16 posts · 20,428 views
A palaeontology blog by someone with far too much work to be getting on with
Adam Yates
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- August 20, 2009
- 10:42 AM
- 1,151 views
Spongebob is a child of snowball Earth
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
Image from commons.wikimedia.orgAlthough looking a little like plants, sponges (Phylum Porifera) are animals. Admittedly, they area very different kind of animal from the ones we see around us in everyday life. Unlike most others they lack bodies constructed from properly organized tissues, they are instead more like giant colonies of single cells. Indeed a famous experiment demonstrated that sponges that have been completely disaggregated into its constituent cells (by forcing them through a fi........ Read more »
Love, G., Grosjean, E., Stalvies, C., Fike, D., Grotzinger, J., Bradley, A., Kelly, A., Bhatia, M., Meredith, W., Snape, C.... (2009) Fossil steroids record the appearance of Demospongiae during the Cryogenian period. Nature, 457(7230), 718-721. DOI: 10.1038/nature07673
- July 6, 2009
- 03:14 AM
- 1,279 views
Three New Dinosaurs - at long last, some dinosaury goodness from Australia
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
Three new Australian dinosaurs, Australovenator wintonensis at the top, Wintonotitan wattsi in the middle and Diamantinasaurus matildae below. Scale bar equals 1 metre. From Hocknull et al. 2009.What a year for dinosaur research it has been. We’ve had: the publication of a Cretaceous heterodontosaurid with filamentous integument; a slew of new taxa including a member of the perennially popular tyrannosauroids; a toothless, herbivorous ceratosaur !!! with a bizarre hand (which may or may not sh........ Read more »
Hocknull, S., White, M., Tischler, T., Cook, A., Calleja, N., Sloan, T., & Elliott, D. (2009) New Mid-Cretaceous (Latest Albian) Dinosaurs from Winton, Queensland, Australia. PLoS ONE, 4(7). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006190
- February 26, 2009
- 05:20 AM
- 935 views
stegopod!
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
Photo (Octavio Mateus) and reconstruction (from the paper) of the new stegosaur Miragaia longicollum.Once again I'm late to the party. Miragaia longicollum is the newly published, long-necked sauropod mimicing stegosaur from the Late Jurassic of Portugal that was featured in loads of blogs yesterday. Attendees of the SVP annual meeting may have actually caught the reconstruction of Miragaia way back in 2007, in Austin. Even though it was only up on screen for a short time, the crazy long neck wa........ Read more »
Mateus, O., Maidment, S. C. R., Christiansen, N. A. (2009) A new long-necked ‘sauropod-mimic’ stegosaur and the evolution of the plated dinosaurs. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1909
- February 19, 2009
- 02:39 AM
- 1,017 views
Fossil Human Hair
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
200 000 year old human hair from a hyaena coprolite. Image from Backwell et al. 2009Over a week ago Lucinda Backwell, who also works at the BPI at Wits, announced the discovery of fossilised human hair that exceeds the previous oldest known hair (from a 9000 year old mummy) by about 200 000 years. Indeed it is so old it might not even belong to our own species but might instead belong to H. heidelbergensis. The story was picked up by some of our local papers but doesn't appear to have generated........ Read more »
L BACKWELL, R PICKERING, D BROTHWELL, L BERGER, M WITCOMB, D MARTILL, K PENKMAN, & A WILSON. (2009) Probable human hair found in a fossil hyaena coprolite from Gladysvale cave, South Africa. Journal of Archaeological Science. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2009.01.023
- February 17, 2009
- 08:25 AM
- 1,085 views
Before they were giants, a new fossil from the dawn of the age of dinosaurs
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
I was shut off from the internet all this morning. When I got back online I find the wonderfull news that a brand new dinosaur from Argentina has been described by Ricardo Martinez and Oscar Alcober. And not just any dinosaur, a basal sauropodomorph, indeed THE basal sauropodomorph. How could I not blog about it?Called Panphagia protos (meaning 'the first that eats all' - a reference to its basal position and probable omnivory) it hails from the Ischigualasto Formation. The authors give its age ........ Read more »
