These same scientists argued in the past that the compound resveratrol, found in red wine, has the potential to fight off key diseases, in addition to offering well-known benefits such as total loss of inhibitions, being uncharacteristically friendly towards strangers, sluttiness, and hilarious “ironic” dancing.

“Yeah, we looked into the benefits behind wine consumption. We studied blood clots and diabetes, we experimented on mice, yadda yadda,” said Harvard researcher Dr. Montgomery Massey-Taylor with a large sigh as he unscrewed a bottle of Malbec. “But it just grew really boring and time-consuming, you know? I’ve got a great Sancerre too, if you’re not opposed to switching from red to white?”

This begs the question: if they didn’t know for certain, why did scientists tell us wine was good for us?

“We liked the sound of it, and we like the publicity these so-called revelations generate,” Massey-Taylor said as he dabbed at a red stain on his tie. “And sometimes you have to tell people what they want to hear. Red wine, chocolate, anal to mouth: it’s all good for you. These “theories” are easier for the public to swallow, so to speak.”

The post Scientist Admits To Having “No Clue” Whether Red Wine is Healthy — Just Sounded Like A “Cool Idea” appeared first on The Faster Times.

…Continue reading

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Stegoceras was not related to Stegosaurus, despite their similar names. it was a member of a group of dinosaurs called the Pachycephalosaurs (previously mentioned here ) that had rounded, bony skulls. When first

Two Stegoceras have a disagreement.

discovered, these animals were suspected to have butted heads, like rams or bighorn sheep. But opinion changed. Some argued that such behavior would have harmed the animals and they were more likely to have rammed each other in the flanks. Some went still further and posited that the animals didn’t use their bony heads for anything more then sexual display.

However, a new study published in PLoS has determined that Stegoceras very likely did ram heads with others of its kind. Researchers Eric Snively and Jessica Theodor ran CT scans on several modern animals, such as Musk Oxen and Bighorn Sheep, and compared their findings to the CT data from Stegoceras. What they saw confirmed that the original theory had been basically correct. Stegoceras, like modern day bruisers, possessed a thoroughly reinforced brain-case that was covered by spongy bone and shielded by the distinctive hardened skull. However, unlike modern head butting animals, Stegoceras had an additional layer of bone sandwiched between these layers. In other words, repeated blunt head trauma–such as the kind gained from smacking the hell out of your head via inter-species contests–would have had relatively little effect on the animal.

A predator manages to avoid a deadly strike.

Kentrosaurus, by contrast, was clearly a dangerous animal. A member of the Stegosaur family, it had traded in its plates for a row of long, wicked spikes down its tail. Clearly the thagomizer, as the spiked tail has come to be called, was capable of doing damage. But how much? The answer, according to Heinrich Mallison, was a horrific amount. Using computer modeling software, he determined how hard and how fast Kentrosaurus could swing its tail. With a strike speed of over 40 mph, the spikes were easily capable of killing a human with only a glancing blow. A predatory dinosaur that misjudged its strike could potentially have been fatally wounded.

With more research ongoing, it’s entirely likely that soon we’ll have more information on dinosaur weaponry. And perhaps some of the hypotheses and reconstructions will once again change. At any rate, it is still clear that even herbivorous dinosaurs were capable of packing a wallop.

The post Cut and Pounded: Two different dinosaurs bring the pain appeared first on The Faster Times.

Debuted by Atari as an arcade game in the 90′s, Primal Rage was a traditional 2D “versus” simulator set in the very traditional mold. Players selected from a menagerie of quasi-prehistoric beasts and battled it out across a variety of landscapes. In this, it was not particularly different from the later Jurassic Park: Dinosaur Battles, although the latter was arguably far better animated. What sets Primal Rage apart, however, is its back story.

Picture a world much like our own. A series of cataclysms wrought by a falling asteroid kill millions of people and transform the worlds surface. Out the devastation come the new gods; massive prehistoric beasts that symbolize various states of being. The carnosaurs Diablo and Sauron represent Chaos and Hunger, respectively. The velociraptor Talon is the god of survival, while Vertigo is a lovecraftian, serpentine monstrosity that embodies madness. The herbivorous Armadon is lord of life. Finally, the two giant apes (for since King Kong, giant apes and dinosaurs have gone together like chocolate and peanut butter) Blizzard and Chaos represent Good and Evil. The surviving remnants of humanity worship these beasts as totems, but the new gods hate one another, and one of them will eventually seek to rule over the entirety of the new world.

