The Next TetZoo Article (Patreon)

I've just finished the text of the very long next TetZoo article. It's devoted to David Peters, and here it is. I have yet to compile the images - it'll take a while - and the article won't appear online (at TetZoo) until that's done. Anyway, I hope you like.... (any corrections, edits and suggestions appreciated).

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Why the World Has to Ignore David Peters and ReptileEvolution[dot]com

And so it is that I must once more write about the great eternal menace of our age: David Peters. 

If you’ve ever looked for information online about the evolution or fossil history of vertebrate animals, chances are high that you’ve encountered work by independent researcher David Peters. Peters sees stuff that no-one else can see, reports findings that no-one else finds, perpetually declares everyone else to be wrong, is vastly prolific, and has been very, very good at sharing and disseminating his stuff online. If Peters were reliable, trustworthy, careful, conscientious, and good at doing science, this would be great, and he would be a significant force for good. 

But Peters is not reliable, or careful, or conscientious, or good at doing science. He is the opposite of those things. And yet he’s on a crusade whereby he aims to share his views – proclaimed by him as representing The Truth – as widely and frequently as possible, all the while decrying the mainstream palaeontological world as if it’s part of a conspiratorial cabal of blinkered elites. Peters is a significant source of miseducation, whose work floods the internet, and who aims to bamboozle those unaware that he’s peddling nonsense.

In this article, I explain why David Peters, and the two primary repositories of his work (his Pterosaur Heresies blog and his ReptileEvolution[dot]com site), must be ignored. But first, some required background. The following largely repeats the review of the Peters’ problem published at TetZoo back in 2012 (and then corrupted by its hosters, hence my reliance on a version at wayback machine).

Prologue. David Peters is a published scientist with articles in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Historical Biology, Nature and Science to his name (Peters 1995, 2002, 2005, 2009, 2010). He’s a skilled and proficient artist, and the author and artist of several excellent books from the 1980s and early 90s. 

But at some point between the late 1990s and early 2000s, it became clear from his online writings and published articles that Peters had become very strange. Thanks to a unique kind of magic, super-powered vision, he claimed to find hitherto undetected babies, soft-tissue frills, umpteen new anatomical structures and more on pterosaur fossils. These claims were awfully reminiscent of those fringe announcements on the finding of skulls and bits of technology in NASA’s photographs of Mars or the moon, or of Jon-Eric ‘the fruitbat’ Beckjord’s proposals that frames of the Patterson-Gimlin film reveal umpteen hidden Bigfoots lurking in the shadows. Today, the Peters of 2020 thinks that at least some of these claims – documented in Peters (2004) and reported at conferences (e.g., the 2003 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting at San Antonio, Texas, the 2006 Flugsaurier meeting at Munich) – should be ignored as “rookie mistakes” or “old laundry”. Making mistakes is part of science, we all do it. But claiming with confidence (in print and at conferences) that you’ve found a ton of incredible stuff that others have not is a red flag, especially when the Peters technique of finding stuff that on-one else can has the vile, distinct stench of pseudoscience about it. And despite arguments that those weird claims of the past were “rookie mistakes” or “old laundry”, the fact is that Peters has never stopped doing whatever it is that he does.

In a 2003 article in the Times Higher, journalist Steve Farrar wrote a piece (‘Experts dismiss vampire reptile claim’) calling out Peters’ Society of Vertebrate Paleontology presentation ‘The Chinese vampire and other overlooked pterosaur ptreasures’, and in 2005, pterosaur specialist Chris Bennett produced an effective demolition of Peters’ work (Bennett 2005). By now, the proverbial cat (a vampire cat, covered in hitherto unseen babies and sporting a Longisquama-like frill of dorsal plumes and with a previously unnoticed long, tassel-tipped tail) was out of the bag, and it became less easy – although not impossible – for Peters to get his stuff into the literature, and presented at conferences. Several of his manuscripts – I believe submitted to such journals as Nature and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and mostly aimed at tackling big picture issues of reptile phylogeny – were rejected at around this time (for the record, I have not ever, not once, acted as a reviewer for a Peters paper).

Predictably, these efforts to block or smack Peters down did not cause him to retreat, or revise or reconsider his methods or conclusions, but, instead, to double-down, become more entrenched, and become ever more determined to convert the world to see and accept his results. He stepped up his game online, giving us the outpouring that is ReptileEvolution[dot]com and the updated daily, twice daily, thrice daily, infinity-times daily blog The Pterosaur Heresies. Though starting this grand online project with pterosaurs as his focus, Peters has expanded his interest to include reptiles of all sorts, mammals, all tetrapods and FISH as well. To those mammal, bird and fish experts who didn’t care about Peters when he was just ‘that weird pterosaur guy’, I say… well, now you know what it’s like.

