mighty digimorphin' dinosaurs

[longrich@alumni.princeton.edu]

http://digimorph.org
     ....has some pretty dang cool stuff, maybe people have already 
pointed this out but there are 3-D CT scans by T. Rowe and crew of 
things like Herrerasaurus, Eoraptor, and Confuciusornis on there. 
Something that struck me is the Syntarsus (or Megapnosaurus or whatever 
ya wanna call it) kayentakatae skull. If you look at the left side it 
looks like it has a crest extending dorsally up over the maxilla. 
However, if you look at it from the right side, I get the impression 
this might just be one of the nasals rotated out of plane, these bones 
being especially broad and platelike in basal dinosaurs such as the 
coelophysoids and plateosaurs (see e.g. the Plateosaurus skull in the 
Dinosauria, coelophysoid nasals are very similar in shape, this 
incidentally seems to be one of the plesiomorphies which indicates that 
coelophysoids are more basal than Ceratosaurus, which like more advanced 
theropods has relatively longer, narrower nasals). _Kayentakatae_ has 
pretty good preservation but the skull is actually quite disarticulated 
so you have to do some mental jigsaw work to figure out what it looked 
like. I have no clue what the implications would be for coelophysoid 
systematics here if this is the case... can anyone offhand cite anything 
else which is supposed to separate _kayentakatae_ from Coelophysis (the 
nasal foramen has been argued to be an error in reconstruction 
incidentally)? This is the next best thing to rummaging around in the 
backrooms of an osteology/paleontology collection, I still haven't 
figured out how to make the darn things save on my hard drive much to my 
frustration.
		Anyways curious on people's opinions here re: the crest 
thingy. These take a while to download if you're on a modem but they are 
*really fun*. I don't know if it's possible to get higher res ones or 
not. There's a moa skull for example which is kind of cool, it has a 
pair of ridges on the anterior palate which sort of make me think of the 
ridged palate of oviraptorids.  Some of these might be fun to look at 
re: arguments involving narial passages and suchforth though lamentably 
the kiwi skull does not have sections you can play with like some of the 
others.
	The allosaurus braincase is just *way cool*.

-/|/