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David Peters is an advertising artist from St. Louis, with a pleasing style when painting natural history subjects. Starting in the 1980's, he produced a series of illustrated children's books on zoological and paleontological subjects and also a couple of calendars. He then became more interested in paleontology and for some reason narrowed his focus to pterosaurs. As time passed, he began to come up with new ideas about pterosaurs and decided he could contribute to pterosaur research by publishing his ideas. To that end he began writing manuscripts, which he sent off to various pterosaur workers for comment. The consensus of opinion was that his ideas were incorrect and his manuscripts so poorly written that they were unpublishable. Although I disagreed with his conclusions, I initially encouraged him to narrow the focus of his manuscripts, clarify his logic, tighten his prose, and get his ideas published. However, it soon became apparent that he either did not understand the constructive criticism offered by pterosaur workers such as Dave Unwin, Kevin Padian, and me, or he simply chose to ignore it. For example, at one point, he sent me a manuscript and asked me to comment on it and I sent him a long letter with many suggestions on how to revise the manuscript in order to get it published. Some time after that, a refereed journal asked me to review a manuscript, and it was the same manuscript, virtually unchanged and with all the problems I had noted earlier and written to Peters about. Because he was unwilling to take well-intentioned advice, Peters was unsuccessful in his attempts to publish his ideas, and so he started submitting abstracts to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and presenting his ideas in posters. After presenting a series of posters at SVP meetings he managed to get two manuscripts published in refereed journals over the objections of at least some of the reviewers. One of the papers was his "A reexamination of four prolacertiformes with implications of pterosaur phylogeny", published in 2000. As a result of his activity on the Dinosaur listservice, Peters' ideas were gaining some uncritical acceptance, and Peters was quite irritated when Unwin and I commented on the list that there were major problems with the paper. Peters asked me what I thought was wrong with the paper, and I wrote him a very long letter detailing 20 or 30 problems, which I emailed to him. Instead of considering the points I had raised, instead of taking the time to understand my point of view before trying to present arguments against it, he replied in fewer than 24 hours and dismissed every one of my points as incorrect. By this time, I had the impression that Peters felt that academic pterosaur workers were conspiring against him, trying to keep him from publishing because he wasn't one of us or because we were jealous of his new ideas. After 2002 Peters concentrated his efforts on a photointerpretation technique, in which he found photographs of specimens, scanned them into his computer, manipulated the resulting digital images, and pored over them to outline features that he then interpreted as bones and traces of soft tissues. Using this technique, Peters claimed to have discovered all manner of bizarre features (dorsal frills, tassels, crests, embryos, babies at the breast, etc.) that no one had seen before and no one else could see; discoveries that surely could not have been made if Peters had had to examine the actual specimens. In 2004 Peters put up a website on which he presented his ideas, and shortly thereafter he had a half dozen articles published in Prehistoric Times magazine. The website and the articles were absolutely amazing. Amazing in the sheer volume of bizarre material that he had produced, and amazing, too, that he could continue to interpret the rejection of all that material by academic pterosaur workers as a conspiracy against a new-thinking amateur rather than as the rejection of the unscientific nonsense that it was. MARCH 2008 UPDATE! - Peters showed up at the Wellnhofer Pterosaur Meeting in September 2007 asserting that pterosaurs are descended from lizards, and although he was treated politely, we did point out that his photointerpretation methodology and his cladistic ideas are nonsense. Perhaps as a result, he seems to have embarked on a frantic binge of writing and submitting manuscripts to peer reviewed journals. He submitted something to the symposium volume though I was not asked to review it, and in the first three months of 2008 I have reviewed three other manuscripts, each based in large part on his photointerpretation methodology, each naming at least one new genus and species by way of a totally screwed up Systematic Paleontology section, two including the same cladistic analysis suggesting that pterosaurs descend from lizards [yes, he tried to publish the same analysis in two journals simultaneously], and one taking aim at my paper on juvenile Germanodactylus specimens and blasting it with both barrels at point-blank range [it's okay, he missed]. In addition, I understand that he intends to submit a manuscript to rebut my paper on the second Anurognathus specimen, which will be based on his photointerpretation methodology, and if we are lucky he will name a new genus and species. The sad thing is