Re: Paleo finds of the year 2005

[K and T Dykes <ktdykes@arcor.de>]

<<I wonder if anyone created some kind of table with the most important
paleontologic discoveries of this ending year. Or if  you were to make such
a table, what would it be like? Thanks, in advance   Vlad.>>

I enjoyed learning about part of the diet of /Repenomamus robustus/ from
Liaoning.  A Lower Cretaceous mammal eating a baby dinosaur was good, but
I'm less enthusiatic about the scraps of mammal bones in the area of that
naughty stomach.

The possibility of the parallel evolution of mammalian inner ears suggested
by a new specimen of the monotreme /Teinolophos/ was also interesting,
although doubts have subsequently been voiced concerning the attribution of
the fossil concerned.  In a recent paper, Averianov & Co suggested the
fossil may be an ausktribosphenid, but they didn't provide any particular
argumentation: Averianov AO, Lopatin AV, Skutschas PP, Martynovich NV,
Leshchinskiy SV, Rezvyi AS, Krasnolutskii SA & Fayngertz AV, (2005),
Discovery of Middle Jurassic mammals from Siberia, Acta Palaeontologica
Polonica, 50(4), p.789-797.

Quoting from my webpage on monotremes: "from page 794): "However,
attribution of this specimen to Teinolophos is problematic, it may rather
belong to an ausktribosphenid." They don't provide elaboration on this
matter, perhaps as it's not of central concern to their study. The fossil
jaws they described are from docodonts."

Cheers
Trevor

Mesozoic Mammals?; Monotremata, an internet directory
http://home.arcor.de/ktdykes/monotrem.htm