I recently started looking at observations of fossil vertebrates and found that many of them were photos of casts or skeletal models. In my opinion, such objects do not provide evidence of an organism other than a human.
Arguments: These casts were made by man and from man-made materials. And without human activity it would never exist as an object. Therefore, it is evidence of human as an organism. We do not identify realistic models (even casts or very accurate ones) of modern animals as real animals or artificial plants as real plants, but mark them as “Homo sapiens” instead. I don’t see any difference in this case.
Counterarguments: If the cast/model is based on a real fossil, that real fossil could be considered the subject of the observation.
Models of modern animals are not actually based on any one individual. They are generalizations, and some do not correlate to actual species. Casts of fossils, however, are exactly or almost exactly like the original fossil. It could be seen as evidence squared. It is evidence of evidence of an organism.
Response: Fish, reptile and amphibian replicas are used in some exhibitions. They are based on specific individuals, but are made entirely of artificial materials. Should they be considered as evidence of an organism and who can say how accurately they were made? On the other hand, there are a large number of models and casts of fossils that clearly do not correspond to the original specimens. And many of those that do correspond, are supplemented with missing fragments (which in some cases are very speculative). Let’s take this one as an example. Not only is this model highly speculative, but it also contains gross anatomical inaccuracies. Can iNat users guarantee that every cast in every observation exactly matches the original? I doubt it.
I know that iNat is not intended for observations of fossils and that extinct organisms have already made some controversies, but it would be interesting to hear opinions on this issue.
I see your point. But I would avoid discussing field sketches in this thread, as it seems this topic has already generated heated controversy.
If you ask me, I wouldn’t consider them to be accurate evidence in most of the cases presented on iNat. If we are talking about the quality of observation and the possibility of reaching a research grade: for higher taxa this is possible, but for species, genera and even families there is a very high risk of misidentification.
Also… Some may call this excessively meticulous, but according to the general guidelines and site tools, there are currently only two options: photo and audio. So you can take a photo of an object you see or record audio. A photo of a sketch in my understanding is a photo of evidence of a human presence, since a person drew this sketch :)
As for “casual”, in this case the question is more about the subject of observation and the accuracy of ID, not about the grade of the observation. I think that even casual observations should be identified correctly.
Thanks!
I would ID these as human. They are to my mind some kind of “hearsay” evidence of an organism. However, iNat isn’t about interacting with evidence or organisms, but organisms themselves. A photo of a cast or mold is the same as a photo of a photo on a museum display to my mind. It’s evidence of a previous interaction with an organism, but not the observer’s.
I think the comparison to drawings is somewhat apt. I personally don’t like having drawings as evidence on the site myself, but staff have made a special exception for this type of evidence, so I think it stands on its own. Unless staff also make a special exception for these types of evidence, I would not treat them differently. As an added layer, fossils are not the focus of iNat anyways, and would be downvoted for “Recent evidence of organism”. I think any replica of a fossil could also be downvoted for this. Even though the replica might be recent, the evidence for the organism is not.
I still think this is the most important point, as far as iNaturalist is concerned. If someone posts an observation of a cast from a museum, there are already multiple DQA checkboxes that would apply, each of which makes the observation casual:
They can be useful for research and educational purposes, in multiple situations. As such, there’s a large difference between these and artistic creations that may be only loosely inspired by an actual organism.
If you are concerned about accurate identifications, then it would be accurate to say, “This is a cast of species X”. If you want to be even more accurate, you might say that is a cast of a particular museum specimen, catalog number nnnn, of species X. To call it a human seems petty and unnecessarily denigrates the scientific value of these casts.
I agree with @larry216. The main purpose of inat is identification, if i’m not mistaken, and I don’t think its very helpful to Id it as human. In fact, even when I run across dinosaur models, I say what species it is in the comments (if it is a recognizable one!)
(just for reference this topic started as a debate between me and @Alexey_Katz on this obs
I would concur. The relevant comparison here is not with field sketches made by the observer, but with insect or shell collections that the observer did not make. We have had threads about those, too, and the general tone was that these do not count as the observer’s interaction with nature.
Per iNaturalist guidelines, that would depend on whether the one uploading the photo of the cast is the same person who found the footprint.
To me, a cast isn’t necessarily a problem – if it’s a cast of a track or some recent animal part that was made by the observer and has the correct date and place where the original was found. However, that’s usually not the case. So I’d nearly always mark such an observation is a way that would make it Casual.
Can I ask where in the guidelines it says this? What does it mean for it to not “count” as an observation? Is it not a data point regardless of who made the cast?
Edit: For clarity, I’m not trying to argue — I’m trying to understand.
“Count” may have been a poor word choice by papernautilus. Certainly, it’s a observation, with the factors that go into the DQA determining whether it gets ranked as verifiable or casual. And that’s really a different discussion than the question asked in the OP: should such a cast be identified as the animal that left the track or should it be identified as human because of the human effort of construction?
It does matter who made the cast because observations represent interactions between an observer and an organism. If you look at and photograph a cast in a museum or in a private collection, you had no personal engagement with that animal or its footprint or even with the plaster of Paris. It’s someone else’s observation.
Yes, jasonhernandez74 and sedgequeen have already addressed these points.
Someone observes a track in the wild. Instead of just taking a photo of the track, they make a high fidelity cast of the track and then take a photo of the cast. That seems like extra work, but perhaps the cast captures details that would not be visible otherwise. Perhaps they want to preserve the cast for its educational value. If that observer posts the photo of the cast, with the correct date and location for where the track was observed, that observation should be ranked as verifiable.
Now, if that cast is brought into a classroom and all the students take photos to post for their class iNat project, those observations would all be casual. It’s not a difference in the cast, it’s a difference in the DQA.
Yes, but observations of fossils do exist. And there are plenty of active fossil taxa – marked as “extinct” but still active. Thus, they can be identified and identifications appear.
As I mentioned above, I see some problems with the accuracy of fossil casts:
We can’t always be sure that it is a cast and not a model not based on a real specimen. In the case of charismatic and popular taxa like T. rex, this is probably easy to spot, since many specimens are well known even outside the scientific community and relatively easy to recognize. But there are hundreds of thousands of trilobites – real, casts, and fakes – and it’s not always possible to determine their true nature from photos alone. And fake trilobites are no different from artificial plants.
In the process of reconstructing a whole specimen, even accurate casts can be supplemented with missing fragments, often speculative. Sometimes only a small part of the model is based on a real fossil. This is probably less of a problem since the accurate cast is still present in the model, but again it is not always possible to determine this.
