Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Dinosaur had avian air sacs redux

Sereno has come out with a new paper (Sereno PC, Martinez RN, Wilson JA, Varricchio DJ, Alcober OA, et al. (2008) Evidence for Avian Intrathoracic Air Sacs in a New Predatory Dinosaur from Argentina. PLoS ONE 3(9): e3303). In this paper he introduces a new dinosaur by the name of Aerosteon riocoloradensis, which falls out as a basal tetanuran, down with the allosauroids. But the main part of the paper lays out Sereno's view of the evolution of avian air sacs within the dinosaurs. Seeing as Pat O'Connor has published on this topic previously and his office is right down the hall from mine, I was a bit miffed at how dismissively Sereno treated Pat's work. While I have some issues with the paper, not least of which is that he seems to be saying basically the same thing as Pat while dissing him at the same time, I do think he does bring some additional points to the table and advances the discussion. It remains to be seen whether or not his claims hold up, but that's ok, it spurs debate and research, which is a good thing. The paper is worth a read.

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