There’s something strangely compelling about this scenario, relayed in bits and pieces through images and text throughout the game. Owing a little to classic kaiju films and a lot to Topps “Dinosaurs Attack!” trading cards, Primal Rage went above and beyond in delivering an entertaining world, and one that held a good deal of potential for an actual story. Indeed, Atari must have thought so as well, since they more or less immediately put a sequel into development, released a licensed comic and novel, and put out toys to allow children to bash their favorite monstrosities together in the real world. Unfortunately, this flood of merchandise ran headlong into the game’s other defining feature: bloody violence.

Primal Rage was a gory game. Its characters bit, smacked, clawed, and tore bloody chucks from each other, in addition to a variety of special attacks that ranged from the predictable (super powered bite) to the gag inducing (acidic golden showers.) There was something of an uproar when parents discovered that not only were the dinosaur attacks exceedingly visceral, but other unpleasant bodily fluids were involved. Understandably perturbed, they kicked up enough of a ruckus that Atari rapidly pulled the game off the market and released a censored version that kept most of the blood but removed the more objectionable content. But this was the end of Primal Rage’s brief brush with any kind of relevance, and the game sank into obscurity, dragging down the sequel with it. There were and are a few die hard fans of the game, but by and large people moved on to other things and the franchise never really recovered.

I think it’s a shame. While vile and nasty, it had more of a story then others of its type, and the creature designs were rather creative. Perhaps if Atari or some other company remade it, it would finally find the audience that it deserves, and we could once more have a chance to bang our toothy toys together and growl.

The post Primal Rage: The Forgotten Fighting Game of The 90s appeared first on The Faster Times.

Warning, controversial ad ahead:

Um, okay. What is controversial about this ad? According to the MBTA, criticism of Brown’s vote is too much for T riders to handle.

“The MBTA only rejects about two ads a year–usually ads containing drugs or borderline nudity–but they’ve decided that a citizen-funded attempt to hold Scott Brown accountable for his vote to gut the Clean Air Act is unacceptable for public consumption,” 350.org’s Jamie Henn said in an email.

Ads that have NOT been pulled by MBTA include an ad that’s currently up featuring half-naked women and alcohol (state legislation banning liquor ads on publicly owned property is currently being considered for the 2nd time in three years), and a Judgment Day ad paid for by a vehemently anti-gay group (see below):

Although the move seems to be pretty clearly politically motivated, rather than take on the MBTA, 350.org is opting to go around them. The group has found a local agency willing to pull billboards of the ad around the city on bikes, and the media coverage of the MBTA’s decision is likely to have more people seeing the ads than would have initially.

In fact, the MBTA may already be re-thinking its decision. “After a week of no responses (and many messages later) the MBTA folks called us back and said that they never made an official decision about banning the ad because it’s too political (though that’s what they told us last week – hmmm) and are re-opening the ad for review,” 350.org’s Phil Aroneanu says. “That doesn’t mean they won’t ban it anyway, but at least they’re taking a second look.”

The post In Boston, Clean Air Is More Controversial than Drunk Naked Chicks appeared first on The Faster Times.

Last month at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Cooking for Solutions Conference , the emergence of genetically modified salmon on the U.S. market was a matter of great debate. After three days of listening to speakers and chatting with colleagues, what stood out most to me was that we have a major disconnect when it comes to informing the public in this country, with companies touting “innovation” on one hand, environmentalists crying foul on the other, and consumers in the middle with no one–certainly not the government–looking out for them, or giving them honest, unbiased information.

In other words, hey, FDA, if genetically modified salmon is perfectly safe for human consumption, why can’t I know which salmon are genetically modified? The answer, of course, is that the genetically modified salmon people would probably have to worry about their business model if they had a big GMO label slapped on their product, but why should their business be more worth protecting than the public’s rights, or the environment?

