Re: Poekilopleuron Part2

[<TWILLIAMS@canr1.cag.uconn.edu>]

Great news if they have found pieces of the skull of _Poekilopleuron_. 
Or is it just tooth impressions?  (I'm assuming the new material is 
from _P. bucklandii_, not the theropod from Normandy sometimes called 
_P. gallicum_ (= _Laelaps gallicus_).  

One of the reasons _Poekilopleuron_ is so poorly known is that the 
excavation of the original skeleton was thoroughly botched 
(through no fault of Eudes-Deslongchamps).  Its destruction in the 
Second World War was the final ignominy for poor old _Poeki_.   




> 
> there had been two questions for the source of the news about Poekilopleuron. 
> I 
> found the news about it in an german online-article (March 4th). 
> It refers to an article in the french "Liberation"-newspaper (March ? 1999). 
> In 
> the following I've translated you the important passages from german into 
> english (please excuse eventually mistakes).
> 
> Nice Greetings, Thomas Hammann
> P.S. Thanks to Ben and Pharris for your interest.
> 
> "The puzzle of a norman dinosaur"
> When Andre Dubreuil, a retired mayor of Conteville in the normandie, was 
> going 
> home one day in the year 1994 he found an orange-coloured stone with 
> impressions 
> of fangs on it. A paleontologist of the university of Caen recognized that 
> these 
> teeth-impressions didn't belong to a crocodilian but to a flesh-eating 
> dinosaur 
> of the middle jurassic (about 160 million years).   
> Philippe Taquet, director of the laboratory of paleontology at the national 
> museum of natural history in Paris examined the find.(...)
> In the 1830s Jacques Amand Eudes-Deslongchamps, a professor of natural 
> history 
> in Caen, found pieces of bones in the limestone of Caen. With these pieces he 
> reconstructed an animal with the length of about 10 metres. In honour of the 
> british discoverer of the Megalosaurus William Buckland the Frenchman named 
> the 
> new animal Poekilopleuron bucklandii. Eudes-Deslongchamps thought that it was 
> even possible that he an Buckland found parts of the same species. 
> Unfortunately 
> the remains were destroyed during second-world-war. There were only detailed 
> drawings left of them.
> Because of this mysterious finding-history the find of the ex-mayor of 
> Conteville was kept secret till last Thursday. But now the people of the 
> laboratory of Philippe Taquet are sure that they are nearly able to solve the 
> puzzle. For the collaborator Ronan Allain the new find is a lucky chance. 
> "The 
> discovered pieces of the skull are something completely new in France. I 
> would 
> be satisfied if I would have the skull because you know nearly nothing about 
> this group of theropods. It was bipedal, armed with claws, growing very fast 
> and 
> eating his plant-eating colleagues", says Allain.
> "If this find belongs to the others we'll have the first complete 
> flesh-eating 
> dinosaur in Europe." -     
> 
> 
>