Fossil Friday Roundup: April 29, 2016

Papers:

• A Basal Lithostrotian Titanosaur (Dinosauria: Sauropoda) with a Complete Skull: Implications for the Evolution and Paleobiology of Titanosauria (Lead image above). Open Access in PLOS ONE

• New Miocene Fossils and the History of Penguins in Australia. Open Access in PLOS ONE.

• The phylogenetic relationships of basal archosauromorphs, with an emphasis on the systematics of proterosuchian archosauriforms. Open Access in PeerJ.

News:

• Texas students charged in Utah with dinosaur fossil theft (link)
• North American Mammoths may have been a single species, by Brian Switek for Smithsonian Magazine (link)
• Study shows dinosaur families migrated out of Europe (link)
• Statistical evidence that dinosaurs were in decline 50 million years prior to their extinction (link)
• An ability to consume seeds might have helped birds survive the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (link)

Events and Society News:

• If you find yourself in the Lyme Regis area of the UK, this weekend (April 29–May 1) is the Lyme Regis Fossil Fest! Find more information at fossilfestival.com

Around the Blogosphere:

• There’s a new family tree for lemurs–Shaena Montanari tells us why it matters.
• Writing at Extinct, Leonard Finkelman looks into the philosophy of ichnotaxonomy and what that has to do with unicorns.
• A recent paper reads the mind of the oldest penguin, summarized by Dan Ksepka at March of the Fossil Penguins.
• Monster Families at the Horniman Museum: an exhibit review by Marc Vincent on Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs
• “Why do titanosaurs lose their heads? When you’ve got a little noggin and it’s at the end of a loooooooong neck, as your remains get scavenged and decompose, your head is likely to be the first thing to get washed away in a flash flood, or perhaps taken away like a restaurant doggie bag by some enterprising carnivore.” You will be hard-pressed to find a more entertaining treatment than Gemma Tarlach’s piece on the new titanosaur.
• Exactly how underrepresented are underrepresented students? Robyn Dahl crunches the numbers for the geosciences.
• How many mammoth species were there in North America? Chris Widga writes about the work that went into a study on which he was a co-author.
• Dave Hone just published a new book, The Tyrannosaur Chronicles. Read more about the story behind it on Dave’s blog.
• John Hutchinson writes about Life as a Diminishing Scientist, in a poignant post about how changes in health interact with a career in the sciences (although it’s so much more of a post than that–just go read it!).
• Ancient Australia was infested by giant penguins. Travis Park (senior author of the study, writing at SciLogs) and Jon Tennant (writing at PLOS Blogs) each summarize the new work.

Do you have some news, a blog, or something just plain cool you want to share with the PLOS Paleo Community? Email it to us at paleocommunity@plos.org or tweet it to us at @PLOSPaleo.