Part of the problem is figuring out which food labels make sense for the most stakeholders. “What do we do, label products with the most dire environmental impact? Or use labels that consumers are most likely to respond to, or that consumers tell us they want? Or do we go with the labels that businesses can most easily make money off of?” Jason J. Czarneszki, law professor at the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School, asked a crowd of journalists in Monterey.

These are the questions the government is grappling with, unsuccessfully, with each agency passing the buck to the next. The FTC is supposed to deal with labeling, but they’re fond of declining to step into an area–like food–where another government agency has authority. And while the FDA can say whether a food product is or isn’t safe for consumers, they have no labeling authority, which is why in the case of genetically modified salmon, they’re throwing up their hands and saying they can allow it to market but they can’t require that it be labeled.

“They can, they just don’t want to,” Dr. Urvashi Rangan, direct of technical policy for Consumers Union says. “It’s a real problem, because every time we ask consumers, the majority say they want GE and GMO to be noted on labels, so it’s always strange to hear the discomfort federal agencies have with it.”

But the labeling issue is just one part of the information problem. Even before we get to the issue of GMO salmon, most people still don’t understand the difference between farmed and wild salmon. In a completely unscientific study, the majority of people I asked over the weekend thought farmed fish was probably better for the environment than wild-caught fish. In the lion’s share of cases that’s not true, but the public is given little to no credible, easily digested information on the matter (for the record: fish farms often erode marine environments, harm biodiversity, and introduce hormones, antibiotics and disease into waterways). Before the public has even begun to wrap its collective head around what “farmed fish” really means, it is just about to surpass wild-caught.

The story of salmon is yet another cautionary tale about what happens when humans mess with nature. The demise of wild salmon stocks has led to a surge in farmed salmon, which has in turn bred a situation wherein the frankenfish GMO salmon seems like an okay idea. Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish, points out that salmon used to be wild-caught on the east coast. “People have totally lost that memory, but they were initially knocked out by dams–not big ones like the ones on the West coast that you want to fight, but thousands of tiny ones,” he says. “Connecticut is a tiny state, but it has 5,000 dams. Connecticut’s chi is totally blocked! And those dams knocked out salmon runs throughout east coast.”

Habitat destruction accounts for part of the problem, but then there’s over-fishing, a problem that can largely be traced to the post-World War II period. “Europe was hungry and war technology could suddenly be applied against fish,” Greenberg explains. “In the 1940s and 1950s, Faroe Island fisherman found a spot near Greenland where all the Atlantic salmon go. As soon as they identified that patch of water, they fished it hard. They told their friends in Denmark and Norway and pretty soon there was a lot of pressure on Atlantic salmon.”

Overfishing and dams have also put pressure on West coast salmon and now Bristol Bay, Alaska is home to one of the last giant wild salmon runs in the country. Unfortunately it’s also the proposed site of the Pebble Mine, which would mine copper at the headwaters. Salmon navigating using their sense of smell, and two parts per billion of copper in the water would be enough to mess with that sense, severely impacting the salmon run. The mine is said to be worth $300 billion, but how do you put a price on one of the last natural salmon runs?

The other side of the story has to do with farmed salmon. The first attempts at farming salmon go back to the 1400s. Salmon eggs are big and nutrient rich, so when they hatch, they have some nutrition to live on, which makes it relatively easy to transition a larval salmon onto industrial feed pellets. As time went on, fish farmers began to breed for traits like feed efficiency, and by the 1960s and 1970s what started to emerge was a sort of farmed sub-species. “They doubled the efficiency of salmon and doubled it again,” Greenberg says. “And efficient farmed salmon got cheap.”

Now we have not only overfishing, habitat destruction, and aquaculture, but also technological advances that have enabled the creation of genetically engineered salmon. The U.S. company AquaBounty grows and filets its genetically engineered salmon in Panama, then ship it back for U.S. consumers, thus avoiding having to do an environmental impact report on its aquaculture practices. Without intervention, and it looks as though there won’t be any, the AquaAdvantage salmon will simply be labeled Atlantic salmon. Rather than provide a cheap protein for the poor, Greenberg says AquaBounty is likely to use the technology to control salmon farming. “Should salmon farming come to be dominated by the AquAdvantage fish, farmers could become dependent on a single company for their stock, just as soy, corn, and wheat farmers must now rely on large multinationals like Monsanto to provide seed for their fields year in and year out,” he wrote in a recent essay.

