Science Descriptions

When an article appears in Science it is typically accessible forever. In terms of Tawa hallae this is very good news for us because the describing and naming paper are housed and available on the website. The paper is stored as a PDF and as html (Nesbitt et al., 2009), which is nice when you do not want to download another PDF and instead just want to read a paper on your screen. The high resolution photographs of bone and approximated skeletal drawings are available too in this format. This is not the only paper to describe Tawa or its family line though. There are a number of other descriptions of Triassic animals that call upon Tawa and other known dinosaurs for comparisons. However, the other paper linked here today is a little more inference based in that it discuss soft tissues of Tawa that are not actually preserved in the fossils. Instead, Burch 2014 uses osteological correlates of muscle attachments and inferences from extant phylogenetic brackets to reconstruct the muscles of the forelimb in Tawa. These kinds of studies are of interest to me because I have done similar things in the head, but muscle reconstruction in dinosaurs, even if one does not do this type of work themselves, is interesting and important in learning how dinosaurs lived, survived, and died in their environment.