Sereno lecture 3 Feb, University of Michigan

[Nick Pharris <npharris@umich.edu>]

Dear all,

Thought you might be interested in this.

Paul Sereno was on campus here at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) to give
a lecture on "Dinosaurs and Drifting Continents" this past Tuesday.  My notes
are kind of sparse, but the highlights included:

-a "boar-crocodile", with huge fangs sticking up from the lower jaw and down
from the upper;

-"Wrinkle-Face", the 90-million-year-old Nigerien abelisaur, due out, I believe,
some time this year;

-a method for comparing cladistic results that mostly went over my head;

-the conclusion that South America, Africa, Australia/Antarctica, and
Indo-Madagascar all lost contact with each other within about 10-15 million
years;

-the further conclusion that true vicariance is pretty rare among dinosaurs and
that differential extinction accounts better for the distributional data; and

-a method for testing how missing data might affect interpretations of
vicariance, dispersal, and differential extinction.

As I was talking with Sereno at the reception, he mentioned that he had a
family-level ID on the small theropod from Niger--this critter is going to be
very important to our understanding of a certain clade of small Gondwanan
meat-eaters!

On a personal note, Jeff Wilson's introduction featured a sonogram labeled "Lyon
and Sereno (in press)".

Cool stuff.

Nick Pharris
Department of Linguistics
University of Michigan