Re: Dino/Birds? was Mesozoic snow? and fund for Antonio

[Jeff Hecht <jeff@jeffhecht.com>]

At 9:45 PM +0100 6/15/05, Aidan Karley wrote:
>> One of the things that's so wonderful about these deposits is that they 
>> contain a broad continuum of dino-birds, showing a range of evolution that 
>> had been little-known before.
>>
>       Is there a readily available summary of *all* the macro-fossils from 
>this fauna? I'm sure that would also be a good basis for a NS article too. And 
>SciAm, if you're not averse to "write once, publish many" syndrome.
>

A lot of new species are still in the pipeline of preparation and description. 

There are odd selection effects in what we see because peasant farmers do most 
of the excavation, and they concentrate on what they think their customers 
(museums and others) want. They've been looking for feathers and dinosaurs, so 
the mammals haven't been getting much attention. They also have been looking 
for small animals, tossing aside the bones of an elephant-sized sauropod. 

Potentially the Yixian formation could be sampling a significant fraction of 
the critters that visited the lake region over a period on the order of a 
million years. The number of new species will drop with time, but we're going 
to see more. That's one of the frustrations, in a way -- the story isn't 
complete enough to write the definitive story. 
-- 
Jeff Hecht, science & technology writer
jeff@jeffhecht.com; http://www.jeffhecht.com
Boston Correspondent: New Scientist magazine
Contributing Editor: Laser Focus World
525 Auburn St., Auburndale, MA 02466 USA
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