Which has me wondering, when are we going to figure out that trying to own or engineer nature tends to have dire, unintended consequences? Monsanto’s infamous “Round-Up Ready” seeds have already sparked the emergence of so-called “superweeds” resistant to herbicides, and the emergence of unaccounted for hybrids (created when the genetically engineered RoundUp Ready genes are transferred to wild plants by pollen). We’re just now finding out…or being told…about the diseases caused by the various chemicals we’ve used to try to dominate nature. Our obsession with antibacterials has created a superbug. And now we’re embarking on a journey with genetically engineered animals, which we plan to feed to people without telling them–probably poor people because that’s how these things always go–and then just hope for the best, even though we know better.

The post The Frankenfish Should Be a Wake-Up Call appeared first on The Faster Times.

Elliot Margolies, Flickr, Creative Commons

In the 1980s and 1990s Big Tobacco, mostly led by Philip Morris, spent millions of dollars trying to stop two things they were convinced would ruin their business: regulation of smoking and how cigarettes are marketed, and the dissemination of information about the health effects of smoking. Today, a similar story is playing out around another everyday sort of product mainstream America has been led to believe is relatively harmless: plastic. In particular disposable plastics (bottled water, straws, and so forth) and plastic food packaging.

When the tobacco industry wanted to gain control over the messages the public was receiving about smoking, it set up a dummy nonprofit called the Center for Consumer Freedom, run by notorious lobbyist Richard Berman. Berman launched the Center for Consumer Freedom with a $600,000 “donation” from Philip Morris; the company continued to make charitable donations to CCF throughout the 1990s, funneling 49 to 79 percent of its charitable funding to the Center between 1995 and 1998. The CCF took that money and turned it into ad campaigns about the “right to smoke” and push polls aimed at “proving” that Americans didn’t want smoking regulated.

Flash forward a decade and the Center for Consumer Freedom has a new consumer product to protect: plastic. Like Big Tobacco, Big Plastic is at a turning point: Although its deep pockets have been able to stave off statewide or nationwide regulation thus far, it is in danger of losing its grip. In California, when a state ban on plastic bags was narrowly voted down thanks in large part to the millions spent by the ACC and various plastic bag manufacturers in the state, counties and cities quickly took matters into their own hands and began passing local bills. Following in the footsteps of San Francisco, the cities of Santa Monica, Long Beach, San Jose, and Calabasas all passed bans in the year following the defeat of the state ban, as did Los Angeles and Marin counties. Now state bag bans are up for a vote in Oregon and Vermont, the California ban is back on the docket, and major county bans are being hotly debated in Hawaii. At the same time, more and more information is coming out about the toxicity of the few chemicals known to be used in plastic. Bisphenol A (BPA), pthalates, and dioxins have all made headlines as toxic villains in the past few years, and pressure is rising for national and state legislators to regulate them for consumer safety. The rest of the chemicals used in most plastic materials are kept hidden from consumers as “trade secrets.”

In a desperate attempt to stop the flow of information about the environmental and public health impacts of plastic, and thus to squelch any regulatory attempts, the plastic industry is taking a few pages from the Philip Morris playbook. In the last several months, lawsuits have been filed against all of the cities and counties passing bans in California. Every time a ban passes, the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, a nonprofit that counts several plastic bag manufacturers as members (although it refuses to disclose which ones) sues the county or city, typically to require an Environmental Impact Report. This tactic worked with earlier bans that solely banned plastic (the increased use of paper bags was an environmental problem), but modern bans are aimed at all single-use bags, making it tougher for the lawsuits to stick. Plastic bag manufacturers have also ganged up to sue a small reusable bag maker in Chico, CA (ChicoBag), claiming “false advertising” because the company includes facts about the environmental impact of plastic bags on its website, and filing the suit in North Carolina to avoid California’s corporate bullying laws.