Why do I care about what Peters says or does, and since when is it my business to tell people what to do? Or, restated: why can’t I just mind my own business and leave Peters alone? I will tell you why. If ‘the published literature’ is regarded as a synonym for ‘the accepted canon of human knowledge’, then efforts to curtail the spread of Peters’ ideas (e.g., Bennett 2005) have been successful. His efforts to instigate paradigm change (that pterosaurs are lepidosaurs, that mammals are archosauromorph reptiles, that bats are civets, that mysticete whales are desmostylians and so on and on and on and on) have failed and are being ignored by working scientists. 

If, however, you think that material shared online – in blog articles and so on – has some impact on what people think worthy of attention or allocation to memory, Peters is successful. Peters is not, dear reader, just doing his own thing in some quiet corner of the internet, beavering away in earnest, minding his own business. He is instead on some kind of eternal crusade to promote promote promote his ideas CEASELESSLY. I can confirm from working with students, the interested public and even other qualified scientists that his stuff is often assumed to be real science, on equal footing with that of those he criticises. All of which means that his efforts need countering. 

My interest in the dissemination of knowledge and public education, and my respect for the due diligence of those people whose work is criticised, admonished or unfairly critiqued by Peters, demands that I produce this article.

Why, then, should we be telling people to ignore David Peters, all of the content he posts at his Pterosaur Heresies blog, and all of the material he has compiled at ReptileEvolution[dot]com? I give you five primary reasons.

Peters works at a million miles an hour. Anyone who does science, or writes about science, or in fact does anything that involves research and hard work will tell you that things take time. Ok, we don’t all work at the same pace, some of us really are very speedy compared to others, and some of us are lucky enough or privileged enough to be able to devote more time than others to the pursuit of our work and projects.

Having said that, Peters works really fast. Disturbingly, ridiculously fast. On seeing a new publication, he looks at the pictures, skims the paper at record speed, whacks out a new interpretation of the fossil’s anatomy, codes the specimen for his phylogenetic analysis, and then writes and publishes a new article for his Pterosaur Heresies blog. By his own admission, he’s sometimes – perhaps often – unaware of the fossil concerned prior to seeing the publication. Yet, in his articles, which (if you check the dates) are frequently published literally one or two days after the paper in question saw print, he invariably announces that he’s ‘discovered’ innumerable features that the relevant scientists had ‘missed’ and has discovered a ‘new’ place for it on the tree of life. 

Indeed, he works so fast that he sometimes gets taxonomic names wrong and seemingly isn’t able to lose valuable minutes of his time by checking sources. To take one example, he’s gleefully pointed out more than once (most recently in July 2020) that the Cretaceous lizard Carusia can’t be called Carusia because there’s already a living lizard called Carusia. Ten seconds of googling would reveal that the living lizard is Corucia. Another example: his speed-reading of works on megaraptoran theropods has rendered him unable to realise that they’re not the same thing as microraptorine theropods. Another example: he dashed out an article proclaiming that zygodactyl birds aren’t monophyletic in response to a study showing support for the monophyly of zygodactylids. ‘Zygodactylidae’ and ‘zygodactyl birds’ are most certainly not synonymous. Again, I get that we all make mistakes, but it sure makes you look bad if you do this sort of thing on a regular basis. Especially when there are other issues about the way you work (read on).

Peters seems to think that his super-speedy evaluation of other people’s work is a strength and he sometimes boasts of how quickly he can evaluate the new animal he’s only just learnt of. I don’t think speediness in science (of the sort discussed here) is a strength. I think it’s a weakness which demonstrates the most superficial of understandings, the most cursory attention to detail, and the most nonchalant defence to error. This approach makes Peters among the least trustworthy sources imaginable; a million miles away from those scientists who have, in cases, spent, literally, years working on the specimens concerned. And on that note…

Peters is not a reliable observer or reporter of anatomy. Peters looks at illustrations and photos of skulls and skeletons, supposedly identifies anatomical structures (most typically bones, but sometimes cartilaginous and soft structures too), and presents his own reconstructions of the specimens in question. He does this on a daily basis, bashing things out in hours or even minutes (see above), and is gradually working his way through the entire gamut of vertebrate diversity. 

