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Fossil Friday Roundup: November 3, 2017

Ian Hamilton Fossil Friday Roundup

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:

Featured Folks and Fieldwork:

Art, books, culture, and fun:

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, tweet it to us at @PLOSPaleo, or message us on Facebook

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