Re: PALEONEWS:Huge dinosaur's neck bones unearthed in Texas

["Jonathan R. Wagner" <znc14@TTACS.TTU.EDU>]

        This is a little late, but...

        For anyone interested in this subject, the expert on _Alamosaurus_,
especially in the Big Bend country, is Dr. Wann Langston at UT Austin*. The
reason this name won't ring a bell to most people on the list is that Dr.
Langston's work has concentrated for the most part on crocodylians (there
you go, Dr. Brochu). Dr. Langston has dug extensively in many areas of North
America, and is responsible for large sections of the Cretaceous collections
at the Texas Memorial Museum, the Texas Tech Museum, the Oklahom Museum of
Natural Histroy. For those of you who don't go through museums reading the
little tags, you may know him from the descriptions of _Pachyrhinosaurus_,
and _Lophorhthon_, or his several other published contributions to dinosaur
paleontology. As for _Alamosaurus_, Dr. Langston has been working on this
fella for a long time, but he has been occipied with other projects. His
efforts have been concentrated on thorough analyses of two frequent dinolist
favorites, _Quetzalcoatlus_ (with listmember Jim Cunnigham, who was sorely
missed at SVP) and _Deinosuchus_. And then, of course, you are surprised,
because you thought these were the territory of Alexander Kellner and David
Schwimmer respectively. Well, the lesson of this whole post is that the
people who have published recently, including the people who are putting out
the flashy press releases, and perhaps, yes, even the people who are waving
their arms before they've even collected the specimens, are not always the
only ones working on a project. In fact, they are sometimes nowhere near the
experts on the subject. It is difficult for outsiders to get a grip on what
is going on, because they just don't know the people involved. Which is why
I posted this. Now you know.
        As an aside, the best recent work on _Alamosaurus_ has been done by
Langston's students, and their students. But I'll let them pipe up if they
want to.

        Wagner

* Of course, the granddaddy of sauropods, Jack Macintosh [sic?], should be
mentioned somewhere here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Jonathan R. Wagner, Dept. of Geosciences, TTU, Lubbock, TX 79409-1053
  "Why do I sense we've picked up another pathetic lifeform?" - Obi-Wan Kenobi