STL Science Center

STL Science Center

26 March 2013

Too Many Papers

Lately, because Dolichorhynchops intersects my thesis research in that there is the potential that my unidentified vertebrae could potentially belong to a "Dolly" or another short neck plesiosaur ("Trinacromerum ?" is the current catalog tag), I have read a lot more papers on Dolichorhynchops than I would be able to share here. I have read about new species (Sato 2005) and cranial anatomy (O'Keefe 2008). I have read about global interrelationships of plesiosaurs (Ketchum and Benson 2010) and I am waiting on interlibrary loans on polycotylids from Morocco (Bardet, Superbiola, and Jalil 2003 and Buchy, Metayer, and Frey 2005). The list goes on even further than that; that is only five papers and I said I have read far too many to share. Sometimes these papers have fantastic photographs and wonderful data sets and character lists (that I am in the process of trying to collect and reconcile painstakingly!). However, when I look to papers for fantastic illustrations, I always have to go back to the original sources. Sometimes these are illustrations of fantastic beasts, see Cope's drawings of the WIS, and sometimes they are beautiful pen and ink drawings of the bones themselves. In S.W. Williston's case we have two good illustrations, one by Williston himself of a fleshed out "Dolly" (1914) and another of the skull by Sidney Prentice (1903). Williston's work can be found online via JSTOR thanks to the efforts of the archival workers at Chicago's Field Museum, for one source, but rather than search through all of his papers on Dolichorhynchops I admit I borrowed the images from the Oceans of Kansas website, because it was just plain quicker!


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