Re: Foraminacephale gen. nov.

[Tim Williams <tijawi@gmail.com>]

David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:

> An even worse case are the names erected in Alan Charig's thesis,
> *Mandasuchus*, *Teleocrater* and *Nyasasaurus*. Charig stayed in
> palaeontology, but never published the names, and then he died! Only now is
> his material being formally described and published under the names he gave
> it.


These particular names are not yet official, am I right?  It'll be
interesting to know what the "prosauropod" Nyasasaurus turns out to
be.


> That said, such situations can happen when a description has been validly
> published, too. The temnospondyl *Doleserpeton*, very important for the
> origin of Lissamphibia, was described in John Bolt's PhD thesis in 1964 and
> published in a three-page Science paper in 1969, and then Bolt sat on the
> material and apparently didn't let anyone look at it. Papers on the teeth
> came out in 1977 and 1979, one on the supposed middle ear in 1985, and a few
> more bits and pieces in 1991, but that's it. Only when his PhD student Trond
> Sigurdsen became involved, publication resumed: occiput and braincase in
> 2008, forelimb in 2009, full description in 2010.


Sounds a little like the history of _Protoavis_, in at least one
respect.  (Although I don't mean to imply that _Protoavis_ is as
potentially important to avian origins as _Doleserpeton_ is to
lissamphibian origins... only that the amount of accessibility to the
fossil material has not helped the scientific process.)





Cheers

Tim