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Volume 8 Issue 3, March 2024

200 years of dinosaurs

2024 marks 200 years since William Buckland presented Megalosaurus, arguably the first dinosaur to have been named by science. Depictions have changed since Mary Morland Buckland’s sketches of the Megalosaurus jaw accompanied her husband’s work, and a wealth of palaeontological and palaeoecological discoveries in the interim two centuries lie behind Mark Witton’s 21st-century take on a megalosaur attacking its sauropod prey in a lush Jurassic forest landscape.

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Image: Mark P. Witton. Cover Design: Allen Beattie.

Editorial

  • Two centuries after the first non-avian dinosaur was announced, we celebrate this iconic clade with some specially commissioned content and a consideration of past and current research questions.

    Editorial

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Comment & Opinion

  • The Brazilian Society of Palaeontology (BSP) has recently taken steps to become more involved in the repatriation of fossil specimens — a central issue in the global palaeontological community, as interest in combating scientific colonialism grows — both through collaboration with researchers and other Latin American scientific associations. We discuss our experience, including the challenges we have faced and how we have overcome them, in the hope of inspiring other scientific societies to play their part.

    • Hermínio Ismael de Araújo-Júnior
    • Renato Pirani Ghilardi
    • Sandro Marcelo Scheffler
    Comment
  • Mark Witton is a UK-based palaeontologist and artist. Since completing a PhD at the University of Portsmouth researching pterosaur ecology and diversity, he has predominantly worked as a consultant, author and artist, although he also remains active in palaeontological research. His artwork has been displayed around the world, from London’s Natural History Museum to Yale’s Peabody Museum. He is also known for his work researching and promoting the ‘Crystal Palace Dinosaurs’, which are among the world’s first naturalistic dinosaur reconstructions. Ahead of the bicentenary of the naming of Megalosaurus, we caught up with him to discuss the art and science of dinosaur reconstruction.

    • Luíseach Nic Eoin
    • Mark Witton
    Q&A
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Books & Arts

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Research Highlights

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News & Views

  • An assessment of time series of riverine fish communities from several continents finds positive trends in abundance and richness but also strong changes in community composition, driven in part by increased proportions of non-native species.

    • Charlotte L. Outhwaite
    News & Views
  • Systematic conservation planning in the European Alps suggests that priorities to safeguard multifaceted plant diversity will shift from low to high elevations and across latitudes, necessitating a coordinated and transboundary conservation strategy.

    • Paul R. Elsen
    News & Views
  • A multidisciplinary study of the Shiyu archaeological site in northern China reveals a complex human behavioural record that currently is the oldest of its kind in Northeast Asia and provides insight into the nature of the northward dispersal of modern humans across Asia.

    • Christopher J. Bae
    News & Views
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Research Briefings

  • Floristic homogenization — an increase in plant similarity within a given region — threatens biodiversity. By studying the taxonomic similarity of the floras of South Pacific islands over the past 5,000 years, we find that initial human settlement was probably a major driver of floristic homogenization.

    Research Briefing
  • Sequencing of a hagfish genome — one of the two jawless vertebrate lineages (cyclostomes) — constrains the timing and nature of genome duplication events that characterize early vertebrate evolution. Genome duplications occurred among ancestral vertebrates and cyclostomes, but genome-doubling in ancestral jawed vertebrates was caused by hybridization, which resulted in an unparalleled morphological diversification.

    Research Briefing
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Reviews

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Research

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Amendments & Corrections

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Species Spotlight

  • Cliché or classic? Stephen L. Brusatte celebrates the enduring appeal of T. rex.

    • Stephen L. Brusatte
    Species Spotlight
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