This is Round Two of the NERS Stories of the Year Reader's Poll. To reiterate, or for those of you who've joined us late, I am going to select the most interesting stories from this blog over the last year by getting people to vote across a series of nine polls. Each will focus on a different theme and the last one will round-up missed stories and late-comers.
The animal behaviour poll is still going strong and this one will look at palaeontology. Here's your selection:
- Breaking the Link - Darwinius revealed as ancestor of nothing
- Raptorex shows that T.rex body plan evolved at 100th the size
- Dinosaur proteins, cells and blood vessels recovered from Bracyhlophosaurus
- Puijila, the walking seal - a beautiful transitional fossil
- Tianyulong - a fuzzy dinosaur that makes the origin of feathers fuzzier
- Titanoboa - thirteen metres, one tonne, largest snake ever
- Fossil foetus shows that early whales gave birth on land
- The plague of tyrants - a common bird parasite that infected Tyrannosaurus
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Not surprisingly, I voted for Afradapis, but not just because of the whole Ida business. I thought it was pretty neat that some adapids convergently evolved some of the same traits seen in anthropoid primates. The description helped to fill out our understanding of extinct primate diversity and relationships, so even if there had been no Ida controversy this year it still would have been a pretty significant study!
I like the polls, Ed. But is it possible to get the order of the links to be the same both above and within the poll box? Thx.
If I had better poll software and programming skills, I'd have put in a button for the Ida paper. If anyone clicked on it, they'd get a pop-up saying "Oh don't be silly. Vote again."
Not that I'm biased, but I'm pleased that four of your eight choices come from a well-known scholarly journal beginning with 'N'. However, didn't you think the Ardipithecus megasplurge in Ssss-you-know-who not worth a mention?
Sadly, I didn't write about Ardipithecus because the paper came out while I was on holiday. This poll only includes things wot I wrote about, in full knowledge that I missed some big stories.
Two of the other papers do come from That Other Journal and the other two come from PLoS ONE (including the one currently in the lead).
No Limusaurus? For shame!