Peters uses software when doing this. Specifically (and I’m describing it here as best I understand it), he uses photoshop to identify areas of differing contrast, these being auto-traced or blocked out as distinct sections worthy of attention. They’re often irregular, messy and discordant with existing views on the anatomy of the organism in question. Peters has a name for this technique – he calls it DGS, which stands for digital graphical segregation – but I’m not going to use this because it’s an effort to normalise and legitimise a technique which is clearly unreliable (read on).

Because Peters identifies wavy, broken edges as valid bits of anatomy, the reconstructions that result from the application of his technique look like broken, deformed, mismatched monsters, not the elegant, tidier creatures which exist in reality. As an example, I just grabbed this effort from a July 2020 article of his on anurognathid pterosaurs. I find it ironic and amusing that Bennett’s reconstruction is dubbed a ‘Monster’ when it’s surrounded by a pantomime parade of hopelessly nasty, broken disasters.

Whatever the technique, are Peters’ results of any value? They are not. Peters thinks he’s finding new stuff, genuine details somehow missed by the scientists who pored over these specimens in person (sometimes with the aid of microscopes, x-ray machines, CT-scanners and synchrotrons). He’s actually finding artifacts of every sort you might imagine: cracks (in bones, rocks and slabs), scratches and preparation marks, shadows, changes in topography, paints and preservatives, and so on. I base my confidence here on my own observations of relevant specimens (I can confirm – with no equivocation whatsoever – that Peters is 100% for sure identifying cracks, bits of crap and debris and so on as anatomical structures), and I can point to many others cases where colleagues can do likewise. This nonsense affects virtually every single one of his interpretations.

Long ago (back when I wrote my 2012 effort on the Peters problem), I pointed to the fact that Peters had claimed the discovery of NUMEROUS TINY BABY PTEROSAURS CLIMBING ON THE BODIES OF THEIR PARENTS as an example of how unreliable he is as an observer of anatomy. As noted above, Peters now says that this is “old laundry” and that my bringing it up as an example of his unreliability is unjust. But what the Peters of 2020 is unable or unwilling to understand is that his efforts of recent times are of the same calibre as the Peters of 2012, or the Peters of 2004. Peters of 2020 might not be finding unossified miniature baby pterosaurs decked out with dorsal frills and tassel tails, instead he’s finding a gazillion ‘new’ or ‘overlooked’ bones. These don’t just include things like alleged bones in the skulls and wing fingers of anurognathid pterosaurs (see the montage below) and claims that some Cretaceous birds had six fingers (I’m not joking, this is a claim he’s actually made) but such proposals as that chickens have a bunch of skull bones that no-one has noticed before.

The umbrella term which describes what Peters is doing is pareidolia: the tendency to incorrectly perceive patterns and objects in quantities of information. If you want to convince other people that you’ve discovered something new and odd and previously overlooked, your evidence better be compelling. Any check of a Peters claim fails this test: his anatomical ‘discoveries’ utterly fail to be in the least bit convincing or are just obviously wrong. It isn’t just me saying this. Those who know the fossils that Peters has reinterpreted (through first-hand experience and actual scientific investigation) have pointed this out time and time and time and time again. Yet Peters blunders on, because Peters knows best.

Peters is not a reliable student of phylogenetics. For some years now, Peters has been adding taxa to a phylogenetic analysis. As of July 2020, his analysis includes 235 characters, coded for over 1700 taxa. A tree has resulted, which he calls the Large Reptile Tree (or LRT). Again, I’m not going to use this term because it’s another effort to normalise his project as if it represents a valid view of reality. I’m instead going to call it the Peters tree. 

The Peters tree is ‘non-standard’ in a vast number of details. When I wrote about Peters in 2012, the main features of his tree worth mentioning were that pterosaurs are within Lepidosauria, and mammals are within Reptilia and part of Archosauromorpha. Both of those positions are contradicted by some quantity of data. They are wrong. Mammals are absolutely and categorically not archosauromorph reptiles; based on anatomical data, pterosaurs are not lepidosaurs (we can’t state this with as much confidence as we might like given the absence of genetic data; more on that in a moment). As of 2020, Peters still supports those two phylogenetic contentions, but the fact that he’s expanded his analysis to include additional mammals, birds, fossil reptiles and fishes means that he’s now taken to promoting non-standard views on them too, this meaning that his capacity for miseducation has increased ten-fold or more. 

