Naming Rights: The Spencer Lucas Case and the Fight Over Fossil Science
How Peer Review Failed in Paleontology

About this book:

Beneath the romantic veneer of sun-bleached badlands and heroic discovery lies a cutthroat race for scientific immortality. In vertebrate paleontology, the power to name a fossil is the ultimate currency—it secures tenure, fuels grant money, and etches a researcher’s legacy into the permanent record of life on Earth. *Naming Rights* blows the lid off the Spencer Lucas case, exposing how a prolific curator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History exploited an in-house journal to fast-track names, scoop competitors, and override the slow, rigorous machinery of peer review. What emerges is a shocking portrait of "taxonomic claim-jumping" where the Law of Priority—a rule designed for stability—became a weapon wielded by institutional power against graduate students and outside researchers whose life’s work was reduced to footnotes in someone else’s rushed publication.

This is not merely a dispute over Latin binomials; it is a forensic investigation into the anatomy of a scientific breakdown. Drawing on internal correspondence, listserv archives, and interviews with whistleblowers, the book reveals how the gatekeepers of paleontology—professional societies, journal editors, and the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature—failed to police one of their own, prioritizing institutional shielding over ethical accountability. The narrative traces the explosive collision between nineteenth-century nomenclatural codes and twenty-first-century digital activism, following a coalition of early-career scientists who bypassed broken traditional channels, weaponizing the blogosphere and formal ethics petitions to force a reckoning that rewrote the rules of the field.

At once a gripping academic thriller and a vital case study in the sociology of science, *Naming Rights* asks the urgent question: who owns the ancient dead? The answer lies in who controls the living—who holds the press, who sets the agenda, and who dares to speak when the establishment closes ranks. For anyone fascinated by the human dramas that shape our understanding of deep time, this book proves that before we can trust the fossil record, we must understand the fragile, flawed, and fiercely human system that writes it.