I’ve been hinting off and on for a couple of weeks that I have something significant in the pipes and it’s due out this time tomorrow (assuming the journal sticks to the publication date and time it told me). So I thought I’d be a tease and leave these not-that-cryptic hints about it up in time for tomorrow’s big splash.
Feathered pterosaur in PLoS ONE?
Pterosaur yes, PLoS ONE yes, feathers not so much.
A pterosaur with evidence of coloration akin to Anchiornis and Archaeopteryx??
If only. Sadly not.
A Rhamphorhynchus caught in the act of doing something super-awesome amazing?
Closer.
David Peters is right – pterosaurs nested within squamata?
I think we all know the answer to that one is ‘no’.
Skimming pterosaur?
Tried to avoid that trope as much as possible considering the animal and environment!
A Rhamphorhynchus “look-alike” with a short tail?
That’s getting very close….
“A new non-pterodactyloid pterosaur from the Late Jurassic of southern Germany”?
Published then is it?
Doesn’t seem to be. Looks like “A question” has been sniffing around the in-press taxa at ZooBank
Indeed, a quick google (and indeed PloS one) search suggested the same thing. Also reveals why they don’t know the name!
Off topic
I just skimmed the “mammal” Q&A at “Ask a biologist” (which is a GREAT site, and I am VERY grateful to you and your colleagues for doing it)– you answered a question about the relationship of “bats and dogs” a few weeks ago, and said bats were more closely related to primates than to carnivorans: this was the standard view in the 20th C, but the newer (largely molecularly based) picture breaks up the traditional “Archonta” and puts bats into “Laurasiatheria” with ungulates, Lipotyphlans and … carnivorans.
(Apologies for being a pedant. And I’m sure I’ve gone further wrong than this in my own field.)
I did not know that. Obviously. I did do a bit of checking before I wrote that though obviously now can’t possibly remember where that would have been. I know there’s been some major changes in molecular work, but I thought that result was still pretty stable. Got a link to anything i can peruse?
Bats have been laurasiatheres since placental molecular phylogeny got its basics down in the late 90′s (e.g. Waddell et al.’s 1999 “Towards resolving the interordinal relationships of placental mammals”). A good basic review is Springer et al.’s (2004) “Molecules consolidate the placental mammal tree”.
Alas, no useful links! I skim journal articles on (mainly) mammalian evolution, but in an amateurish way and not recording bibliographical references.
There were a bunch of articles in 2001 (Murphy et al., Science 294, pp 2348-2350;
Liu et al., Science 291, pp 1786-1789 (which highlights the conflict between molecular and morphological phylogenies);
Madsen et al., Nature 409, pp. 610-614;
Murphy at al., Nature 409, pp. 614ff … … … but none of them, when I just looked them up, looked like the review article I THOUGHT I remembered reading.)
My senses that the relationships of orders within each of the “big four” are still getting rearranged with each new study, but that the assignment or orders to the four main super-ordinal clades
(Afrotheria: proboscidea, tubulidentata, hyracoidea, sirenia, African “insectivores”;
Xenarthra: Xenarthra;
Euarchontoglires: primates, tree shrews, colugos, rodents, rabbits;
Laurasiatheria: Cetartiodactyla, Perissodactyla, Carnivora, pangolins, bats, “Eulipotyphlans”)
has been pretty stable for the past couple of decades.
So the old concept of “Archonta” (bats,tree shrews, colugos, us) has apparently been rejected pretty conclusively. … It took a while for palaeontologists to come to terms with this. Kenneth Rose and J.D. Archibald’s (editors) “The Rise of Placental Mammals” has one chapter reviewing the molecular stuff, but the discussion in the rest of the book is almost entirely morphological, including a chapter on “Archonta” (which, as I recall, more or less admit that the evidence for “Archontan” unity was pretty thin…).
Anyway… the MAIN message of your reply to the AAB enquirer who asked whether dogs were related to bats — that they are both mammals but not closely related ones — was the right one!
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Back on topic: I’ve looked at the article on the new ramphorhynchoid: it’s an exquisite specimen! PLoS One, with its willingness to publish lots of photos, was certainly the right place for the article.