Re: Dinosaur Dreaming 2006 Field Report

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

<<The ?Multituberculate tooth found last year (approx. 5mm wide) has been
studied further, and was found to have at least three features not seen on
any other Multi tooth. It either represents a really weird Multi, or an
entirely new group of mammals. I wonder how it will compare to the recent
(but much younger) New Zealand material?>>

According to the paper, it won't.  The New Zealand 'mammal' (not that I
matter, but I'm not convinced) is an edentulous jaw and a fragment of limb
bone.  Actually, the jaw is the front of both lower jaws.  There's an hole
for a procumbent tooth (which is a fairly mammaly thing to have), and then
three and a scrap more alveoli, which the authors label as being for a
canine, a p1 and a p2 premolar.  To my untrained eye, all those alveoli look
much of a muchness and they're very tightly packed.  (Make that very, very,
very tightly packed.)  If two are for a double-rooted p1, it's enormous, the
roots met below the middle of the tooth, and they were also being extremely
intimate with the roots of the teeth in front and behind.  An enormously
long p1 would be very odd.  The procumbent 'incisor' is naturally also very
odd.  There doesn't appear to be much room in the jaw for a root, so it
looks to me like a lightly anchored procumbent incisor, and I can't come to
terms with that concept.

The mental foramen in the jaw looks like a bullet hole donated by an
outraged kiwi with a shot gun.  It's enormous.  Whatever the thing was, it
was weird.  The authors are educated biologists and I'm not.  Each knows
much, and has already forgotten more than I'll ever know.  But I'm not
convinced that's from a mammal.  (There, I've made a public confession.)

The paper with full frontal naked pics
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0605684103v1