Is New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science plagarizing Arizona, TTU, and Poland?
Fossil reptiles mired in controversy
An ethics row has broken out among palaeontologists over the naming of aetosaurs, a type of ancient armoured reptile.
Doctoral students in the United States and Poland are accusing scientists at the Albuquerque-based New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) of publishing articles that allegedly pilfered their research. The allegations concern three articles published in the NMMNHS Bulletin by the museum’s interim director Spencer Lucas, former director Adrian Hunt and their co-authors.
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In one instance, Lucas, Hunt and Justin Spielmann, the museum’s geoscience collections manager, are accused of rushing to publish a new name for an aetosaur (Rioarribasuchus)1 when they allegedly knew that palaeontologist William Parker of the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona was soon to publish an article naming the species (as Heliocanthus)2.
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And last July, Jerzy Dzik of the Palaeobiology Institute at the University of Warsaw sent Lucas an e-mail in complaint after Lucas published an article in the Bulletin describing Polish aetosaur fossils3.
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Another article published in the Bulletin by Spielmann and his bosses involves a reinterpretation of an aetosaur called Redondasuchus4. Jeff Martz, a palaeontology doctoral student at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, says this reinterpretation — involving bony spikes along the animal’s back — failed to properly credit his own similar description in a master’s thesis, an act akin to plagiarism.