On the health front, the industry is working to push de minimis clauses on BPA legislation, which would allow products to sport the “BPA-free” label if they have below a certain amount of BPA in them; this is problematic with any toxic chemical, but it is especially so with BPA given that it has been proven to cause health problems even at doses lower than the amount currently deemed “safe” by the EPA and the FDA; this is particularly true of fetuses in utero, which have been proven to suffer developmental damage as a result of even very low exposure to BPA.

And in the midst of it all, the Center for Consumer Freedom is trying to keep Americans focused on plastic bags and, most importantly of course, their right to them. The CCF has begun running ads calling into question the safety of reusable bags, and releasing push polls that claim Americans love their plastic bags and don’t want to see their right to plastic infringed upon. When the Center for Environmental Health followed up on the CCF’s claims that “most” reusable bags had lead and bacteria in them, they found only two bags with dangerous levels – one type was made out of recycled plastic, the other had a plastic liner.

Big Plastic’s tactics go a giant step further than Big Tobacco’s in one key way: The plastic industry has successfully managed to use environmental messaging to promote an activity that is 100 % negative for the environment, the continued use and disposal of throwaway plastics. There are several examples of this, but the most insidious are the industry’s use of recycling as a justification for the continued use of disposable plastics, and its sponsorship of various research expeditions and conferences around ocean plastic pollution (which it euphemistically calls “marine debris”).

Recycling is fantastic for paper, cardboard, aluminum and glass. For plastic, the case is harder to make. Oftentimes, plastic can only be downcycled (turned into another type of product) not recycled, which means that unlike, say, glass recycling, plastic recycling in most instances does not stem the need for virgin plastic. There’s also little market for recycled plastic goods; one recycler in Oregon recently told the local paper that they’re sitting on two years worth of old plastic they’ve picked up that nobody wants. According to the EPA, only 9% of U.S. plastic packaging is recycled. Much of the used plastics picked up in the U.S. and Western Europe is shipped to China, where workers are subjected to various toxics in the course of breaking down and, in many cases, incinerating the stuff to make new materials. Unfortunately, by tapping into the environmental movement’s historic love of recycling, the industry has managed to spin a tale of plastic recycling that all but eliminates the impact of disposable plastic goods.

Similarly, by supporting projects like Project Kaisei, which is researching the effects of garbage on the ocean, and Earth911, a website that provides environmental information about various topics, including plastic, the industry has managed to associate itself with the very people who should be railing against it. In this way it has managed to largely control and manipulate the stream of information reaching the public. The latest instance of this is the American Chemistry Council‘s sponsorship of the largest international conference on ocean plastic pollution, happening this week in Honolulu. Convened by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 5th International Marine Debris Conference is filled with panels focused on various aspects of plastic pollution. Yet, two of its largest sponsors are the American Chemistry Council and Coca Cola, and low and behold, the public commitments coming out of the conference are filled with the terms “marine debris” or “marine litter,” and no mention of plastic at all.

At the end of the day, this is a story that should piss off every consumer. Whether you consider yourself an environmentalist or not is irrelevant. The fact is that a group of companies are producing products that contain known carcinogens and other toxics and they are making every effort and sparing no expense to manipulate that information, hide it, discredit the researchers producing it, and stop any regulation of the chemicals. They are effectively robbing consumers of the very freedom they purport to support, by endeavoring to keep important information out of the public’s hands. That is a crime and it ought to be stopped.

This article originally appeared on the EnvironmentaList.

The post The Plastic Industry Is the New Tobacco Industry appeared first on The Faster Times.

No single issue haunts popular ecology and meteorology more than the specter of global warming. Documentaries, television specials, op-eds and magazine articles, there is a ceaseless stream of press and punditry from both sides, a flow as inexorable as water off a melting glacier. Many argue that it’s a real and present threat, and others just a vehemently argue it’s nothing much to worry about. But despite what the media would have you believe, there isn’t any real disagreement that global warming exists; the real disagreement comes from what its effect on our world will be. How should we react to this all encompassing change?

