It's been a long time coming, but finally the smuggled and illegally auctioned Tarbosaurus bataar is heading home to Mongolia.

In case you haven't read about this in the news, an American fossil dealer, Eric Prokopi,  smuggled the fossilised remains of a Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton out of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia to the US via the UK. He then put the fossil up for auction using a company called Heritage Auctions in Chelsea, New York.

A Mongolian palaeontologist living in New York heard about the planned auction, and contacted government officials in Mongolia to warn them of the potentially illegal sale. Both China and Mongolia have strict fossil export laws, and Mongolian heritage laws state that fossils from Mongolia must reside in Mongolia. The Mongolian Government petitioned the United States government to hand back the fossil (leading to the coolest action name ever: The United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton PDF 2.7 MB). However, this was not enough to stop the auction going ahead. In May 2012 the T. bataar sold for just over 1 million dollars to Coleman Burke, a Manhattan real-estate developer and lawyer. However, due to the ongoing saga with proving the fossils provenance, and whether it was illegally auctioned, Burke withdrew his bid.

Further petitions by concerned Mongolians, palaeontologists, and anyone with an interest in stopping the illegal fossil trade, along with the official action lead by the United States government, led to the arrest of Prokopi in October 2012, and a guilty plea in December that same year. His sentencing hearing will be held in April 2013.

So now the long awaited moment has arrived: on February 13 this year, it was announced that T. bataar was free to be shipped back to Mongolia. Although there isn't an official home for the fossil yet, the Mongolian Government hopes to refurbish an old museum dedicated to Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin into a new dinosaur museum.

But what I'm wondering is: has Prokopi learned his lesson? One of the most concerning things to come out of this saga was this quote from Prokopi himself, in a New Yorker article about the T. bataar smuggling and auction:

Wow. What can you say to that? A few things pop into my mind:

• It IS someone's culture and heritage - the T. BATAAR'S!
  
• It's also ALL OF NATURAL HISTORY'S culture and heritage, and therefore it's OUR culture and heritage!
• Fossils form a record of all life on Earth, THEY are the antiquities!

I found this quote especially worrying from someone who collects and sells fossils for a living, and who also recognises the importance of human heritage. Especially from someone who, according to the New Yorker piece, plans to continue selling fossils after the T. bataar issue is settled (and presumably after he's served jail time). He clearly needs to be educated in why palaeontology is important.

When I first encountered S.M.A.R.T. goals, I was working at an environmental consulting agency. I thought they were dreamed up by HR as a performance management tool, to make us prove that we had indeed been making changes and achieving goals and therefore deserved a pay increase. But it turns out they are much more useful than that, especially when setting up daily tasks in a lengthy project such as a PhD.

S.M.A.R.T. goals or criteria are:

So, using the example above, a S.M.A.R.T. goal would be, "Read Beardmore et al. (2012) (S) start to finish (M, A) because it pertains to my taphonomy of reptiles research (R)  before the end of today (T)".

I've put these S.M.A.R.T. goals into practice with another tool: a little black and pink notebook that lives on my desk. I opted for a physical notebook as it's nice to look away from the computer screen once in a while, and items cannot be easily edited or deleted. And unlike time/goal-management software, I don't forget to open it or clutter my desktop with it. The goal of this book is to keep me on task by recording the following:

1. What did I achieve today?
2. What three goals will I focus on tomorrow?
3. What can be improved?

Item 1 includes the three goals from the previous day, and anything else I achieved. As for Item 2, I make sure these three goals to focus on are S.M.A.R.T., as an open-ended task like "keep editing crocodile photos" seems gargantuan and unachievable, whereas "edit Day 4 and 5 photos for CR3A by the end of the day" is much more realistic. Item 3 is also useful, as it forces you to examine your work day and realise that there is always something that can be improved!

But remember, this doesn't mean that your work day has necessarily ended when you've achieved your three tasks. It should fill you with a sense of achievement, which in turn will inspire you to keep working hard and remember why you're here in the first place: you're passionate about your research!

This has been around for a while, but I still love it!

The remains of the basal sauropodomorph P. caducus were first discovered in 1952, and first described as belonging to Thecodontosaurus by Kermack (1984). (Interesting side note: The genus Thecodontosaurus was first described from fossils found in Wales in 1834, and was the fourth dinosaur genera ever named (Riley and Stutchbury, 1836 vide Owen, 1842). It was described 6 years before the term Dinosauria was coined (in 1842), and furthermore wasn't recognised as a dinosaur (instead of a crocodile or other 'saurian') until 1870!) (Benton, 2012).

Closer examination of these fossils, specifically several articulated partial skeletons of juveniles, by Yates (2003) suggested that they could not be ascribed to Thecodontosaurus antiquus (Morris, 1843), and were described as a new species, Thecodontosaurus caducus. But upon further examination of fossils and cladistic analysis, Yates found more and more differences between T. antiquus and T. caducus, enough to suggest that T. caducus wasn't a Thecodontosaurus at all! This problem was solved by assigning the 'T'. caducus material to a new genus, Pantydraco (Galton et al., 2007).

As for the taphonomic history of the P. caducus remains: they were found in underground limestone cave fissure fill – yellow marl that filtered down via large cracks or solution tunnels in a limestone outcrop. Articulated dinosaur skeletons including juvenile sauropodomorphs such as P. caducus have been found fossilised in this marl. It has been postulated that "flash" storms and flooding during the Late Triassic killed these dinosaurs, drowning them and washing their bodies down the fissures into the limestone caves (Galton et al., 2010). The higher percentage of juvenile sauropodomorphs preserved may have been due to size sorting: larger carcasses could not fit down these fissures, and instead decayed and eroded on the land surface.

