Independence Day

it’s the Fourth of July. Time to Celebrate
independence from traditional errors, enigmas and old-fashioned hypotheses entangling, hobbling and corrupting current Academics in paleontology – some of whom continue to refuse to include longer lists of taxa in their matrices – and who refuse to examine relevant taxa.

This is going to be an abbreviated, but nerdy, esoteric, anti-establishment blogpost, all of which you’ve heard here before over the last decade and a half.

It took Independence from Academia to:

1. Recover a last common ancestor for the clade Reptilia (Silvanerpeton, Fig 1), making ‘Amniota’ a junior synonym and recover a first dichotomy splitting Archosauromorpha from Lepidosauromorpha.
2. Recover basalmost tetrapods (fin-to-finger transitions) from previously ignored taxa, moving Ichthyostega and Acanthostega into derived nodes.
3. Recover the origin of hard-shell turtles and soft-shell turtles from small horned pareiasaurs,
4. Recover convergent and separate origins for a diapsid skull architecture.
5. Recover convergent and separate origins for a synapsid skull architecture.
6. Recover convergent and separate origins for an archosaur skull architecture.
7. Recover convergent and separate origins for a whale morphology.
8. Recover pterosaurs from tiny tanystropheids and lepidosaurs close to Huehuecuetzpalli
9. Recover bats and colugos as derived primates, and humans as derived gibbons.
10. Recover Solnhofen birds into ten+ different genera, only one of which is Archaeopteryx.

And many, many other recoveries, still not found in textbooks.

Academics either did not respond to these new recoveries
or responded without evidence, without examining specimens, without matching taxon lists.

Examples follow:

SC Bennett summed up the current situation.
“It is not enough to get published if everybody ignores your paper as the work of a crackpot... I have sincerely given you my best advice for getting your ideas published and taken seriously. You simply do not seem to take any of my advice; perhaps you do not understand my advice, perhaps you choose to ignore it.“

Note that Bennett ignores the fact that other workers and editors actually approved manuscripts published in Nature, Science, Historical Biology, ichnos, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and Rivista Italiana. Few other ‘crackpots’ can claim this publication list.

Be wary whenever you get personal‘advice’ when you are seeking professional advice.

No doubt, Bennett speaks for many academics,
but not ‘everybody’. If not ‘everybody’ Bennett is employing hyperbole, mind-reading and worst of all: avoiding the professional topic (= taxa, hypotheses) under consideration in favor of presenting personal ‘advice’.

Likewise, Bennett’s friend and co-author, David Hone,
refereed and rejected two papers with the following personal ‘advice’. Hone wrote: “You didn’t look at the specimen long enough.” and “You didn’t look at the specimens twice.”

In these short statements, Hone, like Bennett, avoided the professional topic (= taxa, hypotheses) under consideration in favor of presenting personal ‘advice’.

There was a time when referees could gate-keep like this.
Now, with digital platforms like ResearchGate and self-publishing on the Internet, independent researchers now have a time-stamped voice and presence,

Bennett and Hone don’t speak for ‘everyone’.
They apparently have a hard time dealing with discoveries, especially those made by independent authors outside of Academia.

And that’s OK. That’s the way it always has been and ever will be.
Now we can work around that. We can be independent.

Everyone
(no exception) gets into science to make – or be close to those making discoveries.

Some perhaps many,
apparently do not appreciate and celebrate whenever others make discoveries –
especially whenever those others have declared independence from the academic business model.

You can do this in paleontology. It’s accessible. It’s not brain surgery.

If you, as a PhD or grad student,
find your ideas and observations bent, distorted, edited and suppressed by your ‘surperiors’ in Academia, find a way to become independent.

Or bow to peer-group pressures, like so many others have done before.

Discoveries, by definition,
challenge traditional thinking, college lectures and textbooks. So expect blowback.

Especially from ‘the experts’.

Bennett’s anurognathid: the search for giant eyeballs continues…

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2026/07/04/independence-day/