STL Science Center

STL Science Center

15 November 2011

Maiasaura in Ink

Maiasaura articles. They exist and many of the earliest ones were written by Jack Horner. He and I don't always see eye to eye. That's okay; there's always room for disagreement, debate, and even total rejection of another person's theories and beliefs, it's part of being human I think. Regardless, Jack Horner wrote the first really in depth papers about Maiasaura because he did the first in depth research into Maiasaura. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that these articles cannot be found on the internet save in JSTOR, which I do not have an account under, and in their original published version with the JVP, which has literally dozens of content safeguards and warnings meaning that, though I can retrieve articles from old JVP editions because I have joined the SVP, I cannot share them without gaining a lot of permissions and hosting them somewhere. I can, however, send the readers to the abstracts.

Horner, in these two papers, is identifying and studying Maiasaura history, so both of them are about the bones and not necessarily the inferred traits that have been communicated in other ways like interviews and those old documentaries that are playing hard to get with me. One of them specifically, the earliest one, is about bones in the skull and the position of Maiasaura within the Hadrosauria. The other is only about a decade old and discusses histology of long bones. It also makes mention of the growth cycle of Maiasaura and how this plays into the study. David Wilkes has also written a paper dealing with bone studies of Maiasaura, though his is apparently, I cannot read the whole paper, about the locomotion of the animal based on studies of the bones.

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