Benton, M. J., 2012. Naming the Bristol dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus: politics and science in the 1830s. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. 123: 766-778

Galton, P. M., Yates, A. M., Kermack, D. M. 2007. Pantydraco n. gen. for Thecodontosaurus caducus Yates, 2003, a basal sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Upper Triassic or Lower Jurassic of South Wales, UK. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie Abhandlungen 243(1): 119-125

Galton, P. M., Kermack, D. 2010. The anatomy of Pantydraco caducus, a very basal sauropodomorph dinosaur from the Rhaetian (Upper Triassic) of South Wales, UK. Revue de Paléobiologie, Genève. 29 (2): 341-404

Kermack, D. 1984. New prosauropod material from South Wales. Linnean Society of London, Proceedings, 82: 101-117

Owen, R. 1842. Report on British fossil reptiles. Part II. Annual Report of the Association for the Advancement of Science, 1841, London, 9: 60-204

Riley, H., Stutchbury, S. 1836. A description of various remains of three distinct saurian animals discovered in the autumn of 1834, in the Magnesian Conglomerate on Durdham Down, near Bristol. Geological Society of London, Proceedings, 2: 397-399

Yates, A. M., 2003. A new species of the primitive dinosaur Thecodontosaurus (Saurischia: Sauropodomorpha) and its implications for the systematics of early dinosaurs. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. 1(1): 1-42

Have you ever had that sick feeling in your stomach when you find a journal paper published years ago, that is very relevant to your current work, but you had no idea it existed?

This exact scenario happened to me, when I was trawling through the reference list of a taphonomy paper. I came across a paper published in 2004 titled 'Taphonomy of Freshwater Turtles: Decay and Disarticulation in Controlled Experiments' from the Journal of Taphonomy. My immediate thought: "Hooray! Here's another paper on reptile decay, of which there are very few!" Rapidly followed by: "Errr, how did I miss this? What else have I missed?"

When I'm looking for journal papers, I normally start with Google Scholar and use some broad search terms, and then sometimes try the UQ library search engine. To find something like the 2004 turtle decay paper, I would use something like 'taphonomy reptiles experiment'. These are the results you'd get:

In short, the first 10 pages of this search did not turn up the 2004 turtle decay paper. It did turn up a PDF from the Journal of Taphonomy, but for a completely different paper (Brand et al., 2003. 'Decay and Disarticulation of Small Vertebrates in Controlled Experiments'). So I don't feel too terrible for having missed it first time round.

Searching for the exact title doesn't even bring up a reference or citation. So, I decided to search for 'Journal of Taphonomy' and look what I got:

Different papers from the same journal, but indexed by journal name instead of paper name!

So, the answer to how I missed this paper is relatively simple I guess:

1. The Journal of Taphonomy is not open access, and our library does not have a subscription to it. So papers listed in it would not appear in the UQ library search engine.
2. The papers from this journal are not indexed properly on Google Scholar: the search results show all the papers titled 'Journal of Taphonomy', but with authors and year of publication listed below correctly.
3. Finally, this particular turtle taphonomy paper is not indexed by Google at all.

I think it's a real shame for anyone who publishes in the Journal of Taphonomy that their papers (at least for me) were very difficult to find, if at all.

When asked, "What's your favourite dinosaur?", I must admit that although I can't choose just one species or genus, I do often think of lambeosaurine dinosaurs. Their wonderful and puzzling nasal and cranial ornamentation has always been the draw card for me. So with great nostalgic pleasure, let me introduce a Late Cretaceous lambeosaurine, Olorotitan arharensis.

So, do you want to know the magical words that definitely help getting research published? 

I'm not saying that you're not allowed to advertise these qualities, just that it certainly helps to have the 'first', or 'longest', or 'tallest', or yes, 'most complete' fossil to write about. And that is exactly what Godefroit et al. (2003) had. Take a look!

Godefroit et al. (2012) suggested that the disarticulated nature of the O. arharensis holotype (including limbs and missing hands and feet) suggests partial decomposition before burial. Whether due to internal bacteria breaking down muscle and fat with loose elements washing away, or through hunting/ scavenging has not been vigorously examined: the authors did note what appeared to be tooth marks on the skull surface, and "tyrannosaurid" teeth have been found in the same formation, and so tentatively hypothesized that carnivorous dinosaurs had a role to play in either the death or decay of this O. arharensis.

References
Godefroit, P., Bolotsky, Y., Alifanov, V. 2003. A remarkable hollow-crested hadrosaur from Russia: an Asian origin for lambeosaurines. Comptes Rendus Palevol 2:143-151

Godefroit, P., Bolotsky, Y., Bolotsky, I. Y. 2012.  Osteology and Relationships of Olorotitan arharensis, A Hollow-Crested Hadrosaurid Dinosaur from the Latest Cretaceous of Far Eastern Russia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. 57(3): 527-560


PBDB, n.d. Olorotitan arharensis Godefroit et al. 2003 (lambeosurine). From the Paleobiology Database. Accessed 03/02/2013. URL: http://paleodb.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl?a=checkTaxonInfo&taxon_no=72095&is_real_ user=1 and http://paleodb.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl?a=checkTaxonInfo&taxon_no=72095&is_real_user=1