Screenshot of the "Xus yus" Wikipedia page as it appeared at the time of writing (latest edit dated June 22, 2021). In a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server, Wendruff et al. (2018) described a new genus and species of cheloniellid arthropod from the Silurian Waukesha lagerstätte of Wisconsin. The International code of zoological nomenclature recommends that … Continue reading “Xus yus” : the problem of placeholder names in preprints
A photo of a supposed "Tarbosaurus" skin impression, from Young (2011). In a previous post, I revealed the origin of rumors about throat skin from Tarbosaurus. It turns out that there is another alleged specimen featured in a book but not in the scientific literature. The above photo, only captioned as "Fossilized tarbosaur [sic] skin", … Continue reading More Tarbosaurus skin – or is it Saurolophus?
Shonisaurus vertebrae arranged in rows compared with the suckers of a modern octopus, from McMenamin (2012) and Wikimedia Commons (Betty Wills, CC BY-SA 4.0) respectively. A decade ago, Mark McMenamin created one of the most notorious hypotheses in paleontology - the Triassic kraken. It was initially published as an abstract at a GSA meeting (McMenamin … Continue reading The Triassic kraken revisited
Incertae Sedis 
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