STL Science Center

STL Science Center

19 June 2012

Rarely Written Papers

There are indeed papers on Gastornis and Diatryma, the North American version, but they are not posted in their entirety online very often if at all it seems. Most of the little snippets of papers seem to agree that they are different species until around 1992 when Allison Andors wrote a reappraisal of Diatryma (as far as I can tell this is the first mention that they belong together). The conclusion that Allison Andors arrived at was that Diatryma was similar enough that it ought to be contained within the Gastornithiformes. If you are in the mood to look in to an originally definitive paper on Diatryma you can look into the 1917 Matthew, Granger, Stein paper from which we have used illustrations here already. This paper describes the skeleton of Diatryma as presented in the year of 1917 in what was at its time it's entirely known skeleton. Of course other examples have been found since then in varying completeness which can serve to augment and enhance the findings of the 1917 paper, but early papers are always interesting to read. Make sure if you go to download it from the site you are patient or that you save it instead of asking the computer to simply open it; it works faster that way. All of the photographs of the bones are present, which is why this paper is very useful to amateurs that cannot get their hands on the bones for themselves. Also, there is this video, which was shared on a Wired post of Laelaps, the Brian Switek blog, entitled Debating Diatryma. I had to share it today since I found it last night searching for papers and articles. Because embedding and time starting don't go hand in hand for some reason, or I just plain don't know how for some reason, skip ahead to 2:56 to see Diatryma.

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