New Plesiosaur Guide Update

[bh480@scn.org (Ben Creisler)]

To: dinosaur@usc.edu
From: Ben Creisler (bh480@scn.org)
Subject: New Plesiosaur Guide Update

Just days after Jeff Poling posted my guide to plesiosaur names,
Ken Carpenter sent me a copy of his new paper revising
North American elasmosaurs, which sinks a batch of
taxa as junior synonyms.  Had I but known, as the old
novels used to say....

Carpenter, K. Revision of North American Elasmosaurs from
the Cretaceous of the Western Interior. Paludicola 2(2): 148-173
June 1999.

Anyway, I will quickly make the corrections needed. Here
is a short synopsis of major taxonomic changes.

Alzadasaurus is made a junior synonym of Thalassomedon.
(Alzadasaurus riggsi = Thalassomedon haningtoni).
The additional species Alzadasaurus kansanensis and
pembertoni are made junior synonyms of Styxosaurus snowii.

Alzadasaurus colombiensis  (misspelled "columbiensis" in
Carpenter's paper) is made the type of the new genus
Callawayasaurus, named in honor of the late Jack Callaway.

Ralph Molnar also emailed me to point out a mix-up in the
Woolungasaurus entry. The fossil skull described by Persson
in 1982 is the same skull described in 1993 as having been
crunched on by a Kronosaurus--I assumed they were separate
finds based on what I had seen.  The 1993 paper appeared in
Modern Geology, which the University of Washington
dropped from their subscription list the same year. I'll send
Jeff an update on this one too.