Melpardus
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Monthly update, and I'm pretty excited to share this one.
In relevant news, we have a bunch of decently significant discoveries and otherwise interesting arguments:
In relevant news, we have a bunch of decently significant discoveries and otherwise interesting arguments:
- The ornithischian family tree got another shake-up with the publication of a new cladistics study that put the formally non-dinosaurian Triassic-aged group Silesauridae into Dinosauria, squarely at the base of the Ornithischia clade. This is significant for a number of reasons, chiefly that it offers a solid answer to the question of exactly how the ornithischians actually originated; before this, it wasn't clear exactly how the group actually first appeared and what they originated from. Of course it also adds a new group of animals to the dinosaur family tree, which is always cool.
- Two bits of sauropod news, one being the discovery of a skull of a hatching titanosaur from South America that shows how weird-looking some baby dinosaurs could get; the other being a proposal by illustrator Mark Hallett that suggests that sauropods might've had their nostrils more atop their heads than currently commonly imagined, due to their head angle and nostril placement preventing them from drinking and breathing simultaneously when they went to a waterhole.
- Proto-mammals like the tusked dicynodont Lystrosaurus seem to have been able to essentially hibernate, which may provide an explanation for how these animals were able to survive the Permain-Triassic Great Dying, generally considered the biggest mass extinction event in Earth history.
- Another example of grand specimen reexaminations, the holotype specimen (and the first full dinosaur skeleton to be discovered and recognized as a dinosaur) of the Early Jurassic English dinosaur Scelidosaurus was finally anatomically reconstructed. Aside from fully and thoroughly examining the skeletal anatomy (which make up three of the four papers linked), it was found that it was an early ankylosaur, which contradicts traditional hypotheses that posit that Scelidosaurus was close to, if not the ancestor of both stegosaurs and ankylosaurs.
- A beautifully preserved new ornithopod from China named Changmiania liaoningensis, with fossils indicating that it was a burrower.
- A study of the brain cases and inner ear of two Triceratops revealed that they held their heads at a 45-degree angle, likely to better show off the frill. It was also found that their sense of smell was relatively underdeveloped compared to other dinosaur groups, and their hearing, while limited, was sensitive enough to pick up low-frequency sounds.
- Mark Witton continues his rampage across the ancient world with his pair of clippers, shaving the fur and feathers off of all of your favorite extinct megafauna. This time he's coming after mastodons.
- A beautiful Majungasaurus model from digital sculptor Max B.
- The channel Ben G Thomas has a video out on five beautifully preserved species of animals preserved in ice, including the two cave(?) bear specimens that were discovered a few weeks ago in Siberia.
- The annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is next month, and as usual they just posted the annual abstract book. For the uninitiated, these meetings are conferences where researchers present new work that hasn't yet been published; every year there's a few really exciting projects and discoveries, and when it gets closer to SVP time I'll probably look through the abstract and post what I consider to be the highlights in addition to whatever else I manage to hear about from social media activity. I'd like to eventually attend a meeting myself; this year is virtual but it's usually a 3-day event held in-person. This year's was supposed to be in Cleveland I think; last year was Australia if I recall correctly.
- This descent into madness.
- Finally, the thing I saw and wanted to post about:
I haven't been following the development of this game as closely as I've been following Saurian, but it's on my short list of games I'd like to get. It's an indie project that's been in the works since 2014 and I really like how it's turning out; arguably far better looking than its more mainstream competitor, Jurassic World: Evolution. (I've heard nothing about that game in a good while now.) Plus they got a certain time-traveling wildlife expert to narrate this. It's really nice and I suggest giving the trailer a watch at least. - Major P.S. since I don't want to triple-post: the Jon Favreau-directed BBC/Apple TV documentary is going to officially start production soon, based on this tweet. From folks I know who've spoken to others closer in these circles, it's likely that the story and some creature designs have already been commissioned by this point.
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