Galton PM 2009. Notes on Neocomian (Late Cretaceous) ornithopod dinosaurs from England - Hypsilophodon, Valdosaurus, "Camptosaurus", "Iguanodon" - and referred specimens from Romania and elsewhere. Revue de Paleobiologie, 28 (1): 211-273.

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Galton gives the "Iguanodon" hoggi holotype a new genus name, Owenodon, and "Valdosaurus" nigeriensis is now Elrhazosaurus nigeriensis.

Noting back to my recent post, this paper mentions Planicoxa briefly as a dryosaurid,but typos the name as "Planticoxa". Galton goes on to mention it later-

The partial skeleton of the ?iguanodontid
Planicoxa venenica DiCroce & Carpenter, 2001
comes from the Cedar Mountain Formation (Barremian)
of Utah. It has an ilium with a low postacetabular
process with a very wide brevis shelf and the femur
has a long deep groove medial to the fourth trochanter
and a deep extensor groove ; this taxon is referred to the
Dryosauridae by Norman (2004).

A dryosaurid position for Planicoxa is very different from the position I recovered, but its plausible that the data set I used was not broad enough. Either way, I'm a bit suspicious of this assignment.

Later on, he goes onto mention that Camptosaurus depressus was sunk into Planicoxa as P. depressus by Carpenter and Wilson (2008). I thought Carpenter and Wilson (2008) changed the name to P. depressa, but IIRC, these types of changes can't really be made.

Galton tentatively claims that Owenodon hoggi is phylogenetically between Camptosaurus and more derived iguanodontians based on its dentary and tooth morphology.

Galton uses temporal differences between Valdosaurus canaliculatus and "V." nigeriensis to argue that they should be separated. Both taxa are referred to the Dryosauridae. This is a pretty dense paper, and this is what I've gleaned from skimmming it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Six years ago, I wrote a post on the Dinosaur Mailing List discussing the phylogenetic position of Planicoxa, an iguanodontian dinosaur (link). Planicoxa was described in a chapter in Mesozoic Vertebrate Life, but has since remained neglected in subsequent works on iguanodontians. To my knowledge, it has never been included in a published phylogenetic analysis, so the analysis I ran in my DML posting is as close as anyone's tried to get in determining what it might be related to.
Now what's interesting is that Dave Norman did talk about Planicoxa in "The Dinosauria 2nd Edition" but he simply referred to it as being a "fragmentary ornithopod [that is] nonhadrosaurid iguanodontian grade in morphology". Now if you look at the post I wrote on the DML, I recovered Planicoxa in a fairly derived position among iguanodontians. Planicoxa fell out as being more derived than Telmatosaurus, which would make it a hadrosaurid.
I was looking over my post and decided to think about re-running Norman's analysis from "The Dinosauria" given that it appeared to include a number of more taxa (such as Muttaburrasaurus, Lurdusaurus, Equijubus, etc.), however, as it turns out, these taxa are not included in Norman's data matrix (see the supplementary info for this book online). Now, given what Norman wrote in the text, I'm sure he did in fact run these taxa, but as he said, he deleted them after finding supposedly that they led to poor resolution.
Folks, please. If you included a taxon in your analysis but delete it later, please leave it in your complete matrix as what you put up as supplementary info, so that this way people can validate YOUR statements using YOUR codings! PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE.
So what is Planicoxa? I don't know. What would it take me to have a better idea of what it might be? Well, I'd want to run an analysis with a data set similar to what I used in my DML post, but with more characters, especially those concerning the postcrania. Do I have a good data set for this in mind? No, not really yet. But we'll see. I'm betting right now that it's probably at least more derived than Iguanodon. Hell, maybe I was right six years ago and it was an early hadrosaurid. I guess we'll just have to wait until I get around to it or someone else does. ;-D

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A new paper is out in ZooKeys describing a number of new crocodyliform taxa.


(Figure 32 from Sereno and Larsson 2009-- the skull of Kaprosuchus, aka "boar croc")

Sereno and Larsson (2009). Cretaceous Crocodyliforms from the Sahara. ZooKeys 28: 144 pp.

Diverse crocodyliforms have been discovered in recent years in Cretaceous rocks on southern landmasses formerly composing Gondwana. We report here on six species from the Sahara with an array of trophic adaptations that significantly deepen our current understanding of African crocodyliform diversity during the Cretaceous period. We describe two of these species (Anatosuchus minor, Araripesuchus wegeneri) from nearly complete skulls and partial articulated skeletons from the Lower Cretaceous Elrhaz Formation (Aptian-Albian) of Niger. The remaining four species (Araripesuchus rattoides sp. n., Kaprosuchus saharicus gen. n. sp. n., Laganosuchus thaumastos gen. n. sp. n., Laganosuchus maghrebensis gen. n. sp. n.) come from contemporaneous Upper Cretaceous formations (Cenomanian) in Niger and Morocco.

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... is being distributed on our campus. Somehow, I would have thought our university would be too small to be on the list of the "top 100 universities in the US", but I guess I was wrong.

Obligatory link: www.dontdissdarwin.com

Another valuable article worth printing and distributing-
How Creationist 'Origin' Distorts Darwin by Eugenie Scott, executive director of the NCSE, published in "US News"

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Gomphotherium image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Prehistoric man, giant animal coexisted

The secret is out: Man and gomphotheres once coexisted in Sonora.
Tools and spear tips found with fossil bones at a remote Sonoran site suggest that Clovis-era hunters butchered two juvenile specimens of the elephantlike megafauna about 13,000 years ago.
It's the first discovery of such recent evidence of gomphotheres in North America, said Vance Holliday, a University of Arizona anthropologist.
It's also the first time gomphothere fossils were found together with implements made by Clovis people, the oldest known inhabitants of North America, Holliday said.
The discovery, on a remote ranch in the Rio Sonora watershed, was actually made in 2007 but was kept quiet to avoid alerting fossil hunters to it. Archaeologists from Mexico and the United States named the site "El Fin del Mundo," or "The End of the World."

Relevant links added by me.

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Muslim creationism is back in the news, this time in Egypt

Muslim creationism is back in the news. There’s been a spate of articles in the U.S. and British press recently about the spread of this scripture-based challenge to Darwinian evolution among Muslims, mostly in the Middle East but also in Europe. The fact that some Muslims have embraced creationism, a trademark belief of some conservative American Protestants, is not new. Reuters first wrote about it in 2006 — “Creation vs. Darwin takes Muslim twist in Turkey” – and this blog has run several posts on the issue, including an interview with Islam’s most prominent creationist, Harun Yahya. What’s new is that these ideas seem to be spreading and academics who defend evolution are holding conferences to discuss the phenomenon

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