Skeletal Drawing: Please (properly) label your scale bars: Exhibit A

Please (properly) label your scale bars: Exhibit A

6:15 PM | Posted by Scott Hartman

As many of you know, I spend a lot of my time doing skeletal drawings. Not everyone does them, but I don't think I demand any special considerations in the papers I use as reference. Many of the critiques about measuring your dinosaur posted over at SVPOW are similar to what I think when I read a paper. Anyhow, in terms of typos making a scale bar useless, I think this next image speaks for itself:

That is all.

(If you're having trouble seeing what I'm talking about, read the image caption carefully)

9 comments:

Mike KeeseyDecember 20, 2011 at 6:33 PM
The world's smallest dinosaur!
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LizDecember 20, 2011 at 7:34 PM
Hurrhurr.. oh lol. It's a miniscule titanosaur!
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Heinrich MallisonDecember 21, 2011 at 1:20 AM
Well, better than a WRONG scalebar that LOOKS RIGHT. Here, at least, you immediately see something ain't right.
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Andrea CauDecember 21, 2011 at 2:26 AM
That titanosaur violates the Pauli Exclusion Principle!
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Scott HartmanDecember 21, 2011 at 7:28 AM
@Heinrich - absolutely. I will say though that I'm not yet sure what the scale bare should be - most of the figures use a 50mm scale bar, but if I scale it to that size it clearly isn't correct.

It's hardly the only example of this sort of thing, and certainly not the worst, but it's one of the funnier ones.
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Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.December 21, 2011 at 11:09 AM
Andrea for the win!
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Henrique NizaDecember 23, 2011 at 3:10 PM
It's "sale" bar. It clearly indicates that much costs nothing.
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Steve PFebruary 1, 2012 at 5:28 AM
Based on the measurement for the vertebra in the paper (Gomani measured her damn dinosaur - the centrum is 295mm long), the s(c)ale bar should probably read 100mm. What's more frustrating in the paper is Figure 21, which should be the ulna and radius but is a repeat of this figure (funnily enough the scale bar for the missing figure was meant to represent 100mm...).
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Steve PFebruary 1, 2012 at 5:33 AM
Hmmm. It seems that that is only the case in the PDF of the paper - the proper figure is available from the website.
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