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Are dinosaur fossils hogging top journals? Analysis sparks debate over ‘charismatic’ finds
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Discoveries of some species, such as this Pleurobranchaea britannica mollusc (left), are often seen as less enticing than others, such as the fossil dinosaur Spinosaurus mirabilis (artist's impression, right).Credit: Turani, M. et al./Zoosyst. Evol. CC BY 4.0, JA Chirinos/SPL
“When there’s a new dinosaur in a high-profile journal, there are always some critical remarks about why dinosaurs seem to always have this ‘in’,” says Bryan Gee, a palaeontological researcher at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, Washington, and author of the study. This especially seems to be the case when compared with less glamorous fossil species.
In a preprint posted to bioRxiv2 this month, Gee has put numbers to palaeontologists’ hunch. He found that discoveries of dinosaurs and other ‘charismatic’ extinct species — animals that capture public attention — are over-represented in high-profile journals, relative to the types of species described in specialist journals (see ‘Species spotlight’).
Gee’s study was inspired by social-media discussion of the Spinosaurus paper. But the idea that dinosaur fossils receive outsize attention from leading journals has always been taken as fact without much evidence to back it up, says Gee.
So he analysed more than 4,200 research papers, published since 2000, describing 8,331 new extinct species. The descriptions appeared in 13 journals, ranging from Science and Nature — which Gee says are the most prestigious journals that publish palaeontology research — to more specialist publications such as the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Journal of Paleontology. (Nature’s news team is independent of its journal team.)
Gee found that more than 50% of the fossil species described in Science and Nature were Avemetatarsalians — the group that includes dinosaurs and birds — and mammaliamorphs, which includes mammals and their close relatives. By contrast, these groups accounted for only 15% of the species described in a selection of specialist journals, in which invertebrates such as molluscs and arthropods accounted for more than half of the discovered species. Francesca Cesari, chief biological, clinical and social sciences editor for Nature, says: “Editorial decisions as to which papers are published are made independently based on the quality and significance of the research presented, and following a rigorous peer-review process. The papers we publish are a reflection of both the submissions we receive and the assessment of editors and reviewers regarding the importance of the findings.” (Representatives for Science declined to comment on the study, which has not been peer reviewed.)
The response to Gee’s preprint has been mixed, he says: “I saw some posts on [social-media website] BlueSky commenting — pardon my French — but almost like ‘No shit, Sherlock’.” But he thinks that it is important to bring data to bear on such questions.
The bias, Gee argues, warps incentives in palaeontology research, potentially driving early-career researchers away from working on less-captivating species. “You get a Nature paper, you probably get a tenure-track job,” he says.
A 2022 analysis3 by palaeobiologists Nussaïbah Raja-Schoob and Emma Dunne, at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen–Nuremberg in Erlangen, Germany, argued that the pressure to publish spectacular finds in high-profile journals favours charismatic fossils, particularly dinosaurs, over other species. This can encourage researchers to overlook questions about a fossil’s provenance, legality and accessibility to other scientists.