As I begin the school year and prepare to begin creating art for species and focusing on different types of information (measurements vs. time period), I thought it would be useful to document how I have approached the research and how I've organized the information. The First Step: Organizing Species: The majority of trying to find actual lists of species was done in July, and was mostly complete up to 2012, when the phylogenetic analysis by Carrano et al. was published. However, as the analysis focused on the relationships between species and included many, for each coding characters to find its position relative to others, it included many remains that would otherwise be considered to fragmentary to adequately describe. It also included many species that have since been either subsumed into others, reclassified (Cryolophosaurus, Monolophosaurus, etc), or lacked species that since have had new specimens or were described after 2012. This includes many Spinosaurids, such as Vallibonavenatrix (a rare grammatically feminine genus), and other theropods like Wiehienvenator. I spent hours following Wikipedia links (to find the cited sources), references in other papers, and most helpfully, comparing to Gregory Paul's Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs: Second Edition in order to have the most complete and accurate list possible. Mostly likely, I still missed some. But I believe that I have created a good list of species. A big part of the time this took was in part due to complex groups like Spinosaurids, who have almost a dozen potential genera that dozens of papers argue can be subsumed into each other. Is Suchomimus a junior synonym of Baryonyx? Is Cristatusaurus a synonym of Suchomimus? Is Baryonyx AND Suchomimus both junior synonyms of Cristatusaurus? I spent a significant amount of time reading papers just to find snippets of information to include. I certainly enjoyed it, but reading, skimming, and searching for the information I needed was a major factor in time that I didn't quite expect. The Second Step: Recording Information: The first thing I did after creating a list of species was create a list of information I wanted to record. I recorded information handwritten into journals (after completing about 5 species, I spilled an entire cup of water on it, which had me rush to a fan to dry it without the ink bleeding; thankfully, it did not, but it highlighted the problems with paper) because it was easier to read and compare information on my laptop and record what I deemed nessecary on my paper. I had one notebook for my notes, species list, and comments/controversies/plans, and another for the actual information sheets, which made it easier to compare. For each genus (for most they included only one species), I recorded:
Overall: Organization: For a time, I would save the papers themselves to a file folder with many subfolders, but as I began to encounter papers I could not download and were only displayed, I switched to a system of book marking, with detailed folders and titles as to access many of the resources I've encountered. This has solved my problem of a window with 93 tabs. It has been extremely helpful to keep track of sources, something I have been recording in my notes as well. (an example of just one path: most of these sites and papers have been looked at or read, and more lie within the folders) As of now, I have done dozens of species and its going well. As I said before, it has all been a little bit slower than I had imagined. I had to revisit some species I had done earlier, I have not gotten to the Tyrannosaurs. But that is fine, I can do those later.
This has been incredibly enriching.
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AuthorJulia Youssef Archives
April 2021
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