Sarmientosaurus, a titanosaur with a known skull

[Halichoeres]

Will Patagonia's wonders ever cease? http://phys.org/news/2016-04-newly-titanosaurian-dinosaur-argentina-sarmientosaurus.html

They were even able to get a decent endocast, and the semicircular canals of the inner ear suggest that it often fed close to the ground.

[amargasaurus cazaui]

Wasnt this one of your predictions for this coming year or am I just confused?

[Halichoeres]

It was! Holy cow, I'd forgotten. So far I'm 1 for 3.

[Newt]

Very interesting, and peculiar! That pointed tip to the snout - I wonder if that's distortion or if it really was shaped like that? Guess I'll have to read the paper...

[amargasaurus cazaui]

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0151661


that one?

[sauroid]

one of the best news of the month

[Newt]

Thanks Amargasaurus!

[amargasaurus cazaui]

The paper is open access anyways , I just made it easier for everyone to get a copy !

[Diplotomodon]

It's great that we're starting to find titanosaur heads and get a better picture of what they really looked like. Now if we could just find heads and bodies together, that'd be even better.

[Lusotitan]

I'll note that over at SV-POW Matt Wedel has placed some doubts in their inferences on its palaeobiology; he's against the idea that it was a grazer/low feeder. Also note that the comment section of the post has some discussion on the phylogenetic analysis being somewhat questionable. Post here:

https://svpow.com/2016/04/28/enter-sarmientosaurus/

[Halichoeres]

That's interesting about the difference between alert and foraging posture as inferred from semicircular canals. Maybe it'd be an easier case if we had more of its shoulder girdle and thoracic vertebrae. Without knowing anything about the particular characters excluded from analysis, I think the commenters might be missing one defensible rationale: reducing bias. The original dataset had a very large number of characters relative to the number of taxa, a situation in which parsimony analyses can find high statistical support for an incorrect answer. I don't know if that's why they did it, but if that's why, it's a way to test that their original result isn't spurious without adding dozens of additional taxa to break up the branches. They only say they excluded characters which optimized as synapomorphies of Neosauropoda, not why--it might just be that they considered them irrelevant as there wasn't any real chance Sarmientosaurus would fall outside that clade.