On Friday, December 3, 2021 at 5:25:51 PM UTC-8, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> Welcome to sci.bio.paleontology, Leroy! I'm glad I noticed you before
> some other regulars did: I'll explain that below.
>
> I'm almost always glad to see new participants who are interested in paleontology.
> But the "Soetoro" part of your moniker gives me pause: are you a regular from talk.origins
> posting under a new pseudonym that he hasn't used there?
>
> Be that as it may, let me explain why I like to welcome newcomers.
> When I first posted here in the 1990's, it was quite an active group
> with a good number of regulars, a few of whom
> were professional paleontologists.
>
> But when I returned 11 years ago after almost a decade of absence,
> I was shocked to see that the group was on the verge of extinction.
> Thanks to some strenuous efforts by myself and a few others,
> it has recovered to the extent that I would only call it "vulnerable".
> There is even one person, "Pandora," who joined a few years later,
> who I'm sure is a professional, but doesn't give out any information about her identity.
> On Thursday, December 2, 2021 at 1:58:08 PM UTC-5, Leroy N. Soetoro wrote:
> > About 80 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, an 18-foot-
> > long (5 meters) sea monster called a mosasaur cruised the ancient ocean
> > that once covered western Kansas, snagging prey with its slender, tooth-
> > lined snout.
> This brought back memories of my first experience, earlier this year,
> of fossil digs out west. There was a conference in Casper, Wyoming,
> at a fine museum, with lots of good speakers, most of them quite young,
> about the marine reptiles that swarmed in those seas. It covered both
> Jurassic and Cretaceous kinds.
>
> Our first expedition was to a Jurassic site, and I found some nice minerals
> but no fossils. Other members were luckier, including one group that found
> a long ichtyosaur lower jaw; too long to unearth that day, but marked
> for careful removal and taking to the museum to enrich its collection.
> > Paleontologists discovered the fossil of this beast in the 1970s, but they
> > had difficulty classifying it, so it ended up stored with other mosasaur
> > specimens in the Platecarpus genus, at Fort Hays State University's
> > Sternberg Museum of Natural History (FHSM) in Kansas.
> >
> > Recently, researchers revisited the enigmatic fossil — pieces of a skull,
> > jaw and a few bones from behind the head — and found that the reptile
> > didn't belong in the Platecarpus genus. Rather, it was a close relative of
> > a rare mosasaur species known from just one specimen, scientists reported
> > in a new study.
> Reminds me of the second day, a Cretaceous site where some
> members of the group found a mosasaur fossil with most of the same
> fragmentary parts that are described above. If memory serves, this was the site that
> was very close to the South Dakota border-- so close, that our guides
> took us just across the border and past a "Welcome to South Dakota"
> sign, then turned the vans back and took us past a "Welcome to Wyoming" sign.
> > The newly described species, formerly known as specimen FHSM VP-5515 and
> > now named Ectenosaurus everhartorum, is the second known species in the
> > Ectenosaurus genus. The only other species is Ectenosaurus clidastoides,
> > which was described in 1967, according to the study.
> >
> > E. everhartorum's head was about 2 feet (0.6 m) long, and like E.
> > clidastoides, E. everhartorum had a snout that was narrow and elongated
> > compared with those of other mosasaurs, said study co-author Takuya
> > Konishi, a vertebrate paleontologist and assistant professor at the
> > University of Cincinnati.
> >
> > "It's a kind of skinny snout for agile, speedy snapping of fish, rather
> > than biting into something hard like turtle shells," Konishi told Live
> > Science. The narrowness of the jaw and of a bone at the top of the head
> > hinted that VP-5515 belonged in the Ectenosaurus genus, even though the
> > fossil was about 500,000 to 1 million years younger than the E.
> > clidastoides specimen, Konishi said.
> >
> > But in some ways, the skull wasn't Ectenosaurus-like at all. For example,
> > it lacked a bony bump at the end of its snout. The snout on VP-5515 was
> > also shorter than the one on E. clidastoides, according to the study.
