If you head over to National Geographic News, you can see my picks for the most important, most overlooked, and weirdest paleontology stories of 2008. Afarensis contributed picks for anthropology, and other prominent science bloggers did the same for their areas of expertise. Head on over and have a look!
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Nice! Good picks also. Congrats!
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with your recognition of the new species of Velociraptor, just because I think there were more important, but just as overlooked, paleo stories including Chinlechelys, Anchiornis, and Eotriceratops (or was that last year?). The new Velociraptor is based on a maxilla, so it's not really that exciting.
Just my opinion, tho!
Zach; I agree that those stories deserved more attention, too, but I was limited to stories that I had blogged about myself. Now that I think of it, there was a really neat study about ground sloth hearing that could have made the list, but I forgot it.
I picked the new species of Velociraptor as the most overlooked story because I thought it would get a fair amount of media exposure and it didn't get any! No one seemed to mention anything about it, even though the genus is a household name. The fact that a new species of a well-known dinosaur was overlooked gave it more prominence than some other stories I had been considering for the same title.
Eotriceratops was last year (well, 2007, I guess it is year before last now)...but the new Pachyrhinosaurus was this year! And that did not get much press sadly. Chinlechelys was also pretty cool.