs who are friends with a paleontologist? If yes that's your ticket in, if no you're probably SOL.
Why would someone pay for a physics freshman to work on a dig when that money would be better spent on someone already in a paleo/archeology program?

Also, /sci/ isn't /adv/.
Read the sticky.

>>6312192
I might, the thing is I haven't made any meaningful relationships with professors yet. Not really sure if I have any pull to have them call a friend.

regardless, thanks for the info.

Look up paleontology professors at universities and email them expressing your interest in volunteering in the field. That's how I did it. You handle your transportation out to the relevant locale and bring a tent, they generally feed you while you're working with them.
Bear in mind, fossil digs are usually in high-erosion environments; that means desert and badlands, where the wind and rain constantly strip away the land and reveal fresh rock. It's rough out there, you'll need to adjust to the conditions, and you will be sore and tired the whole time. For someone whose passion lies outside of paleo, it might be more than you're willing to deal with. I wish you luck in finding a dig to join, and good hunting out in the field.

The only way this will happen is if you volunteer, and it probably won't. Why would anyone take a physics major on a dig when there are dedicated students waiting in line to do so. Its like someone signing up for a bio lab internship as an engineering major.

>>6312204
oh yeah this could help. Yeah I know that nobody in their right mind would take a physics major lol. Idk though, I just have in interest in learning to apply knowledge in different ways than what I'm used to. That being said, I doubt a professor will say "Oh cool, let me satisfy this random kid who won't contribute to my field but wants to use what he learns to contribute to his own's random dreams". I'm pretty sure profs are more privy to helping out those with a passion. That being said, from the documentaries I watch, it seems like 4 paleontologists and 8 helpers that really need not know more that the methods of excavation.

I will message professors regardless, worst comes to worst I just don't go on a dig. Right?

>>6312181
nice Marshosaurus bro. Those are pretty rare.

you can pay to work on a museum dig, the cost generally covers your transportation, food, training, and insurance. They tend to run a little over $100 per day and because there is transportation and training that takes up much of the day, you get more dig time by buying more days. Contact the Museum of Western Colorado at their website if this interests you. They (we) run digs all year long except for winter.

you might be able to get on as a volunteer, especially with underfunded an boring work like screenwashing projects. Mostly you just need to talk to paleo professors, and as mentioned they have plenty of volunteers and people willing to pay them for time on a dig.

if hunting is your thing, you can sign up for the Parapaleontologist program at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, or similar programs in your area of choice. We'll give you education on ID'ing dinosaurs, where to look, and the laws concerning searching on both private and public land. Armed with this information you can go out on your own time and hunt dinosaur bones with relatively little fear of breaking the law. You won't be digging though.

Finally you can stick your name in the hat at any dinosaur museum, often enough fossils are found at construction sites in the West and suddenly the museum needs a ton of volunteers to dig them up very quickly. These digs aren't planned very far ahead of time, so letting the museum know you're interested can easily find you a spot, especially if your schedule is flexible.

we particularly look for people with construction, mining, and heavy equipment experience for these projects, though we also need safety guys, site supervisors, lawyers, administrators, etc.

or you can pay to dig dinos on private land, but that won't get you much and won't generally advance science.

>>6312181
>is there a database that contains filtered information on theropods? You know, something organized like name/weight/dimensions/foot-size/tooth-size. Just some concise database? This doesn't have to only include theropods but I have an interest in formulating more refined theories about foot-tooth-weight ratios

No, this is something you'd have to collect on your own.

there's no reason to include that kind of information in a single database, so it's all just kindof floating around in thousands of different osteologies.

one problem you're going to find is that most theropods aren't known from both teeth and feet, and in many cases neither is known. Of the small percentage where both are known, there's usually a problem in determining that the feet and the teeth came from the same animal- articulated body fossils are rare.

sounds like an interesting project though, and if you have any questions I happen to study theropod teeth. I won't be around too much longer tonight though, so you're always welcome to pose questions at my usual haunt on /an/. It's a slow board but you'll find me there most days.

>>6312275
ok great, well just a little theory I came up with a couple of hours ago. I was watching a documentary where they said that based on the size of a tooth, paleontologists can make pretty good assumptions on how big the dino was going to be. One of the guys said something about how the tooth of some recent find was about 2 times as large as a t-rex and therefore the whole dinosaur might also be 2 times as large. But then I remembered something from an article I read online once that stated that the larger an animal becomes, the smaller the food consumption to body size ratio becomes. Since, at least in the case of a carnivorous animal, the size of the teeth usually depend on the size of the prey, I thought maybe it would make perfect sense if big theropods had big teeth, however, with this ratio theory, it seems to me that big dinosaurs did not really necessarily need to hunt bigger prey, just a small more abundance of smaller prey.

