Paleontology Editing and Proofreading Services

The specimen is figured, described and named. The locality is given as a quarry, the horizon as a formation, and the material as being in a private collection with an owner's number. In forty years the quarry is landfill, the collection has been sold, and the name rests on an animal nobody can examine — which means the name will eventually be set aside, along with everything published under it.

We edit what palaeontologists write — systematic descriptions and revisions, specimen and locality documentation, taphonomic and depositional analyses, phylogenetic analyses and character matrices, biostratigraphic and correlation studies, palaeoecological and functional papers, collection and curation documentation, and monographs, articles and theses. Our editors work on the specimen record and what it has to carry.

A palaeontological name is anchored to a physical object, and the failure is a description whose specimen cannot be found or whose provenance cannot be reconstructed. The specimen, its repository and its stratigraphic position are the parts of the paper that have to survive everything else. We work through these so the holotype is designated explicitly and singly, with its institutional number in a permanent, publicly accessible repository, since material in private hands cannot support a name that others must use; so referred material is listed separately with the basis for referral, because a hypodigm assembled without stated criteria expands quietly and stops meaning anything; so the locality is recorded with coordinates and enough description to relocate it, given that quarries close and exposures are lost within a working lifetime; so the horizon is given as a measured position in a described section rather than as a formation name, as formations are thick and their boundaries move with revision; so preservation and preparation are described, including any reconstruction, adhesive or restoration, since a later worker examining the specimen needs to know what is bone; so characters used in analysis are defined observably and their scoring justified for the specimen; and so casts, photographs and scan data are deposited. Descriptions written this way outlive their authors' careers.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished descriptions, locality details and material awaiting accession. We are editors rather than palaeontologists, and we offer no view on identification, phylogeny or stratigraphy. What we can do is make the specimen record complete.