What I think of as our phylogenetically-extended nuclear family grew by one this week: we got a baby box turtle. We got her from a local hobbyist, who hatched her last summer. We haven’t named her yet, so for now she’s just Baby Tiny Turtle.
If I had to sum up my main research program over the past 20+ years, it would be, “Why pneumatic bone?” Or as I typically put it in my talks, most bone has marrow inside, so if you find bone with air inside, someone has some explaining to do (f’rinstance). One of the reasons I […]
Matt dropped me a line midweek about the catalogue of complete sauropod necks, with some interesting thoughts.
A couple of months ago, I asked for your help in compiling a list of all known complete sauropods necks. This has gone really well, and I want to thank everyone who chipped in, and all the various authors I have contacted for details as a result.
It is said that, some time around 1590 AD, Galileo Galilei dropped two spheres of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa[1], thereby demonstrating that they fell at the same rate. This was a big deal because it contradicted Aristotle’s theory of gravity, in which objects are supposed to fall at a speed proportional to their mass.
“And in conclusion, this new fossil/analysis shows that Lineageomorpha was more [here fill in the blank]: diverse morphologically varied widely distributed geographically widely distributed stratigraphically …than previously appreciated.“ Yes, congratulations, you’ve correctly identified that time moves forward linearly and that information accumulates.
Here’s figure 1 from my 2005 book chapter. I tried to cram as much pneumatic sauropod vertebra morphology into one figure as I could.
A month after I and Matt published our paper “Why is vertebral pneumaticity in sauropod dinosaurs so variable?” at Qeios , we were bemoaning how difficult it was to get anyone to review it. But what a difference the last nineteen days have made!
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Today should be a day of rejoicing, as it brings us a new sauropod: Arackar licanantay Rubilar-Rogers et al. 2021., a small titanosaur from Chile. It’s not, though. Because not only is this paper behind a paywall in Elsevier’s journal Cretaceous Research , but the paywalled paper is what they term a “pre-proof” — a fact advertised in a tiny font half way down the page rather than in a giant red letters at the top.
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