Hadrosaurs. David A. Eberth
was what we came to Drumheller to report on. It was hadrosaur taxonomy, North American, Asian, South American, and European hadrosaurs, and ornithopod brains. It was also hadrosaur gigantism and age, hadrosaur jaws and herbivory, locomotor mechanics, taphonomy, integument, tracks, and various aspects of development. This was where we thought our discipline was as we began the symposium.
Eighty-eight percent of the symposium talks (n = 34 talks, 16 posters) fall within the categories discussed here (Braman et al., 2011). Most are taxonomic, phylogenetic, or biogeographic in scope. Another half-dozen or more pertain to functional morphology, growth, and taphonomy – a good sampling of the categories examined here (an acclaim delivered independently twice over – the organizers and I both got it right!).
Symposium percentages are all the same order of magnitude compared to those obtained for the decade of 2000–2010, but there are several differences. General taxonomic presentations at the symposium were nearly 25% fewer than from 2000–2010, phylogeny was 19% fewer, taphonomy was 15% fewer, biogeography was 28% fewer, paleoecology was 19% fewer, and faunistics was 13% fewer. Soft tissue remained approximately the same. Interestingly, functional morphology was 14% more and growth was 6% more than from the decade of 2000–2010. While it is tempting to assign significance to individual percentages, they are probably no more than sampling errors when comparing a very small number of symposium talks with the projected breakdown of categories for an entire decade.
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
I am certainly no prognosticator, even about my own research field. Like all historical sciences, our ability to predict the future is fraught with the kinds of unpredictability that derives from historical contingency. There is little inevitability that guides us in the progress of our science – just as there is little that links the hand-cranked ice-cream maker (1840s) to the electron microscope (1930s), a transition that happened in only nine decades. What about going from the invention of the Band-Aid (1930s) to the home computer in five decades? Who would have predicted these changes?
But the contents of this volume give an inkling of where we are headed, at least in the short run. I see continued fieldwork, the wellspring of our science. Its direct consequences – new species and taxonomic revisions – are likely to be accompanied by a healthy continuance of studies focused on comparative anatomy, both bony and inferred soft tissue. To do so requires a healthy dose of phylogenetic systematics, which now should be part of everyone’s toolkit. In functional morphology, finite element analyses and tooth-wear studies have appeared on the horizon and I hope these will be coupled with cladistic analyses to produce even more outstanding work. Finally, growth studies are very likely to continue in the future: the small bit of bone given up for a thin-section is bound to yield disproportionately much more subtle and profound information than if it were left with the rest of the bone.
Still, things do not always work out that way. Contingency makes history messy. Things come out of left field and WHAM! Someone discovers the most amazing specimen or means by which colors can be inferred from skin impressions. All of a sudden, with no way of predicting, we are all scrambling to do research on the melanosomes of what could turn out to be red-, green-, and yellow-striped ornithopods!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank David Eberth and David Evans for their kind invitation to join them at their fantastic first International Hadrosaur Symposium in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. Their generosity and that of François Therrien and the other hosts at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology are most commendable. And to throw in a bronze plaque of Corythosaurus intermedius (ROM 845); well, I sure had a good time! I also thank Ali Nabavizadeh and Cat Sartin for their help on and reading of this manuscript and Jack Horner, Cora Jianu, and Pilar Yagüe for their own individual inspirations.
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