Ricardo N. Martinez, & Oscar A. Alcober. (2009) A Basal Sauropodomorph (Dinosauria: Saurischia) from the Ischigualasto Formation (Triassic, Carnian) and the Early Evolution of Sauropodomorpha. PLoS ONE, 4(2). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004397
- February 9, 2009
- 02:07 AM
- 1,239 views
Another giant from the tropics: Superlucina
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
As the blogosphere buzzes about Titanoboa I’m going to review another recent paper that hasn’t received the same degree of publicity but describes another tropical giant that is as equally interesting to me. I’m talking about Superlucina: a new generic named coined for an old species ‘Lucina’ megameris named in 1901. Superlucina megameris is a giant bivalve from the Eocene of Jamaica that was revised and interpreted by Taylor and Glover in the latest issue of Palaeontology. Yes that’........ Read more »
JOHN D. TAYLOR and EMILY A. GLOVER. (2009) A GIANT LUCINID BIVALVE FROM THE EOCENE OF JAMAICA – SYSTEMATICS, LIFE HABITS AND CHEMOSYMBIOSIS (MOLLUSCA: BIVALVIA: LUCINIDAE). Palaeontology, 52(1), 95-109. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2008.00839.x
- February 6, 2009
- 08:08 AM
- 1,133 views
Titanoboa and paleophidiothermometry
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
Yes that's right a new word to describe the measuring of ancient temperatures using fossil snakes. By now most of you will have heard of the Jason Head and colleagues' paper describing Titanoboa, the largest known snake ever. For those that might not have seen it, Titanoboa was a boa that lived 58-60 million years ago in Colombia. Many fossils (mostly vertebrae) deriving from multiple individuals have been found and the largest of these came from a snake close to 13 metres in length and probably........ Read more »
Jason J. Head, Jonathan I. Bloch, Alexander K. Hastings, Jason R. Bourque, Edwin A. Cadena, Fabiany A. Herrera, P. David Polly, & Carlos A. Jaramillo. (2009) Giant boid snake from the Palaeocene neotropics reveals hotter past equatorial temperatures. Nature, 457(7230), 715-717. DOI: 10.1038/nature07671
- February 2, 2009
- 06:00 AM
- 1,278 views
Wierdo of the Week; Protuberum cabralensis
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
Image from Reichel et al 2009Imagine you found this fossil. At first glance you might think it was some kind of ornamented cranial horn but a closer look would reveal that one end bore two articulation facets on a vaguely hockey-stick shaped head. These features identify the bone as the rib of a tetrapod. But the rib of what, exactly? The row of knobs along the dorsal surface is very unusual and does not bear a close resemblance to any other known tetrapod.These questions were raised when some o........ Read more »
MÍRIAM REICHEL, CESAR LEANDRO SCHULTZ, & MARINA BENTO SOARES. (2009) A NEW TRAVERSODONTID CYNODONT (THERAPSIDA, EUCYNODONTIA) FROM THE MIDDLE TRIASSIC SANTA MARIA FORMATION OF RIO GRANDE DO SUL, BRAZIL. Palaeontology, 52(1), 229-250. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2008.00824.x
- January 15, 2009
- 06:40 AM
- 1,579 views
Where do spiny sharks go?
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
Hi and welcome to fish fortnight on Dracovenator. You may notice a slight change in style here, as a new year's resolution I'm going to try to write for a more general audience. Does this mean I'm dumbing Dracovenator down? No, I'm just going to try to stop assuming a lot of specialist knowledge on a part of my readers, and will throw in some more basic anatomy for the Form and Function students I'll be teaching later this year.Anyway by pure coincidence a bunch of fish-related items have come u........ Read more »
Martin D. Brazeau. (2009) The braincase and jaws of a Devonian ‘acanthodian’ and modern gnathostome origins. Nature, 457(7227), 305-308. DOI: 10.1038/nature07436
- January 13, 2009
- 03:49 AM
- 1,339 views
A new Beipiaosaurus - beautifull plumage!
