Dinos at the SVP meeting

All of the abstracts for the talks and posters I will be mentioning can be found in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Volume 28, Supplement to Number 3.
I will start with the dinosaurs because 1) they are cool, 2) they are my favorite animal even though they aren't technically in my field of research any more than any other particular animal, and 3) everybody likes dinosaurs, right?
Schmitz gave an interesting talk during the Romer Prize session in which he looks at the orbits of dinosaurs and, after comparing them with modern animals, was able to determine that, even though most dinosaurs were indeed diurnal like commonly thought, many dinosaurs were most likely nocturnal or cathemeral (active all the time). All the pterosaurs he studied were diurnal, but Syntarsus was nocturnal, and Herrerosaurus and the larger (over 296 kg) herbivores were cathemeral.
Evans showed that hadrosaurine crests were unrelated to olfactory ability in that the olfactory region was not involved in the crest. He also showed that the sound estimated from the crest and the optimal hearing frequency based on inner ear casts matched quite nicely. Combine this with the finding that hadrosaurines had enlarged cerebral hemispheres, making them rather intelligent compared to most other dinosaurs, and the conclusion is that they had a complex social structure and their crests played a role in social signalling.
Tsuhiji discussed the first known complete skull of Avimimus, finding that it was a basal oviraptosaur with the horizontal canal of its semicircular canals being more avian than Archaeopteryx.
Hurlburt discussed dino brains, finding that while their forebrain percentages were in the low avian range, their cerebral EQs (cerebrumin proportion to body mass) placed them between reptiles and birds, but closer to reptiles.
Andy Farke did a decent job ruling out the shock absorber hypothesis for the frontal sinuses in ceratopsians and modern bovids, but couldn't say what if any function they might have had.
Longrich found that having feathers on the legs allowed Archaeopteryx to increase lift and reduces turning radius and drag thereby improving performance at low gliding speeds. He also found the original Berlin specimen had feathers preserved on its legs until overzealous preparators removed them. Interestingly he says this supports the arboreal origin of flight.
This puts him in direct opposition to Dececchi and Larsson, who looked at the anatomy of derived maniraptorans to see how well they compared to known claw or grip climbers and found their anatomy was all wrong to be arboreal, saying that, while they may have gotten into trees from time to time, they certainly weren't arboreal and were scansorial at best.
Zanno reprted a new phylogeny of therizinosaurs based on two new specimens, which broke up the presumed monophyly of therizinosaurs and oviraptors, putting therizinosaurs as basal maniraptora and ecologically convergent with oviraptors. Interestingly, this makes herbivory rather common in maniraptora, so they evolved from hypercarnivores into herbivores and omnivores with the derived manirpatora that were hypercarnivores secondarily derived it.
Barrett reviewed the hypothesis that dinosaurs coevolved with cycads and found no evidence that they either ate them or would have had problems even if they had and no association with large dinosaurs, so absolutely no evidence that dinosaurs in particular had anything to do with cycad evolution.
Carrano did another study of dino diversity in the late Maastricthian and found no evidence that dinos were on the decline in the Western US, but can't say globally as the data just isn't there.
Hayashi found that stegoasaur spikes had thick compact bone but ankylosaurs spikes and clubs had thin bone on their periphery so they clearly were doing something different with them.
Ok, it's getting late and there is much more to say, but for now, I will report on one last crazy thing. Witmer described the first detailed description of ankylosaur nasal passages and the best way to describe them is the crazy straw nose. I can honestly say I have never seen anything quite like it. The nasal passages, rather than having a series of paranasal sinuses, had a crazy twisted tortuous path through the head. Very odd.