To pick just a few examples of the findings he’s announced: he’s argued that whale sharks and mantas are part of an archaic vertebrate clade that includes the jawless thelodont fishes, that catfishes and pike are part of a clade which also includes placoderms like Dunkleosteus, that multituberculates are rodents, that whales are non-monophyletic and that odontocetes are close to tenrecs while mysticetes are desmostylians, that moa are close kin of parrots, and so on and on and on. Remember that Peters has determined this by throwing these animals into the same one single dataset, this being the one containing 230-odd characters and all the vertebrates he’s examined so far. Yes, you read that right: he’s determined these many novel results by throwing over 1700 taxa into a dataset originally designed to test the position of pterosaurs. The one containing 230-something characters.

Now, it’s not – in theory – impossible to create a single phylogenetic matrix that tests the relationships of such a vast diversity of vertebrates. But such a task would have to include literally thousands of anatomical characters. Note that specialists interested in resolving the phylogeny of just one vertebrate clade – say, squamates, theropods or actinopterygians – routinely build analyses of 100s of 1000s or characters, and even then aren’t happy that they’re capturing enough data. There is just no way that 230-something characters is sufficiently representative when it comes to testing the affinities of well over 1000 taxa. The number of characters here is simply too few to gain statistically meaningful resolution.

In any case, such an analysis – designed to help resolve affinities among reptiles – is as good as useless when it comes to elucidating the positions of multituberculates, whales, catfishes and piranhas since it doesn’t include sufficient character information relevant to the nuances of their anatomy. Peters is not unaware of this issue, since it’s been pointed out to him on innumerable occasions by his critics. His primary response is to insist that everything’s just fine, and in fact he refuses to add more characters. Witness this Peters quote from June 2012: “As long as I can recover a single tree from all these reptiles, I’m not going to add another character. Sorry. I only take things this far. No further”. Yes, Peters thinks that the key aim in phylogenetics is to recover a single tree. It isn’t. The statistics which show how well your tree or trees explain the data are what’s important, it doesn’t matter if you have one tree or one million.

So, the foundational principle here is broken. But it gets better... or worse. The characters which Peters does use in his analysis are badly chosen, often overlap, actually describe more than one character, or incorporate anatomical misunderstandings (there are cases where Peters has based his interpretations on reconstructed and even hypothetical sections of skeletons). And miscodings abound, in part because Peters is utterly unreliable on anatomical details (see above), and because he simply isn’t expert in the many groups he writes about. 

Also on phylogenetics, Peters’ primary contention is that other scientists don’t get the results he does because they practise taxon exclusion. That is, they don’t – Peters says – include the right animals in their phylogenetic studies. Throw rodents into the same analysis as multituberculates, or catfishes into the same analysis as placoderms, or whatever, and you get Peters-style results, says Peters. 

But this only works if you put in the hard work, by which I mean that you have to incorporate more than 230-something characters. If I throw Pteranodon, say, into an analysis designed to test the affinities of neornithine birds and don’t expand my character set beyond one designed to test affinities within neornithine birds, I will get erroneous results, specifically finding Pteranodon within neornithine birds, and within a clade that includes pelicans and storks. That’s because the analysis doesn’t include codings for those characters which make Pteranodon different from neornithine birds and part of a group very distant to neornithine birds. The test literally wasn’t constructed to test for the position of non-birds. Peters’ results are of this sort. He criticises palaeontologists and zoologists for practising taxon exclusion, yet glosses over the fact that his character exclusion is a less forgivable sin.

In any case, the Peters’ claim that taxon exclusion is the one great thing which explains why his results are so odd is just not true. We can say this because other people have performed their very own Peters-style inclusive tests of reptile phylogeny. In 2019, Andrea Cau specifically designed a phylogenetic analysis of Reptilia which includes lepidosaurs, archosauromorphs and other reptiles and tetrapods relevant to the Peters contention that pterosaurs are nested within Lepidosauria, rather than Archosauria. The result? Pterosaurs are archosaurs, close to dinosaurs (this being the ‘standard’ view which Peters rails against).

Both Andrea and Mickey Mortimer have also tested Peters’ wayward, non-standard take on dinosaur phylogeny and found that it doesn’t explain character distribution at all, at least no better than does a random effort to throw names at a dartboard.

