Concavispina biseridens (Jun Liu)
Posted on 04/03/2013 6:34:42 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Chinese paleontologists led by Dr Tao He from the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History in Hangzhou have identified a new species of thalattosaur from a fossil found in the Xiaowa Formation of Guanling, China.
Thalattosaurs (meaning ‘ocean lizards’) were a group of prehistoric marine reptiles that lived during the mid and late Triassic period in North America and Eurasia. They resembled large, up to 13 feet (4 m) in length, aquatic lizards, with long, flexible bodies and short limbs.
Dr He’s team has described a new species of thalattosaur, named Concavispina biseridens, in the latest issue of the Journal of Paleontology...
C. biseridens is characterized by a long skull, measuring approximately half the length of presacral portion of the vertebral column, two rows of blunt teeth on the anterior part of the maxilla, and neural spines that have convex anterior or posterior margins and V-shaped notches in their dorsal margins.
Concavispina differs from all thalattosaurs except Xinpusaurus in that the anterior end of the maxilla is curved dorsally, less than five cervical vertebrae are present, and the proximal end of the humerus is wider than the distal end.
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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this pains me
Thalatta is the Attic dialect form of the word thalassa, meaning "sea."
It's a non-Indo-European loanword in Greek. That could mean that the ancestors of the Greeks had been living where there were no huge bodies of water, so when they invaded Greece they took over a word for "sea" from the previous inhabitants, whoever they were.
There are a number of loanwords in Greek with the -ss-/-tt- sound (glossa/glotta, "tongue," is another) along with many place names like Parnassos and Hymettos. They are also found on Crete (e.g., Knossos, Tylissos), which may mean that the pre-Greeks of the mainland spoke the same language as the "Minoans" on Crete.
Sounds like Nessie.
So Attic hath a lithp like Castilian Spanish?
I see what you did there. Nice one.
For the last time, this is unrelated to my plan to create “Triassic Park”.
(Besides, just TRY to find one blasted prehistoric mosquito containing thalattosaur DNA. You have-—I mean, I have—no idea how difficult such a search would be.
It took 8 posts to get to the truth of the matter.
I’m convinced Nessie is a thalattosaur
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