Dinosaur Cranial Kinesis and a Wizfolio correction

In the December issue of J. Vert. Paleo, Casey Holliday has finally gotten his paper on cranial kinesis in dinosaurs out. It is a thorough study of what it takes to make a skull kinetic, providing four criteria for determining kinetics. Three have been commonly used, that being synovial basal and otic joints and protractor musculature. However, these are insufficient by themselves without "permissive kinematic linkages" as I talked about in an earlier post on Casey's work. The problem with the first three criteria is that Casey has found them pretty much throughout Diapsida, including in animals with clearly akinetic skulls. I should point out here that he rarely says animals were akinetic, he refers to those animals meeting one or more but not all four criteria as "partially kinetically competent", meaning they have some of the items needed but lacking enough to actually permit movement. All in all, a fine and much needed study.

In other news, someone has pointed out to me that Wizfolio does indeed allow easy sharing of pdfs and other documents between colleagues. Now if it only allowed full text search capabilities.