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
We're just under a fortnight into the new year and already the new dino papers are stacking up. The DML brings news of Ceratonykus a newly named alvarezsaur. And PNAS have published a short paper on a stunning new specimen of the therizinosaur Beipiaosaurus. This specimen is much less badly fragmented, than the holotype but sadly still only consists of the front end of the skeleton. It gives us all sorts of new details to mull over. First and foremost are the weird large single filament feather........ Read more »
X. Xu, X. Zheng, & H. You. (2009) A new feather type in a nonavian theropod and the early evolution of feathers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0810055106
- December 1, 2008
- 07:47 AM
- 1,660 views
Two new Fossil Cowries
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
A small paper has just been published on two new fossil cowries from the Miocene of South Australia (Yates 2008). Although it is unlikely to set the palaeontological world on fire it is a personally satisfying paper as it represents my first published foray into a subject area that has actually been close to me for most of my life. As I have mentioned before growing up in South Australia provided next to nothing in the way of actual dinosaur digs or even museum displays of dinosaur bones. If you........ Read more »
Adam Yates. (2008) Two new cowries (Gastropoda: Cypraeidae) from the middle Miocene of South Australia. Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, 32(4), 353-364. DOI: 10.1080/03115510802417927
- November 28, 2008
- 04:31 AM
- 1,700 views
Closing in on turtle origins
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
I wrote in this blog in October that we can expect a more complete prototurtle. Never would I have dreamed that it would appear so quickly and that it would be even more primitive than Proganochelys or Chinlechelys. Finally something that hasn’t progressed so far down the road to turtlehood that its ancestry has been all but erased. Named Odontochelys semitestacea, it came as quite a shock to me – why? Because of all the competing hypotheses of turtle origins this guy seems to support the on........ Read more »
Chun Li, Xiao-Chun Wu, Olivier Rieppel, Li-Ting Wang, & Li-Jun Zhao. (2008) An ancestral turtle from the Late Triassic of southwestern China. Nature, 456(7221), 497-501. DOI: 10.1038/nature07533
- October 10, 2008
- 10:42 AM
- 1,312 views
Good News Everyone!
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
After spending the whole week in hospital (it wasn't just tonsilitis after all) Matthew will probably be coming home tomorrow ..... and one of palaeontology's holy grails - a basal stem turtle has been found and published.I imagine most of my readers know that pinning down the closest relatives of turtles and the origins of their bizarre morphology has been one of the most recalcitrant problems in tetrapod evolution.While the lack of holes in the cheek region of the skull suggests that they are........ Read more »
WG Joyce, SG Lucas, TM Scheyer, AB Heckert, & AP Hunt. (2008) A thin-shelled reptile from the Late Triassic of North America and the origin of the turtle shell. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1196
- July 29, 2008
- 04:18 AM
- 1,007 views
Monographs aint dead
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
A common lament amongst the vertebrate palaeontology community is the trend toward quick, brief publications in high-impact journals with long delayed to non-existant followup with detailed descriptions. The problem is a symptom of today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic climate where the cost of spending a lot of time producing a monograph that will inevitably appear in a low impact journal can actually harm an early career. I am guilty of adding to the problem myself. Five year........ Read more »
Ronan Allain, & Najat Aquesbi. (2008) Anatomy and phylogenetic relationships of Tazoudasaurus naimi (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) from the late Early Jurassic of Morocco. Geodiversitas, 30(2), 345-424. www.geodiversitas.com
- July 23, 2008
- 05:25 AM
- 1,067 views
Dinosaur supertree- Mark II
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
Back in the day when I was a postdoc at the University of Bristol I was involved in a project to build the first supertree for non-avian dinosaurs (Pisani et al. 2002). Now our initial efforts have been thoroughly superseded by a new supertree created by a new team, also from Bristol, headed up by Graeme Lloyd. What is a supertree? Basically its a very large phylogenetic tree stitched together from smaller trees made from standard cladistic analyses of a feasible size (known as source trees). Th........ Read more »
Graeme Lloyd, Katie E Davis, Davide Pisani, James E Tarver, Marcello Ruta, Manabu Sakamoto, David WE Hone, Rachel Jennings, & Michael J Benton. (2008) Dinosaurs and the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, -1(-1), -1--1. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.0715
- July 18, 2008
- 10:13 AM
- 1,647 views
The most primitive short-tailed bird?
by Adam Yates in Dracovenator
The latest issue of Palaeontology is choc-full of palaeo goodness. I might end up blogging quite a bit of it, then again time may elude me. For now I just want to say a few quick words about the paper by Gao Chunling et al. It describes yet another new bird from the Yixian Formation of Liaoning, China. Called Zhongornis haoae, Gao et al. bestow upon it a relatively high degree of importance because they believe it to be the sister group of all other short-tailed birds, a clade called Pygostylia......... Read more »
CHUNLING GAO, LUIS CHIAPPE, QINJING MENG, JINGMAI OCONNOR, XURI WANG, XIAODONG CHENG, & JINYUAN LIU. (2008) A NEW BASAL LINEAGE OF EARLY CRETACEOUS BIRDS FROM CHINA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE AVIAN TAIL. Palaeontology, 51(4), 775-791. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2008.00793.x
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