One thing about evolution and speciation is that every new fossil species discovery, and a few living species discoveries, are links of varying importance from one cladistic twig to another. Hence the new ones were missing, whether or not anybody missed them. Now along comes discovery of the bones in South Africa of a lumbering, occasional bipedal dinosaur that lived about 200 million years ago, and which may fill a gap in dino radiation, and son of a gun if a few outlets aren’t reaching into the barrel where imagination goes to die and pulling out a sober declaration of  Missing Link. Getting rid of this cliché – which dates to hoary ideas that one link connected humans to other primates – would be my Holy Grail of Cliché Clearance if it weren’t that getting rid of Holy Grail weren’t itself my Holy Grail of Cliché Clearance (except for rare emergencies, like Holy Grail lore stories).

The news is that in Johannesberg a paleontology team revealed a collection of fossils recently dug up, with results published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. They included two specimens of a newly known species they have named Aardonyx celestea. It appears, they say, to shed light (ack!! another cliché!) on how sauropods first began to evolve toward fulltime four-footedness and toward the behemoth end of the scale. Its first name means earth claw, because it has big claws. As for the species second name I was hoping for Celeste, of Babar fame, but it’s still nice as it honors a woman who prepared the fossil for study and display (and it can’t hurt that she is married to the team leader).

Stories:

• LA Times - Robyn Dixon: New dinosaur species may be a missing link ; Filed from Joberg, and m.l. or no m.l., a good, atmospheric story with a feature lede and lots of color. It addresses the use and misuse of m.l. too. But The Tracker doesn’t quite get the ref. to The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
• ABC (Australia) Andrew Goeghegan: Dinosaur discovery the missing link ;
• Independent (S. Afr) Shaun Smilie – Dinosaurs lived in lush oasis ;  Published in the affiliated Johannesburg Star (couldn’t get full text there to link), it leaves one confused over the connection to the shadowy “Predator X.”
• The Times (S.Afr) – Judy Lelliott: New dinosaur discovered in SA plus   Wits student finds new dinosaur ; She has the facts, including that A. Celeste’s eponym worked on these bones through two pregnancies.
• Reuters – Alison Raymond: South African find gives clue to dinosaur evolution ;
• AP – Celean Jacobson : Scientists: New dinosaur species found in SAfrica ;
• Telegraph (UK) Sebastien Berger : New Aardonyx celestae dinosaur discovered in South Africa / Scientists in South Africa have hailed the discovery of a huge new dinosaur..that predates the giants of the Jurassic period ; Except this one is not THAT huge.
• Discovery News – Jennifer Viegas: Dinos Evolved by Fattening Up ;  Nice, and looks as though Ms. Viegas made a long distance call to S. Africa to bolster what’s in the journal and press release.
• BBC: Missing link dinosaur discovered ;

Grist for the Mill:

Journal article full text ; Univ. of the Witwatersrand Press Release ;

Western Illinois University Press Release ;

Wired – Betsy Mason: 5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down a Black Hole ; Tracker’s not alone in this campaign….

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.