Is there a finish line? (and how to get there)

Yes. . .I hope there is a finish line. As with many things started with the best of intentions, the ODP (and its heads – particularly me) has gotten waylaid. That said, it would be a shame to let the numerous contributions and hours of volunteer effort go to waste. So, Matt and Mike and I have been having some serious conversations about finishing this once and for all! So, here’s the deal.

• I want to finish this. You want to finish this. It just needs to be finished.
• Analysis and write-up are the main things that need to be done. It requires a bit of concentrated effort (primarily on my part).
• The way I see it, the most productive product of the analysis would be to examine limb disparity in ornithischian dinosaurs through time. This would entail binning the dinos and running the analysis. Riffing off of recent work by numerous authors, this would involve running a PCO (principal coordinates analysis) on the measurements for each bin. This can then be converted to a metric that shows overall morphological disparity. The primary question this asks is, “How did ornithischians diversify in their limb bone proportions through time?” Was it something that happened right away? Or something that happened later? A related question concerns how to accommodate phylogeny. As with many recent papers, the main thing we’re interested in here are ghost lineages. Given the incomplete nature of the fossil record, ancestral state reconstruction of some sort is probably needed. The problem, however, is that these methods are often. . .vague. . .at best. Perhaps maximum likelihood reconstruction in the relevant R packages? (see this link for an example ) Or perhaps skip trying to reconstruct stuff altogether and take the results with appropriate caution?
• I envision three analyses: all limbs together (for all animals that are appropriately complete), forelimbs, and hind limbs. This would help account for animals that preserve only forelimbs, or only hind limbs.

Tasks to do:

• Incorporate any last bits of data (assuming there is something major that needs to be added)
• Check that all taxa are binned correctly (info on bin size in methods section of linked paper – see spreadsheet with preliminary binning)
• Run the analysis – probably using R
• Write the paper – I have a preliminary manuscript draft viewable (but not editable) here.

Timeline:

• Realistically, upcoming major events in the real world mean that I (Andy) have to get this thing off my plate by December 1 at latest. This is also best for Matt and Mike, too (and everyone, right?). This means a finished, submitted manuscript.
• If the December 1 thing doesn’t happen, realistically we need a way to “cut the data loose.” Although we’ve had a general statement on the blog that we would rather others hold off on using our data until the paper is published, it isn’t fair to sit on the data for years at a time. So, this means that we would step aside from right of first refusal for publication with the data. This means that others are welcome to use the data without explicit permission (although the ODP should still be cited as the data source). The data would be archived at figshare, which provides a stable link, long-term archiving, and DOI for future linking.