Foreword - Why I am taking advantage of Your time and kindness

Cesare Brizio, January 2005 - To be read thoroughly

· Signal-noise ratio, taphoplasticity and the terrestrial vertebrate fossil record: more than a metaphor

· Digitalizing biologic diversity: how good is our scanner, and are we using it correctly?

Dear Sirs:

You have accepted - at Your own risk - to take a look at this page: obviously, this doesn't imply that You will read the ones that follow. Please feel not obliged in this respect.

Let me clearly state that I do perfectly know that my self-taught English is an awful mixture of idioms surreptitiously stolen from the papers I happen to have read, and of badly digested grammar (sadly, my spoken English is even worse). If someone would have submitted to my attention something similarly written in Italian, I would find the reading itself very irritating, so my limited command of the language is the very first thing I must apologise for.

I regret not being a scientist - despite an old full honors degree in geology - because I cannot directly engage in scientific disputes with professionals. What I am looking for is a champion who may be interested in my ideas and who would fight for them in the scientific arena. And it may be You! I am bothering You just because I think the subjects roughly outlined below deserve discussion.

I am an Italian 41 years old, very fond of paleontology, and I make my living as a freelance information technology consultant. When I first decided to begin reading international scientific newspaper about ten years ago I was very enthusiast about everything I read, with unquestioning faith in the fact that every scientist was working just for the sake of making information circulate in the scientific community. It took some years for me to understand how heavily competition among institutions affects the work of professionals throughout the world, and presently I think that only under very favorable external circumstances would scholars from different universities and museums sit around the same table with the aim of coming to a common conclusion about any particular natural phenomenon.

My temper - and obviously my lack of detailed, professional practice and knowledge - makes me interested in very general aspects of evolutionary biology, the ones that would mostly require this kind of utopic harmony within the scientific community. The pages that follow deal with two subjects of this kind, the quantifying of the "small animal gap" in the non-marine vertebrate fossil record and the project of a web-based reference data bank of Discrete Character Matrices.

The first of these "wannabe-papers" is the one I am most interested into, and is very very far from complete: I am looking for someone to provide numeric population data from today's vertebrate faunas. Only these data would make possible to circumstantiate my suggestion that the only reliable way of assessing the completeness of fossil record is a comparison with the "signal" our biosphere is presently sending, an approach very different from the ones I have seen from my limited window of sporadic scientific reading.

The project outlined in the second paper (a public, Web-based database of Discrete Character Matrices pertaining to a predefined set of characters from a selection of reference taxa in different natural groups, these standard data to be included in every scientist's matrices to ensure some degree of comparability among the works of different professionals) is admittedly almost impossible to carry out, even though it well fits with our information era. Sadly, there are too much things that urged and the subject itself is very poorly focused, so - in the most improbable case of someone being interested in publishing this text - some major cut is absolutely indispensable. Apart from that, the subject itself is quite unpopular, as the text addresses the problem of bad practices in Discrete Character Matrix generation.

Any comment, correction, observation or suggestion is appreciated. Obviously, any serious interest in publishing an adequately completed and emended version of the following texts would be appreciated even more. I have no aims at authorship of possible papers, although I ask to be cited as the one who suggested the subject.

Please feel also free of referring me to some Colleague of Yours who may be interested.

Thank You once again for Your attention. Send Your comments - if any - to my e-mail address

P.S.: I have not enclosed any bibliography because this manuscript is very very far from its final form. I would gladly supply on request the information I have at hand about papers published on the various themes touched by the texts that follow.

Cesare Brizio

Via Chiesa Vecchia, 45

44028 Poggio Renatico FE

ITALY