The many moods of Rauffella

Earlier in February, I attended a Geological Society of Minnesota fossil lab hosted by Jeff Thole and Macalester College. At some point someone brought out a fossil that they weren't familiar with; it looked a lot like the final photo in this post, a light-colored object that resembled loops of cord. What this person had was one of the most characteristic but least scientifically appreciated fossils of the Decorah Shale: the trace fossil Rauffella (specifically R. palmipes, as we'll get to later).

Your Friends The Titanosaurs, part 9: "Campylodon", Clasmodosaurus, Choconsaurus, and Daxiatitan

I've come up against some judgement calls at this point. There are two varieties for this exercise. The first includes a group of names based on poor material that have had little study but which are sometimes/often stuck into Titanosauria, usually from historical inertia or the "provenance argument". The provenance argument goes something like this: "the only described sauropods from this time and place are titanosaurs, ergo this is a titanosaur". The provenance argument is a seductive bit of taxonomic stereotyping, but I'm wary of it. For one thing, the implicit flip side is "therefore there cannot be anything else here than titanosaurs". When the provenance argument is correct, it's not because you put in any effort or had any kind of insight, and when it isn't, you look stupid for being lazy. When confronted with this dilemma and, say, a handful of teeth which have no particular characteristics that would put them in one group or another, I don't see what's wrong with "indeterminate sauropod". The other type of judgement call includes the frustrating taxa that sometimes end up in a clade and sometimes end up outside of it, generally because they are in that fuzzy transitional zone.

For this particular entry, I had cause to consider examples of both types: in the historical orphan bin are "Campylodon" ameghinoi (=Campylodoniscus) and Clasmodosaurus spatula, and in the fuzzy clade bin is Chubutisaurus insignis. I decided that the position of Chubutisaurus is too unstable to be confident it's a titanosaur at this point, and so left it out. We can always cover it later on, with some of its similarly ambivalent cronies. As of this writing, others in a similar equivocal position which I currently have outside of Titanosauria include Angolatitan adamastor, the two Huanghetitan species, Ligabuesaurus leanzai, Mongolosaurus haplodon, Phuwiangosaurus sirindhornae, Tastavinsaurus sanzi, Triunfosaurus leonardii, and Wintonotitan wattsi. Two things they almost all have in common: late Early Cretaceous age, and when they do show up in Titanosauria they're just barely over the line. The other two were more problematic because there's not much material and they've never attracted much interest. I decided to cover them here together as examples.

Bajadasaurus pronuspinax

Like their cousins the rebbachisaurids, the dicraeosaurids have been on a roll over the past year. I featured the new oldest dicraeosaurid, Lingwulong shenqi, last year. This week saw the publication of another new dicraeosaurid, from a much more typical time and place (the Early Cretaceous of South America), but with a unique style all its own: Bajadasaurus pronuspinax.

Concerning an Isotelus and its acquaintances

Here we have a big ol' rock.

New Pages: Geologic Time Scale and Classification Diagrams

So far the year has been quiet (well, up until Friday), so I thought I'd address a couple of nagging things, which I've done by adding two pages. The first page is a geologic time scale figure, from one I worked up for National Park Service reports. It's the kind of thing I thought would be handy to have on hand here for reference, instead of having a link to an external site. It'll be updated from time to time as dates are refined. The Quaternary is rather cramped, although I don't feel particularly apologetic for shortchanging Homo sapiens.

The second page is a sort of "map" to the classifications used in the various sheets over at The Compact Thescelosaurus, made with classic ASCII cladograms. (I contemplated drafting them in other ways, but none of them were as amenable to updating.) I thought this would be useful for visualizing the mess of classification columns. The process also forced me to look at the positions of a few clades, as you may have noticed from the updates sheet.

It's not connected to either topic, but I've also added a paragraph of new information to the post on the "Kweichow sauropod" after coming across a mention of it in Averianov and Sues (2017).

Finally, so as not to leave the post without an image, here's one attached to a quick story:

Back in spring 2001 I was on a field trip to the Badlands/Black Hills area of southwestern South Dakota. We were stopped along a road near Deadwood for lunch. One of the professors said something to the effect that "there are fossils in this formation." I looked down at the chunks of rock at my feet and said "You mean like this?"

Yeah, like this.

From my notes the source is the Whitewood Formation (or Dolomite, or Limestone), fittingly enough an (surprise, surprise) Upper Ordovician unit. More on its cephalopods can be found in Miller and Furnish (1937).

References

Averianov, A., and H.-D. Sues. 2017. Review of Cretaceous sauropod dinosaurs from central Asia. Cretaceous Research 69:184–197. doi:10.1016/j.cretres.2016.09.006.

Miller, A. K., and W. M. Furnish. 1937. Ordovician cephalopods from the Black Hills, South Dakota. Journal of Paleontology 11(7):535–551.

Your Friends The Titanosaurs, part 8: Bonitasaura, Borealosaurus, and Brasilotitan

And so we reach Part 8, otherwise to be known as "Bonitasaura and these other two." Bonitasaura is one of the best-known sauropods, even if it isn't quite a household word, and also has some unusual jaw features going for it. Brasilotitan has some of the same jaw features, but is not known from nearly as much material and came along several years later. Borealosaurus has an uncertain grip on Titanosauria, and gripping things takes some creativity when you have either no fingers or just nubs.

Crystal Ball for 2019

So we've come to 2019. I didn't do so well last year trying to apply a system, so that's gone. I'm trying to mix it up beyond "X# of new taxa"; the problem is "X#" is so easy to define and score.

Will the coming year bring, for no obvious reason, a photo of Simosuchus? (yes)