Paper Days

Rozhdestvensky's original papers were written in Russian. Cyrilic is hard to read for non-Cyrilic readers typically. Thankfully, then, we have polyglot paleontologists that are willing to translate and post articles that have been translated! The Hadrosaurs of Kazakhstan is hosted on a site called DinoChecker and describes not only Aralosaurus but all of the other hadrosaurs that Rozhdestvensky discovered or described from Kazakhstan. Since that time, I vaguely mentioned before, many authors have revisited Aralosaurus for one reason or another. Godefroit and Alifanov (2004) revisited Aralosaurus for the sole purpose of describing the dinosaur again. Their redscription declared that Aralosaurus remains a valid taxon and discusses the distribution of the dinosaur during their existence. Averianov (2007) mentions Aralosaurus briefly in a discussion on theropods of Kazakhstan, but as they are not the focus of the paper they are only briefly treated. Two papers are particularly interesting from a cranial anatomy standpoint. Maryanska and Osmolska (1979) and Hopson (1975) both discuss hadrosaur cranial morphology with different emphases, but they also both mention Aralosaurus and discuss the known cranial anatomy of the dinosaur. Maryanska and Osmolska are overall more focused on certain aspects of the cranium and focus most of their descriptions and discussions on Saurolophus, but they do discuss characteristics of Aralosaurus in reference to hadrosaurs in general as well as Saurolophus in particular. Hopson, however, discussed the evolutionary trends of hadrosaur display structures of the cranium. While the majority of Aralosaurus' cranial displays are not known for certain, some inferences are made by Hopson of the Lambeosaurine group in general that could possibly be applied to Aralosaurus. There is a lot of good reading material here if one can access it. The Hadrosaurs of Kazakhstan is available for everyone and should definitely be on the reading list of anyone interested in Aralosaurus.