Above: "Ah love filter feedin' thorugh mah beak! Om nom nom." Apatosaurus louisae (or not?), photo by Tadek Kurpaski, licensed.
Dan Chure on the DML alerted us to this new, privately published monograph published without peer review (probably?) by an independent fossil digging/selling organization. It concerns a pretty damn remarkable looking bonebed from the lower Morrison Formation with several complete diplodocid specimens of various ages. This line from page 21 pretty much sums it up:
"The traditional approach would have provided us with two new species to add to the Morrison list of sauropods. Instead we employed a novel approach by attempting to fit previously reported Morrison fossils within the context of the A. brontodiplodocus sample. The results are astoundingly radical by comparison with previous studies."
I don't know what to say about this paper. It wouldn't surprise me THAT much if something like this were true but... really? Really guys? Fingers crossed that SV-POW or some some other sauropod experts take a look at this bad boy, though the stigma concerning privately held specimens may simply prompt everyone to ignore it. This is what Mike Taylor suggested on the DML, since he (correctly) pointed out that the hypothesis of the paper (all Morrison diplodocids are congeneric) is essentially unverifiable as long as the specimens are in a private collection and haven't been described in a peer-reviewed paper.
As it was independently published, questions about the newly named taxon's validity have been raised. But, really, is this any different from what Cope and Marsh were doing back in the 19th Century? If anything, cheap and easy publication has simply brought us back to those Wild West days of do-it-yourself science, spurious results and all.
Taxonomy aside, the baleobiological conclusions in this thing are... just... fascinating. and probably will NOT help the author's case.
You can read the pdf here:
Galiano, H. and Albersdorfer, R. (2010). "A new basal diplodocid species, Amphicoelias brontodiplodocus, from the Morrison Formation, Big Horn Basin, Wyoming, with taxonomic reevaluation of Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, and other genera." Dinosauria International, LLC. 44pp.
"...the hypothesis of the paper (all Morrison diplodocids are congeneric) is essentially unverifiable as long as the specimens are in a private collection..."
ReplyDeleteIt's unverifiable anyway, since "congenericity" is subjective. That's not a hypothesis; it's a bookkeeping suggestion.
If I'm reading this right, their hypothesis might be better summed up as "'Apatosaurus' are actually male Amphicoelias and 'diplodocines' are the females." Of course, all published names are either considered synonyms of A. altus or indeterminate with respect to A. altus and A. brontodiplodocus....
Whoops, you're right, I should clarify that. The authors lump them all into Amphicoelias, which is a subjective, genericometrically determined philosophy rather than an hypothesis, but they further suggest that apatosaurines are male diplodocines, so there is species-level synonymization going on here. So, assuming they consider A. altus a synonym of D. longus (need to re-check the paper but I remember them citing Forster 2003, who also suggested this), that would make all species in Diplodocinae and Apatosaurinae synonyms of A. altus, the only species they recognize other than A. brontodiplodocus, which is confusingly named because they *don't* synonymize B. or d. with it, rather regarding it as a new, basal form. I think.
ReplyDeleteFilter feeding? Beak?
ReplyDelete@Albertonykus
ReplyDeleteI wish I were making this up... better read the paper ;)
It may not be different than Marsh and Cope... but for their respective brilliance, is that *really* what we want to go back to? They should have submitted this to a journal. Maybe they did and were rejected. Regardless, I'll definitely be pouring a mug of hot cider and cuddling up with this paper one of these cozy autumn nights...
ReplyDelete
ReplyDelete"...the hypothesis of the paper (all Morrison diplodocids are congeneric) is essentially unverifiable as long as the specimens are in a private collection..."
It's unverifiable anyway, since "congenericity" is subjective. That's not a hypothesis; it's a bookkeeping suggestion.
In this case, no. It isn't just a case of massive lumping -- it's lumping all previously recognised Morrison diplodocids into a single species (not just a single genus!) and establishing a new species which is conveniently not synonymous with everything else. So the claim is: the new species is the outgroup to a clade containing Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus, Supersaurus, Suuwassea, Eobrontosaurus, Tornieria and maybe a couple that I've forgotten.