#Sciart #Paleoart Archelon. Deeply appreciate at @archelosaurian.bsky.social for giving advice
This claim comes up every few years but something that always bothered me about it is that it completely ignores how keratin growing over the tooth row should block the alveoli. If this model is correct, adult sauropods should be edentulous, as in Limusaurus, but we don't see that at all.
This is setting off a lot of red flags. If your paper claims to have developed a method to detect beaky-ness in fossil animals, all of the beaky taxa should be grouping. Turtles being so far removed from sauropods+birds in every analysis tells me that this measurement has nothing to do with beaks.
Confirmation that the “American cheetah” isn’t a cheetah at all, but closer to Puma. I know a lot of relevant workers have been wondering this for a while. I hope we eventually get good genetic data for Eurasian Puma, since my hunch is that Miracinonyx will eventually turn out to be Puma trumani.
