The Arnold Berliner Award 2013

Abstract

The Arnold Berliner Award is presented for the first time this year, as part of the 100-year birthday celebration of Naturwissenschaften (Fig. 1, Thatje 2013). It is my great pleasure to announce the first recipient of the award, Dr Mark Young (University of Edinburgh), in this editorial. Mark Young (Fig. 2) was nominated for his work on the iconic Diplodocus, which, as a sauropod dinosaur, belonged to the largest terrestrial herbivores to ever have roamed Earth. Their pure size may have pushed them to the evolutionary limits of vertebrate biomechanics. In his paper published in Naturwissenschaften (Young et al. 2012), Mark and his colleagues presented a compelling multidisciplinary approach demonstrating that the gigantic Diplodocus was unlikely to have employed its bizarre dentition for a previously suggested bark-stripping hypothesis feeding strategy, and that the rather unusual (aberrant) dentition of Diplodocus may have, instead, demonstrated an adaptation for food procurement rather than an adaptation to high mechanical bite force. This would suggest that Diplodocus had a skull which was seemingly over-engineered for muscle-driven biting alone; the reason for which may have been related to other behavioral or ecological traits. This paradigmchanging discovery was only possible by making use of modern technology, the computed tomographic scanning of a fossil specimen of a Diplodocus longus skull from museum collection, and subsequent modeling of its biomechanics of feeding. The Arnold Berliner Award was established in recognition of the founding editor of the journal. The award is sponsored by Springer Science+Business Media and is given annually for the best research article published in NAWI during the previous calendar year (Thatje 2012). Criteria are excellence in science, originality, and in particular interdisciplinarity,