that the manuscripts are poorly formatted and much less polished than his efforts of 2000-2002. With all the constructive criticism he has been given, he could by now be producing perfectly formatted and very polished manuscripts encapsulating his ridiculous ideas, but he does not seem to be serious about publishing his ideas and perhaps he now takes some sort of perverse pleasure in the rejections. AUGUST 2008 UPDATE! - PETERS ADMITS HIS PHOTOINTERPRETATION METHOD DOES NOT WORK! - Well, not exactly, but almost. Here's what happened. After four months of blissful silence, Peters emailed me 3 images of his reinterpretation of the new specimen of Anurognathus that I described in 2007, a reinterpretation that was based as usual on his photointerpretation methodology applied in this case to a color photograph supplied by Helmut Tischlinger. Peters stated that "We have to get past this Photoshop roadblock" and suggested that his reinterpretation was very Dimorphodon-like, but did not provide any other description or discussion. I replied in an email that we didn't need to get around a roadblock, he did, that I could not interpret his illustrations without some accompanying description or discussion, and closed by asking him "How can you convince me or Unwin or Kellner or anyone else that the basipterygoids (or any other elements that you find with your methodology) are actually there?" Note that I specifically mentioned basipterygoids because I saw features labeled as basipterygoids on one of the figures he sent me, and because it was clear to me (based on my examination of the actual specimen) that basipterygoids could not possibly be visible at the point on the specimen where Peters "found" them (instead at that point one sees limestone filling the endocranial cavity where the thin frontals flaked off with the counterpart leaving an internal mold of the frontals). In a second email to which Peters attached a copy of his Anurognathus manuscript (proposing a new genus and species for the specimen) plus another 7 images, Peters stated that a comparison of our competing interpretations of the Anurognathus specimen "provided an ideal test of one method vs. another". Peters, of course, does not understand that that would not be a test of competing methods, but rather a test of competing methods and practitioners, because although the methods we used differ, so too do our competences. I replied to Peters' second email at some length, but closed with the following: "You did not answer my question 'How can you convince me or Unwin or Kellner or anyone else that the basipterygoids (or any other elements that you find with your methodology) are actually there?' other than to suggest that your manuscript should do it. I tell you again, it will do no such thing; the only way to convince us would be to sit down with the specimen under a stereo microscope and have you point of [sic; I meant 'out'] where the basipterygoids are to be seen. I would point out that you had a genuine opportunity to test your methodology last September, when you could have gotten together with me and the others, a stereo microscope, the holotype of Anurognathus , and your photointerpretation of same. But instead you made no attempt to convince us, and I bet you made no attempt to check your photointerpretation against the specimen by yourself either." Peters replied to this closing paragraph as follows in a third email:"For you to suggest that I show you guys the basipterygoids under the microscope when we're all there is unreasonable. I can't place markers on the bones under the microscope as I can with Photoshop. And I can't place them into a reconstruction as I can with Photoshop. And It's also all too easy for a naysayer to say "I don't see it that way. End of story." Besides, more than anything, these bones, as you know, are intensely difficult to determine. Some underlie others. And I didn't have the data until after Munich." Did you get that, in essence he says he cannot identify the things that he "finds" with his photointerpretation methodology on the actual specimens. Microscope eyepieces often have pointers and failing a pointer he could center the basipterygoids in the field of view or even use a camera lucida to outline them if they were actually there to see, but no, he can't find them under a microscope any more than we can. Furthermore, it is "unreasonable" for the likes of me and Unwin to expect that he could actually point out the basipterygoids or any of his other "finds" on the actual specimen under a microscope. His suggestion that "these bones, as you know, are intensely difficult to determine" is ridiculous if by it he means that it is difficult to identify what is and isn't bone. Interpreting the homologies of the skull bones of the new Anurognathus was difficult and took a lot of time, but identifying what was bone and what was limestone was not a problem. By the way, that line "I didn't have the data until after Munich" is not true, because in my message I referred to the holotype of Anurognathus not the new specimen, and Peters sent me a copy of his photointerpretation of the holotype back in the Fall of 2002 (see my Critique below).Should anyone really care, I can provide the full texts of Peters' 3 emails and my 2 replies. For more information, check out the following:
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