The doc I was watching talked about a theory that late theropods hunted in packs to take down large prey, however there is overwhelming evidence that they walked alone and scarecly any evidence that they were in packs. So what I believe is that the people formulating theories about meat eating dinos hunting in packs are just trying to fit evidence to there theory, where overwhelming evidence points to the contrary. I believe that larger (but not giant) meat eaters did not need to hunt super-large plant eaters at all, in fact I believe that would be a death sentence. And so I'd like to compare teeth size to foot size(a general indication of volume) to see what kind of relationship I can make from the data.

>>6312327
ah.
One problem I can imagine for foot size as an indicator of mass is that feet will never be smaller than necessary but they can be and often are much larger than necessary.

Also minimum foot size relates more to the substrate the animal lives on, and with some behavioral modifications (e.g. avoiding walking through swamps) the foot can be quite small on some very massive animals. Ungulates come to mind, as do elephants.

So without knowing the type of ground the animal usually walked on as well as its behavior regarding soft ground the foot size thing is going to be even less accurate than tooth size, and tooth size isn't very accurate at all.

both are forms of circular reasoning though if not backed by some empirical data and we don't have empirical data on most dinosaurs body mass. (though we can make rough guesses on which ones were larger or smaller than others based on comparisons of bone thickness, overall length, dimensions of the skeleton, etc.)

Pack hunting in theropods is a pretty weakly supported speculation either way, and you won't meet too many paleontologists that have a firm opinion either way. All the current evidence is equivocal, easily explained by other scenarios. Television is a pretty terrible way to learn about the current state of the art in dinosaur paleontology though. Newspapers and magazines likewise tend to publish only the most spectacular and speculative of ideas.

Theropod footprints are far more common and far more informative about mass, but we still have unknown variable such as the hardness of the ground and the speed and force of the footstep. Also of course footprints are almost impossible to correlate to a tooth size.

Size of prey is another area of circular reasoning, we don't actually know what most gigantic theropods ate except in very rare cases where stomach contents are preserved. Coprolites might be informative but rarely contain identifiable remains.

>>6312327
so we've got a lot of areas of speculation and tautological reasoning: body mass, tooth length/body mass, foot length/body mass, prey taken, and predation strategies.

using one speculative argument to support another is what most paleontology for public consumption is about, but in real life we prefer much more rigorous arguments. That kind of speculative work is fluff, it's fun to read but doesn't really mean anything because it can't be supported or rejected based on evidence.

>>6313276
>cont.
Rigor aside, that kind of study would be eaten up by the media, and is exactly the sort of work that the most famous of paleontologists made their entire careers on.

if you wish to go ahead with it I can direct you to a few hundred papers on theropod teeth, all of which list tooth lengths.

body mass estimates and foot size you'd have to collect on your own though, those aren't things I collect papers about. Presumably most of the papers I have are for animals for which the feet haven't been found.

>>6313304
Yeah, I think I'll pick it up as a side activity to my studies, but thanks for the insight to modern paleontology. The documentary I watched, which was from the early 2000s, coupled with some papers of collected information about finds, which what I saw was primarily qualitative information and a huge lack of quantitative info(lengths/bone weights/ density/ volume). I think if all of the numbers are crunched a significantly better method of approximating things like muscle content and fat content and maybe from that diet could arise. I'm not sure, I'm not a history guy or biology guy in any respect of the word. What I see from a layman's perspective is a bunch of stamp collecting and little to no formulation of correlation.

Of course there has been advancement in the field in the last 10 years (something about feathers and weight distribution), but the rigor of the field is not as apparent as, say, physics. I'd like to bring my thought-pattern from physics to outside fields, and I've been interested in herpetology and paleontology since I was a kid, but now I'm just getting into the legit theory.

Anway TL;DR yes, I would love some links to papers, specifically those that at least make guesses on what the numbers mean, rather than just field notes.

Thanks!!!

>>6313304
Also you seem to know a lot about paleontology. Care to answer a few quick questions about yourself?

Are you a practicing paleontologist? If so do you go on digs? if so how often?

Also where do you practice? Uni or Museum (or something else)? Also how long have you been working as a paleontologist? Do you have any research out there?

