The mobile sternum and its associated sternal ribs explain how pterosaurs could breathe effectively even when the dorsal vertebrae were fused together to form a notarium: as Claessens et al. On (1), a good argument is made that pterosaurs pumped their big sterna dorsoventrally like birds do, and that it was this action that drove the breathing cycle. (2009) essentially looks at two different, but connected, details of pterosaur palaeobiology: (1) how pterosaurs breathed, and (2) how pterosaurs pneumatised their wing skeletons. September 2007 is a long time ago: how come it took so long for this work to appear in print? You will note that, coincidentally, another paper on ornithodiran pneumaticity appeared not too long ago in the same journal, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.Ĭlaessens et al. This is when the data was presented at the Munich Flugsaurier conference held in honour of Peter Wellnhofer. Īnyway, those of you with good memories will recall that the conclusions of the current study were mentioned here at Tet Zoo back in September 2007. It joins another outstanding paper on pterosaur palaeobiology, also published in an open-access journal, and which modesty prevents me from mentioning. Yet again here is an excellent paper that's available no-holds-barred to anyone, thanks to the wonder of open-access publishing. Today sees the appearance of another very neat study: Leon Claessens, Pat O'Connor and David Unwin's research on respiration and pneumaticity in pterosaurs (Claessens et al. Yesterday saw the debut of the new basal sauropodomorph Panphagia protos (Martinez & Alcober 2009), and you'll know from SV-POW! that Matt Wedel's long-awaited paper on pneumatic hiatuses in sauropods recently appeared in Journal of Experimental Zoology. Just when I'm in the middle of talking about the new dinosaurs and pterosaurs that were published in January ( part I, part II, part III), February is turning out to be just as interesting.
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