PILOT WHALES & POLACANTHIDS

["D.W.Naish" <dwn194@soton.ac.uk>]

Being something of an amateur cetologist, I will look  up the stuff on the 
pilot whale name changes. I didn't realise it was so complex. Thanks for your
comments George....

And thanks Mickey for forwarding the stuff on Polacanthids and Ken Carpenter.
I was going by Olshevsky's article in fall '94 The Dinosaur Report. It says:
'Further discoveries by Kirkland in the Early Cretaceous have shed much new
light on this group of dinosaurs, and a paper resurrecting and redifining the
old family Polacanthidae, generally considered synonymous with Nodosauridae, is
presently in preparation.' Ken Carpenter is mentioned, particularly as he
described Mymoorapelta together with James Kirkland, but the emphasis here
definitely seems to be on Kirkland. Hence my little error!

STRUTHIOSAURUS AND ACANTHOPHOLIS

If someone out there with access to info. on the nodosaurid Struthiosaurus 
could help me with the following query I'd be extremely grateful. It has
recently been shown that the hadrosaurid Telmatosaurus was a kind of 'island
relict', a living fossil of its age. Has there been any published information
on Struthiosaurus that support a similar interpretation? And how did 
Struthiosaurus get its name, seeing as Struthio is the generic name for the
ostrich? What's the latest on the Acanthopholis debate, or is the info. 
awaiting publication? Incidentally, a French company called Starlux do a toy
Acanthopholis.......

PLATY SAUROPODS

As you'll probably know, Stephen Czerkas showed a couple of years back that at
least some sauropods had dermal spines running atop their backbones. The
sauropod he recorded this discovery on was a diplodocid, and I think he called
it 'cf. Diplodocus'. But was it actually Diplodocus, does anybody know? If it
wasn't, does anybody know what became of it?

We have a kind of science magazine programme here called 'Tomorrow'w World'.
They reported on this discovery and did a rather nifty little piece of computer
animation to illustrate the point. A Steve Kirk painting of a rearing
Apatosaurus was donned in dermal spines and also big, plate-like scales (as
opposed to the small, rounded scales recorded from other sauropods). A.F.A.I.K.
this discovery of big, plate-type scales was not reported on officially. Does
anybody know any better?

Can anyone please give a ref. for Dyslocosaurus, a diplodocid with more than 3
unguals (claws) on its foot. Regarding the gastroliths, a new Apatosaurus
species - A. yahnapin - has (I think, I haven't actually got the paper yet)
irrefutable ones. Did Seismosaurus' gastroliths prove that sauropods held them
both in a base-of-neck crop and also a gizzard? Thanks for any help.

"What we didn't want not to do was to not confuse anyone" - a spokesperson for
a  toilet-paper making firm.

DARREN NAISH