And thanks again for speaking with me, I'm glad I actually got someone like you on /sci/!

>>6313392
reverse order because personal questions are easy and I'm working on some stuff today-
>Are you a practicing paleontologist?
I haven't published anything in over a decade, and paleontology was never my job, so no.
>If so do you go on digs?
I've been on a few.
>if so how often?
Not very. Last one I was on was in 2011, but it wasn't a dinosaur site. In the 24 years since I've graduated I've been on 7 digs, so what's that? Less than one every 3 1/2 years? Most of them were in a single decade though.
>Also where do you practice? Uni or Museum (or something else)?
I've worked with Universities and Museums.
>Also how long have you been working as a paleontologist?
It's been a hobby of mine for most of the last 24 years.
>Do you have any research out there?
Yes.
I like my anonymity on 4chan though, so I'm not going to link you to it. Not that it matters, nobody here has read anything I wrote.

>>6313338
do you have JSTOR or equivalent?
I'll get you a list together as I have time later.

>>6313552
yeah I think I still have a JSTOR from when I was still in gradeschool. Thanks, I can't wait to check them out.

>>6313932
very well.
Here's a shot of part of my library, mostly I collect info on theropod crania, though there's some behavioral and biomechanical articles mixed in as well. Quite a bit on teeth.

If something looks interesting just enter it in your search bar either from JSTOR or google scholar. Most of these are available free, but a few are behind a paywall.

happy hunting.

>>6313932
I apologize for not providing direct links but there's a lot out there.

as mentioned, this is just a little bit of my library and I only read articles on a very limited part of dinosaur paleontology which is of course only a tiny part of paleontology in general.

>>6313552
this article in particular would seem to approach your line of thinking-
http://www.arca.museus.ul.pt/ArcaSite/obj/gaia/MNHNL-0000784-MG-DOC-web.PDF

though it's been largely discredited because the author's "Antrodemus" type was the result of shady reconstruction and probably didn't exist in real life.

the ideas presented are sound though, and are similar to your lines of thought.

>>6314207
meant for
>>6313932
of course

>>6314092
Thanks I enjoyed reading this, although once again it would be nice to see some more mathematics involved. I just moved into a course about geological modeling and shit, so I'll see how that pans out. I'd like to add some math.

>>6314093
>>6314207
Thanks! This should keep me busy for a while

>>6315842
a couple more math-intensive articles:
>Bite me, biomechanical models of theropod mandibles and implications for feeding behavior.
>Evidence for predator-prey relationships: examples for Allosaurus and Stegosaurus

>>6315881
that's one freaky looking hip bone

>>6315888
standard-issue theropod hips aside from the random fenestra just south of the patent acetabulum.

Update: I just signed up for a course in Geodynamics. I'm hoping, using the knowledge from that class, I can further the credibility of some of the theories I've come up with.

>>6315909
therapod hips are fucked up, then
>dem long protrusions to the legs
>dat random bone to its ass

Schools with paleo programs will frequently solicit volunteers to do prep work, clean fossils, do casts, and so on. Once you have some lab experience, then you can probably get in on some field work.
> http://vertebratepaleontology.biodiversity.ku.edu/volunteer

Another way in may be through volunteer work at a museum.
> http://www.amnh.org/our-research/paleontology/about-the-division/more2/volunteering-in-the-division-of-paleontology

Or you can do what I did two years ago: grab a few friends who are equally enthusiastic, spend a year's worth of spare time researching geology, scouting potential sites, and just generally learning about dinosaurs, and then take 2 months of vacation time to do your own fieldwork. We were moderately successful: we found a fragment of a nice sized marine reptile (which we knew better than to try to excavate ourselves, passed it on to some real researchers), and also a lot of random sea life.

Next year, I'm going to build a portable ground-penetrating radar. Really excited about it.

And I don't know of a theropod database, but pterosaurs are way cooler anyway: http://www.pterosaur.co.uk/PDB2012/

>>6315940
>http://vertebratepaleontology.biodiversity.ku.edu/volunteer

Yeah but all of these places say "must be 14 years or older to participate"

Is this really what I want to start doing field work?

>>6315962
>Is this really what I want to start doing field work?
yes.
Any monkey can do what you want to do. There's not some "adult" top-tier fieldwork division or something. Digging fossils is digging fossils, no matter who does it.

>>6315923
makes a bit more sense when seen from the front.

the bones form a sort of basket for the guts, just like in any other vertebrate. The front set is just like your pubic bones, the back one acts like your tailbone in protecting the vent.