By not panicking, argues paleoclimatologist Curt Stager in his new book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life On Earth. The world is going to change in new and unexpected ways–we are past the point of no return. The arctic ice is going to shrink, the glaciers will recede and leave new and fertile lands, and the ocean waters will grow progressively more acidic. Beach front property will be submerged, and countries such as Greenland will finally start to live up to their name. Some dry areas will grow wet, and others will parch. Stager spins a vision of a radically changed but still viable world, and takes pains to point out that while a global warming trend is going to be ecologically painful, it may yield some good down the line.

That said, we should by no means dismiss global warming as an over hyped issue. In various chapters, Stager describes the harrowing results of carbon saturation; massive acidification in the oceans, parching in the interiors of the continents, and other ecological changes that will make life very difficult in some parts of the world. In one particularly harrowing passage, he describes the effect of oceanic acidification on plankton, the foundation on which the ocean food chain is built. The reader is left wondering if perhaps the real horror stories of global warming are going unreported.

Chapters such as this contribute to the book’s rather odd tone. It’s an improbably relaxed book, one that jettisons the hysteria of other such studies. Stager writes with an engagingly open style, although in a few places he struggles to simplify certain concepts in a satisfactory manner. On the whole, however, he does an excellent job of making himself understood in a lucid and occasionally witty fashion. Every now and then, however, the prose takes a dark turn: Stager makes it very clear that while we should not panic about the coming change, it would be catastrophic for us to continue with business as usual.

The pacing is also worth noting. Many books on the subject of global warming are not well organized, their arguments either lost in the welter of data or running roughshod over it. Stager opts for a slightly different tack–he allows the data to guide and support the narrative, while mostly being deft enough to preventing it from taking over the work. There are a few points in which he loses the thread somewhat, particularly toward the middle, but such lapses are rare and brief.

On the whole, Deep Future is a clear, concise, and thought provoking work, one that takes a refreshingly frank look at the science behind global warming and, more importantly, what is coming next. In a field where hyperbolic claims and bitter skepticism prevail, the clarity and unflappability of Stager’s account is like a breath of fresh, slightly heated air.

The post Deep Future: A Book Review appeared first on The Faster Times.

First things first: It’s great that companies are looking for alternatives to plastic, and there’s huge potential for bioplastics to be a big part of the solution to our single-use plastic problem. On that note, Pepsi and Coca Cola deserve kudos for putting their money where their press releases are and investing in research for new materials. At the same time, if companies get a big pat on the back for new packaging materials that come with the same old problems, then they stop trying to do better and we all lose. Furthermore, if we replace one disposable item with another, how is that really a solution?

Unfortunately, this is where we’re at with the Pepsi “plant bottle” announced yesterday. The headlines were filled with praise for the company for using nothing but cast-off plant parts in its bottle (plus points for not using a food-based crop as the feedstock), and for beating Coca Cola to the punch by delivering a 100-percent plant-based bottle. The problem is that the bottle is still PET, just like regular old plastic water bottles, it’s just that Pepsi’s plant-based PET is made from agricultural waste and non-food crops like switch grass, while the average plastic bottle is made from petroleum.

What was not included in Pepsi’s announcement, nor in any of the subsequent articles about the plant bottle, was the fact that the disposal issue remains the same. Whether plant-based or petroleum-based, PET still poses a waste management problem. In fact, in some ways it might even be worse. As Captain Charles Moore, of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, points out, switching the source material from petroleum to plants just means that plastic water bottles will continue to be a problem once oil runs out. In that sense, Pepsi’s move to a plant-based bottle looks like more of a supply chain solution than a particularly “green” business practice.

“A plastic such as PET, or high-density polyethylene HDPE, can be 100 percent bio-based (for instance 100 percent organic hemp), and yet still be non-biodegradable,” says Manuel Maqueda, of BlooSee. “The public, however, is led to think that any bio-based plastic is biodegradable, which is not at all the case.”

It’s this end-of-life issue that concerns Daniella Russo, executive director of Plastic Pollution Coalition. “A 100-percent plant-based PET bottle would be great along with a recycling system to capture and process the material,” she says. “Otherwise they will all end up in landfills, incinerators and the environment……most composters do not want the material.”

