Hairy Museum of Natural History

• New Turtle: Odontochelys semitestacea
• Name Means: Half-shelled Toothed Turtle
• Relations: Basal Turtle
• Holotype: IVPP V 15639, complete skeleton
• Other Material: IVPP V13240 (paratype): complete skeleton prepared in ventral (bottom) view, IVPP V 15653: partial skeleton.
• Location: Guizhou Province, southwestern China
• Age: Carnian Triassic, ~220,000,000 years ago
• Length: ~40cm (~16 inches) long.
• Reference: Chun Li, Xiao-Chun Wu, Olivier Rieppel, Li-Ting Wang, and Li-Jun Zhao, 2008. An ancestral turtle from the Late Triassic of southwestern China Nature 456: 497-501 DOI: 10.1038/nature07533 [Figures and Tables] [Supplemental Info]
• Elsewhere on the Web:
  • Canadian Museum of Nature: Press Release
  • Chinleana: Rethinking Turtle Origins: Odontochelys
  • Dracovenator: Closing in on Turtle Origins
  • The Dragon’s Tales: To Osteoderm or Not Osteoderm?
  • Not Exactly Rocket Science: Heroes in a Half-shell Show how Turtles Evolved
  • National Geographic News: Oldest Turtle Found; May Crack Shell Evolution Mystery
  • Oldworld: ついに出た！カメになりかけの古生物
  • Palaeoblog: Odontochelys semitestacea: The Oldest Turtle
  • Pharyngula: Odontochelys, a transitional turtle
  • When Pigs Fly Returns: A carapaceless turtle
  • Why I Hate Theropods: Quote-mining Odontochelys

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Reptiles, Triassic.

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For any New Mexico readers, there are a couple of lectures coming up this week that would be of interest to the paleontology-minded:

The NM Friends of Paleontology are meeting Monday, Nov. 17 at 7:00pm at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. This month’s meeting includes a talk by Larry Rinehart on some of the recent work he’s done on the allometry, growth, dimorphism and population structure of Coelophysis bauri from Ghost Ranch. The NMFOP meetings are free and open to the public.

On Thursday the 20th, geologist David Love and paleontologist Gary Morgan will be giving a talk on a 10 million year old oreodont recently unearthed at the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge. The talk will begin at 3:30pm in the Macey Center auditorium at New Mexico Tech in Socorro (admission $5). More info about this find is online here.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Mammals, Neogene, Recent Discoveries, Triassic.

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The Beyond Bones blog at the Houston Museum of Natural Science is full of paleo-stories these days:

• Several prime pelycosaur posts from recent field work in the Permian beds of Seymour, including Dimetrodon-as-chondrichthivore and new material that may be from the narrow-snouted finback Secodontosaurus .
• And a step-by-step look at how Julius T. Csotonyi recreated the world of Leonardo, the fantastically well-preserved Brachylophosaurus, for the museum’s Dinosaur Mummy CSI: Cretaceous Science Investigation exhibit. Csotonyi’s digital paintings are about the best I’ve seen, and this post gives valuable insight into his process.

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cretaceous, Dinosaurs, Museumabilia, Permian, Synapsids.

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Striving for fair and balanced reporting for all arthropod aficionados:

A few weeks old, but worth noting: World’s oldest flying insect fossil. A beautiful resting trace from a Carboniferous insect that landed with its limbs sprawled out like a mayfly; found in Massachusetts by a geology student at Tufts University.

Moving back in time, Chris Nedin kicks off his new Ediacaran blog with a compelling Cambrian tale of how flexible trilobites avoided unlucky breaks in The Spandrels of San Marco and the Anomalocaris Paradigm.

Speaking of the Cambrian, scientists are furthering their insight into the exceptional preservation of the famous Burgess Shale fossils, according to this article.

And  The Life of Madygen provides a brief introduction to the Triassic titanopterans, an extinct group of insects, related to grasshoppers and crickets, but with wingspans reaching half-a-meter across!

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Cambrian, Carboniferous, Invertebrates, Triassic.

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• 
• Epidexipteryx hui
  Credit: Zhao Chuang & Xing Lida.

• New Dinosaur: Epidexipteryx hui
• Name Means: Yaoming Hu’s Display Feather
• Relations: Scansoripterygid Avialaean
• Holotype: IVPP V15471, skeleton preserved with feather impressions.
• Location: Inner Mongolia, northern China
• Age: ?Middle to Late Jurassic, somewhere between 152,000,000 to 168,000,000 years ago
• Info: The well-preserved skeleton of little Epidexipteryx shows that this pigeon-sized dinosaur was covered in a fluffy feather coat, although it did not possess any contour feathers that would have enabled it to fly. It did, however sport two pairs of long ribbon-like plumes that fanned out from the tip of its rather short tail, presumably used for some sort of display. Other interesting features include its enlarged, forward-curving front teeth and its unusually proportioned hip bones. Its describers suggest that Epidexipteryx was related to the long-fingered Epidendrosaurus, and that these unusual little dinosaurs are examples of a previously unknown diversity of theropods near the origin of birds.
• Reference: F. Zhang, Z. Zhou, X. Xu, X. Wang and C. Sullivan, 2008. A bizarre Jurassic maniraptoran from China with elongate ribbon-like feathers Nature 455: 1105-1108.
• Elsewhere on the Web:
  • Nature: Figures and Tables
  • Palaeoblog: Epidexipteryx, Jurassic Feathered Dinosaur
  • Catalog of Organisms: A New Stem-Bird and Publication in the Digital Age
  • BBC News: New Feathered Dinosaur Discovered
  • Dave Hone’s Archosaur Musings has a guest post by one of the describers of Epidexipteryx, Corwin Sullivan: The Vampire Peacock of Daohugou

—Matt Celeskey.

File under: Dinosaurs, Jurassic.

Comments on record: (3)