> >
> > "We knew it was a new species, but we didn't know if it was an
> > Ectenosaurus or not," Konishi said. "To answer that puzzle, we were
> > eventually able to find another feature where the jaw joint was, at the
> > back end of the lower jaw." There, the researchers detected a small notch
> > that didn't appear in any mosasaur species — except one.
> >
> > "That little depression turned out to be a newly discovered consistent
> > feature for the genus Ectenosaurus," Konishi said. "You have this
> > Ectenosaurus united by the little notch at the end of the lower jaw, but
> > then it's consistently different at the level of the species from the
> > generic type — that is to say, the first species assigned to the genus."
> >
> > One lingering question about Ectenosaurus is why this genus is so poorly
> > represented among mosasaur fossils from western Kansas. To date,
> > paleontologists have uncovered more than 1,800 mosasaur specimens at the
> > site of the former inland sea. But for now, the entire Ectenosaurus genus
> > is represented by just two fossils — one for each species.
> I wonder whether this genus is different enough for little bits sticking above
> the ground not to be noticed by paleontologists used to looking for telltale
> signs of other genera. For instance, the only turtle bones found were spotted
> by a young woman who specialized in sea turtles of just that family for her Ph.D. dissertation
> and her postdoctoral work.
> >
> > "That's very strange," Konishi told Live Science. "Why is it so rare for a
> > mosasaur, where you have hundreds of Platecarpus from the same locality?
> > Does that mean they were living near shore, or were they living farther
> > south or farther north? We just don't know."
> >
> > The findings were published Aug. 26 in the Canadian Journal of Earth
> > Sciences.
> >
> > Originally published on Live Science.
> >
> > https://www.livescience.com/mosasaur-18-foot-monster.html
> >
> >
> > --
> > "LOCKDOWN", left-wing COVID fearmongering. 95% of COVID infections
> > recover with no after effects.
> I'm a bit surprised that none of the left-wing troika [meaning "trio" but with special connotations]
> dominating s.b.p. has sussed you out yet. The senior member [in s.b.p. experience, not age],
> is John Harshman, and the other two are "Oxyaena" and Erik Simpson.
>
> "Oxyaena" is a trans "woman" who has ducked questions as to whether he
> had any hormonal abnormalities or unusual genetics (XXY, etc.); hence I
> decline to use feminine pronouns for him, and that infuriates him.
>
> I think he would also be infuriated if he saw the rest rooms in one small restaurant
> where we stopped on one of our expeditions. The women's room had a big
> wooden sign on the door with XX on it, and the men's room had a similar sign but with XY.
> >
> > No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
> > Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.
> >
> > Donald J. Trump, cheated out of a second term by fraudulent "mail-in"
> > ballots. Report voter fraud: sf.n...@mail.house.gov
> Did you know that Google masked the email address you put above?
> It's done automatically to all such addresses, but I was able to remove
> the masking and see it unmasked: sf.n...@mail.house.gov
>
> The troika can be expected to rip into you for this, but
> I don't expect to come in on either side unless I see good evidence one way or another.
>
> You see, there has been such a smokescreen by the mainstream
> media about this, that I'm not sure whom to believe.
> > Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
> > fiasco, President Trump.
> My biggest beef with Obama is that his sympathies with radical Islam
> caused all kinds of disruption in the near east: the overthrow and
> cold-blooded murder of Ghadaffi in Libya, the Benghazi murders, ...
>
> I'd say more, and probably will if you reply favorably to what I'm saying here.
> > Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
> > The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
> > queer liberal democrat donors.
>
> > President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
> > dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.
> I can just imagine the attitude of the troika to the choice of justices.
>
> I'm impressed by Trump's international accomplishments, and I'd like to talk more about them,
> but much prefer to do it in posts where there is a good bit of paleontology, like this one.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> University of South Carolina
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

A gentle reminder Peter. You have no knowledge of my polical opinions, as I've been careful
not to divulge them here (or elsewhere online). I will divulge this however: as usual when
expounding without knowledge, you're wrong.