Finally on phylogeny… you might, just might, have found yourself screaming “BUT DNA!” several times while reading this section of the article. The Peters take on vertebrate phylogeny – remember, his studies incorporate living animals, not fossil ones alone – is of course utterly discordant with molecular studies. As you’ll know, the vast majority of biologists today accept that a great many DNA-based results discordant with anatomy are now so well supported, so frequently recovered, that they simply must be accurate. Toxicofera, Eufalconimorphae and the scombroid-flatfish clade – to take just three infamous examples – must be accepted as valid phylogenetic hypotheses, whether existing anatomical datasets support them or not. How does Peters respond to this? He argues that DNA just doesn’t work when it comes to elucidating the affinities of animal groups. Of course he does, since – yet again – the only conclusion can be that everyone else is wrong, and that only Peters can be right. And on that note…

Peters is toxic. Peters think that we reject his conclusions because we don’t like them, or because we hold a vendetta against him because he’s an ‘outsider’, or something. As should be clear from the rest of its article, the reason his claims are rejected is because they’re garbage pseudoscience, contradicted across the board by those who’ve studied the relevant specimens first-hand, or know how to do a phylogenetic analysis. Peters is not some wily genius who’s doing good, careful, detailed work of the sort that we might respect, but a blundering hack who approaches every issue with the bluntest of instruments and most superficial and error-prone of unsatisfying solutions. 

There is a human element to science. We’re not machines who see data or results and automatically – beep ba boop – churn out a response. Instead, we have a mostly unspoken code that includes ethical guidelines, standards of conduct and even friendliness, philanthropy and humanity. Peters thinks that none of this matters and that it’s cool to do his hack smackdowns on PhD students and their projects, on early career scientists who’ve only just published their first paper, and even on the recently deceased. His entire factory or laboratory or research programme, if we can speak of such a thing, is a negative one which does nothing but declare other people to be wrong. Wrong on their new results, wrong in following their colleagues and forebears, wrong in backing up their previous results, wrong in their years of careful, detailed work, wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. It’s exhaustingly toxic to go through his back-catalogue of articles and see all this negativity.

This constant, never-ending yet unjust criticism of everyone else’s work – it reads like the outpouring of someone with a weird, misanthropic superiority complex – means that being dissed by Peters is now seen as an unpleasant but necessary rite of passage which vertebrate palaeontologists use to show that they’ve arrived. And that’s wrong. David Peters, change your ways.

And this brings me to the final reason to ignore David Peters….

Peters has morphed into a troll who aims for world domination. As I said early on in this article, part of my reasoning for criticising Peters isn’t just that his work is worthless nonsense, it’s also because he’s so effective, and so relentless, in promoting his ideas. For whatever reason, his proposals and reconstructions swamp google searches to such a degree that he’s hard to avoid. I despise using the Trumpian term ‘fake news’ but – yeah – that’s what Peters is. Does this mean that I deny him the right to do what it is that the does? Again, no. I’m not advocating censorship.

But if you’ve looked around at palaeontological news sites online, on YouTube videos about vertebrate palaeontology, or in the comments sections attached to online papers at PLoS ONE, PeerJ and the like, chances are high that you’ve seen Peters pop up there too, promoting his views. Peters, it would appear, doesn’t think that his views are becoming sufficiently well known, or are sufficiently accepted or discussed outside of his blog, so he’s set out to convert the world. Publish something online about any of the issues where Peters declares interest, sit back a few minutes, and – presto – Peters will appear. Doing your own weird nonsense in some little corner of the internet: fine. Working ceaselessly, 24-7, to disseminate your weird nonsense and alert others to your broken views: not fine.

I will finish this article pretty much as I finished my previous effort of 2012. In the end, David Peters can continue as he pleases, with his own unique, broken brand of erroneously criticising everyone else, of producing his own mutant nonsense reconstructions, of tinkering with his 230-something character phylogenetic analysis which produces such hilariously scattershot results, of claiming that DNA-based phylogenetic results can be ignored. But the important thing – the whole reason I wrote this article in the first place – is that the miseducation of others needs to be kept to a minimum. David Peters is not a reliable or trustworthy source and should be ignored.

Refs - -

Bennett, S. C. 2005. Pterosaur science or pterosaur fantasy? Prehistoric Times 70, 21-23, 40.

Peters, D. 1995. Wing shape in pterosaurs. Nature 374, 315-316.

Peters, D. 2002. A new model for the evolution of the pterosaur wing – with a twist. Historical Biology 15, 277-301.

Peters, D. 2004. Pterosaurs from another angle. Prehistoric Times 64, 34-46.

Peters, D. 2005. Suction feeding in a Triassic protosaur? Science 308, 1112.

Peters, D. 2009. A reinterpretation of pteroid articulation in pterosaurs. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 29, 1327-1330.

Peters, D. 2010. In defence of parallel interphalangeal lines. Historical Biology 22, 437-442.