Professional Paper On Sharks

[Carson]

Does anyone where I can find online a paper by R. L. Meyer, 1974, entitled: Late Cretaceous Elasmobranchs from the Mississippi and East Texas Embayments of the Gulf Coastal Plain. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Carson

[erose]

"Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation" these things make me crazy! They are sometimes a very common reference but can be really hard to come by. I have ordered copies three times from the universities that held them with mixed results. One was a decent copy and the other two were really bad photocopies with plates that showed up as not much more than black smears. But that was many moons ago and more of these are now digitized and you may have better results.

[piranha]

This thesis is available as a 13 Mb PDF at Proquest. My link to it is not functioning but someone else with university access should be able to get it for you.

[FossilDAWG]

If you can post a link I'll try to pull it up.

Don

[piranha]

You need to access it through the university portal. I sent you a PM.

[FossilDAWG]

Well they want $37 for a pdf, which is more than I care to spend. I really do not understand why people do not publish their dissertation in journals. Leaving it in an "unpublished dissertation" restricts access to the point that the work might as well never have been done. I did a literature search for R.L. Meyers and found nothing related to the dissertation.

Don

[MikaelS]

I proudly ignore them.

[piranha]

Well they want $37 for a pdf, which is more than I care to spend. I really do not understand why people do not publish their dissertation in journals. Leaving it in an "unpublished dissertation" restricts access to the point that the work might as well never have been done. I did a literature search for R.L. Meyers and found nothing related to the dissertation.

Don

Hopefully someone with a university subscription to Proquest will be able to get it. I usually can get these but that PDF file keeps timing out.

[squalicorax]

I can get it. PM me your email address

[missingdigits]

I proudly ignore them.

This made me chuckle more than I should have.

[siteseer]

Don,

The thing with PhD dissertations is that they are not considered peer-reviewed publications so species proposed in them are not official descriptions. Often, years later, the author writes a separate description of material introduced in the dissertation. Years ago, I bought Bruce Welton's dissertation from UMI and I think that was $35. As I recall, there is a disclaimer that pages may be missing and the print quality may not be great and that was the case with the dissertation but it was good overall. I thought it was well worth the price - tons of info you don't read elsewhere even now. Even when you go to the original institution, you might find that some dissertations, especially the older ones, are stored elsewhere,

The Meyer dissertation is a valuable reference everyone should have. That's worth $35 too. I got it as a photocopy even before the Welton one.

It gets very expensive when you want one from outside the U.S. One from South Africa would cost around $100.

Jess

Well they want $37 for a pdf, which is more than I care to spend. I really do not understand why people do not publish their dissertation in journals. Leaving it in an "unpublished dissertation" restricts access to the point that the work might as well never have been done. I did a literature search for R.L. Meyers and found nothing related to the dissertation.

Don