Fossil Friday Roundup: November 3, 2017

Featured Image: Reconstruction of adult female giraffid,  Decennatherium rex. Illustration by Oscar Sanisidro, from Ríos et al. (2017), CC-BY.

Less than 2 weeks to vote for the Top 10 Open Access Fossil Taxa of 2017! Vote here before it’s too late!

Papers (All Open Access):

• Leaf anatomy of a late Palaeozoic cycad (Biology Letters)
• Asteriacites and other trace fossils from the Po Formation (Visean–Serpukhovian), Ganmachidam Hill, Spiti Valley (Himalaya) and its paleoenvironmental significance (Geologica Carpathica)
• Foraminiferal, ostracod, and calcareous nannofossil biostratigraphy of the latest Badenian – Sarmatian interval (Middle Miocene, Paratethys) from Poland, Romania and the Republic of Moldova (Geologica Carpathica)
• Diversification dynamics, species sorting, and changes in the functional diversity of marine benthic gastropods during the Pliocene-Quaternary at temperate western South America (PLOS ONE)
• Kleptopredation: a mechanism to facilitate planktivory in a benthic mollusc (Biology Letters)
• Record breaking achievements by spiders and the scientists who study them (PeerJ)
• Descendants of the Jurassic turiasaurs from Iberia found refuge in the Early Cretaceous of western USA (Scientific Reports)
• A new giraffid (Mammalia, Ruminantia, Pecora) from the late Miocene of Spain, and the evolution of the sivathere-samothere lineage (PLOS ONE)
• Scaldiporia vandokkumi, a new pontoporiid (Mammalia, Cetacea, Odontoceti) from the Late Miocene to earliest Pliocene of the Westerschelde estuary (The Netherlands) (PeerJ)
• Desert mammal populations are limited by introduced predators rather than future climate change (RSOS)
• Probabilistic methods surpass parsimony when assessing clade support in phylogenetic analyses of discrete morphological data (Palaeontology)
• The topology of evolutionary novelty and innovation in macroevolution (Philos Transactions B)

Community Events, Society Updates, and Resources:

• Vote for the Top 10 Taxa of 2017, deadline November 15 (PLOS Paleo)
• A history of life on Earth: A masterclass on evolution with experts from the Natural History Museum, November 19, 2017 (Link)
• The Science Ambassador Scholarship for female undergraduate and high school seniors, Deadline December 11, 2017 (Link)
• Trekking Across the GOBE: From the Cambrian through the Katian, IGCP 653 Annual Meeting, June 3-7, 2018, Athens, Ohio, USA (Link)
• North American Paleontological Convention June 23–27 2019 (Link)

News and Views:

Animals and Anatomy:

• Underwhelming Fossil Fish of the Month October 2017 (UCL Blogs)
• Aussie snakes and lizards trace back to Asia 30 million years ago (Link)
• Fossil Focus: The ecology and evolution of the Lepospondyli (Palaeo[Online])
• Is everything we know about sauropod phylogeny nonsense? (SVPOW)
• A New Look for Sinosauropteryx (Dr. Neurosaurus)
• Plant-eating dinosaur had huge chisel-shaped teeth (Earth Archives)
• Time to rewrite the dinosaur textbooks? Not quite yet! (Link)
• An Inordinate Fondness for Giant Birds (Laelaps)
• First of the Guinea Pigs (Synapsida)
• Buff Little Biters (Laelaps)

Museums, Methods, and Musings:

• Elsewhere in the blogosphere update October (Fistful of Cinctans)
• This Mesozoic Month: October 2017 (Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs)
• Doing history and philosophy of science like paleontology (Extinct)
• Fossil Friday – vacation! (Valley of the Mastodon)
• URI researchers, students provide unique insight into extinction dynamics in Late Triassic (Link)
• Dinosaurs of China at Wollaton Hall (Raptormaniacs)
• Bath Time for Sue (Extinct Monsters)
• The Asteroid That Wiped Out Dinosaurs Sent Earth Into A Multi-Year Winter (Link)
• The Winds of Winter (Letters from Gondwana)

Featured Folks and Fieldwork:

• Halloween: Platteville in disguise (Equatorial Minnesota)
• Rocky Mountain Field Trip (Time Scavengers)

Art, books, culture, and fun:

• Tet Zoo Reviews Zoos: Colchester Zoo (Tetrapod Zoology)
• Halloween Special V: Lovecraft’s Paleontological Journey (Letters from Gondwana)

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