Re: Foraminacephale gen. nov.

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

On 1 August 2011 05:05, Tim Williams <tijawi@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.)

And I had a Jobaria flashback when I read the Doleserpeton account.
Initially "described", if you want to call it that, in about one and a
half pages of a 1999 _Science_ paper, we are now twelve years into the
looong wait for ANY further published information on that animal.

Sadly, this is not even an isolated case.

-- Mike.