STL Science Center

STL Science Center

27 August 2013

Lindsay Zanno's Abridged Works

Not that everything thing Lindsay Zanno has ever written has been about Falcarius or anything, but Dr. Zanno spent a good deal of time with Falcarius and wrote, or coauthored, quite a few articles about different aspects of Falcarius' anatomy. We know quite a bit about Falcarius thanks to the work of many different paleontologists, but the names that came up the most in the early articles were Zanno, Kirkland, and Sampson; coincidentally, the tooth shape mention I made on Saturday was corrected by Dr. Kirkland, if anyone missed that. In 2005 Kirkland et al. officially named Falcarius (an article that can be found here) and described the animal in a short but detailed paper. Phylogenetic analyses from this paper placed Falcarius as the "basalmost therizinosauroid known". Zanno went on the next year to analyze the pectoral girdle and forelimb of Falcarius, which is of interest to everyone given those rather unique and interesting claws. She discusses clade placement in the paper, which is very interesting, but if anyone was wondering what the range of motion for that nifty forelimb was, that is also addressed, so no worries! The systematics lovers that are now appalled at my casual dismissal of the former part of the 2006 Zanno paper should try to find a copy of Zanno's 2010 article examining the osteology of Falcarius and placement of Falcarius and other basal therizinosaurs within their family and clade. It makes up for my dismissal of the previous papers section on systematics, I promise.

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