Re: Early land tetrapods used dermal bone to counter CO2 in blood

[Jocelyn Falconnet <j.falconnet@gmail.com>]

Well, the paper is now online:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/04/19/rspb.2012.0558.abstract

As a sidenote, I don't find this paper convincing. It includes many "predictions" that are 
"confirmed" by "observations". But there is no attempt to analyse or to quantify the 
variation of the parameters they discuss.

The fact that the last part of the discussion (focused on amniotes and relatives) is just worthless 
does not help either. Seriously. Captorhinomorphs ? Polyphyletic. Romeriids ? *Romeria* is a 
captorhinid. They could have meant members of the clade Romeriida instead of Romeriidae, but the 
last name has been frequently used in the past so that it is very misleading (and given that the 
cited reference is a paper published by Carroll on "romeriids", I think they just stuck 
to the name included in the title - "Romeriidae" - and that was used in polyphyletic 
sense). No dermal sculpturing in synapsids ? What about caseids ? And varanopids ? The more derived 
eureptiles ? Aren't there a number of crocodylomorph having a sculptured skull ?

You might think I'm a bit harsh, but just read the paper and face the truth.

Cheers,
Jocelyn

Le 25/04/2012 04:50, Ben Creisler a écrit :

> From: Ben Creisler
> bcreisler@gmail.com
>
>
> The paper is not posted yet on the Proceedings of the Royal Society B
> website. Here are links to the press release and news stories about
> the theory that bone helped neutralize acidity from CO2 in the blood
> of early land-venturing tetrapods that had fixed ribs.
>
>
> PRESS RELEASE
>
> http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2012/04/tetrapods
>
>
> http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/04/body-armor-for-breathing.html
>
> http://news.discovery.com/animals/tetrapods-body-armor-120424.html