Despite Pepsi Co.’s claim that its plant bottle exists in a “closed loop system,” Russo argues that the company has effectively dodged end-of-life responsibility for the bottles by passing that responsiblity off to consumers. “The claim of a closed loop system is not justified without the consumer end of the loop being closed,” she says. “The onus is still on consumers to turn in the bottles.”

Moreover, a recent study found that in some cases the process of creating plant-based plastics is actually more polluting than the traditional plastic manufacturing process.

So, thanks for trying, Pepsi, but we think you can do better. In fact, we’re certain you can.

This post originally appeared on Plastic Free Times.

The post Surprise! Pepsi’s New Plant Bottle Is Good Old-Fashioned Greenwashing appeared first on The Faster Times.

Then, a few days ago on the Dinosaur Mailing List, Gregory S. Paul decided he’d had enough. In a long series of posts, he railed against those artists who were working in his style and underbidding him and, to a greater extent, the media and museum people who encouraged it. Finally, he made a sweeping statement to the paleoart world: stop using my skeletal reconstructions.

This sparked a massive discussion on the list serve, one that has had artists and scientists from the professional to the amateur weighing in. Several issues were raised with Paul’s position. Was Paul attempting to copyright specific postures, as he’d implied in one of his emails? Did he have the right to prevent artists from making use of his technical and scientific skeletal illustrations for the purposes of their own reconstructions? How far did his copyright claims extend? And most importantly, can you copyright the exact proportions of an animal skeleton?

These are all important issues, and for simplicities sake let’s make a few things clear. First, Paul has every right in the world to try and protect himself from copyright infringement–indeed, he pointed out that if it weren’t for the significant lost revenue, he wouldn’t have said anything. I fully encourage him to go after people who have been ripping off his distinctive life reconstructions. It’s his duty as an artist.

However, many of his arguments have devolved into a good deal of pointless name calling and this is starting to cloud what is a very important issue–the need for a uniform price index or guild for paleoartists. How do Paul’s complaints stack up against this need? Which of his demands are reasonable and which aren’t?

Paul is demanding that other skeletal artists start using a different standard pose then the one he pioneered. Scott Hartman, among others, has graciously agreed and is changing his illustrations to new, original poses. But it’s clear to me that Paul has no legal grounds to claim copyright or brand on this so called “Paul Look.” His argument, in essence, is one of squatter’s rights; he’s been doing it for the longest, so it belongs to him. Copyright, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t work that way.

Similarly, he claims that a standard skeletal pose is bad science when used by different illustrators. Others have argued, I think correctly, that in fact standard poses tend to highlight errors made in the reconstructions, especially when compared to other artist’s work.

There’s more. What if an artist wishes to use another person’s skeletal references on a commercial illustration? Are royalties in order? Paul overreached again, making a blanket assertion that artists should simply create their own. Nothing wrong with that, but some of us have neither the money nor the access to papers or bones necessary for such work. Paul’s response to this issue is simply to say that we should stay out of the business and leave it to the professionals, but that is tamping down on valuable creative competition and is dangerously close to blaming younger artists for what is basically a problem with the employers.

These issues are going to need to be solved, and while I wish Mr. Paul only the best in protecting his interests, I also cannot in good faith support him any longer. Some of his ideas are good, and I suggest we should use them–perhaps a different standard pose can be found, one that we can all agree will not be subject to such debates in the future. Price indexing is long overdue, as well. But when it comes to the kind of old guard vs. new guard arguments that he is espousing, his ludicrous claim to brand, and his frankly shocking behavior on the DML, I have to say that I have had enough.

Gregory S. Paul is correct in that there are serious issues in the paleoart world. But the way to deal with is is not to try and restrict others usage of scientific artwork–rather, it is to encourage others to produce work that has a distinct visual flavor, and can be valued at set prices. Otherwise, much like the dinosaurs we illustrate, we’re ignoring the wider troubles headed our way.

Elsewhere on the blogosphere: Love in The Time of Chasmosaurs, Art Evolved, Scientific American. We haven’t heard the last of this, folks. Not by a long shot.

The post Gregory S. Paul and The Future of Paleoart appeared first on The Faster Times.