Good news: the publication of this little Tlingit sea monster is registered in ZooBank.
Also good news: "All previously used characters were critically reevaluated; some were either reworded and/or redefined for clarity and in other instances character states were modified, added or deleted. Additionally, a total of 37 new characters were developed in the building of this matrix (23 cranial, 14 postcranial). The newly created phylogenetic character list (Supplementary Note
2) attempts to capture morphological variation mentioned in other descriptive works but that had not been previously incorporated into discrete phylogenetic characters, as well as anatomical insights gained in the study of the new Alaskan taxon."
I also find it striking how much the animal superficially (fig. 2) looks like an ichthyosaur. I don't doubt the identification, of course; but maybe this is evidence for the rarely discussed hypothesis that thalatto- and ichthyosaurs are closely related.
The hyoid apparatus is also interesting. It seems to contain a lot of ossified ceratobranchials (called "epibranchials" as usual) despite the presence of only one hypobranchial ("cerato-"). There's a big possible basihyal, too.
Gesendet: Dienstag, 04. Februar 2020 um 17:43 Uhr
Von: "Ben Creisler" <bcreisler@gmail.com>
An: dinosaur-l@usc.edu
Betreff: [dinosaur] Gunakadeit, new thalattosauroid from Late Triassic of Alaska (free pdf)
Ben Creisler
A new paper with free pdf: