News from the SVP meeting

Just got back from the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Cleveland, where I reported on my work, but since I already know about mine, I won't report on it here other than to say it is devilishly difficult to reconstruct soft tissue from sediment traces, but there are things you can lean before prepping out a fossil. While I was gone, I missed the announcement of the first known vertebrate neck in tiktaalik, as reported in Nature (Downs, Jason P. et al. 2008. The cranial endoskeleton of Tiktaalik roseae. Nature vol. 455 (October 16), 925 -929). This is rather important as it provided a great advantage to the animal allowing it to turn its head without completely realigning its whole body. Downs gave a talk about this at the meeting, explaining that the head had several features making it more tetrapod-like, including the lack of an operculum and reduced hyomandibular bone that helped free up the neck and a more complex joints between skull bones reducing their mobility.

In the next several posts, I will relate several of the items I found interesting at the meeting, some of which you may hear about in other arenas, some you most likely won't.