Читать книгу Hadrosaurs - David A. Eberth - Страница 18

I am certainly no prognosticator, even about my own research field. Like all historical sciences, our ability to predict the future is fraught with the kinds of unpredictability that derives from historical contingency. There is little inevitability that guides us in the progress of our science – just as there is little that links the hand-cranked ice-cream maker (1840s) to the electron microscope (1930s), a transition that happened in only nine decades. What about going from the invention of the Band-Aid (1930s) to the home computer in five decades? Who would have predicted these changes?

But the contents of this volume give an inkling of where we are headed, at least in the short run. I see continued fieldwork, the wellspring of our science. Its direct consequences – new species and taxonomic revisions – are likely to be accompanied by a healthy continuance of studies focused on comparative anatomy, both bony and inferred soft tissue. To do so requires a healthy dose of phylogenetic systematics, which now should be part of everyone’s toolkit. In functional morphology, finite element analyses and tooth-wear studies have appeared on the horizon and I hope these will be coupled with cladistic analyses to produce even more outstanding work. Finally, growth studies are very likely to continue in the future: the small bit of bone given up for a thin-section is bound to yield disproportionately much more subtle and profound information than if it were left with the rest of the bone.

Still, things do not always work out that way. Contingency makes history messy. Things come out of left field and WHAM! Someone discovers the most amazing specimen or means by which colors can be inferred from skin impressions. All of a sudden, with no way of predicting, we are all scrambling to do research on the melanosomes of what could turn out to be red-, green-, and yellow-striped ornithopods!