Paleopterys thompsoni
Based on the fact that dad had established a warm relationship with a person that dad identified as “a billionaire, Lord Thomson of Fleet” in one of his writings. The relationship was formed because dad took Lord Thompson’s sone one summer, and daughter another, to work early in his years at BYU. The outcome of the friendship was frequent financial contributions. These are dad’s words from a 15 page document filed in the library, but not dated:
“One prime source was a bilionaire, Lord Thomson of Fleet. Each spring he would ask me how much I needed for my firld season and then he would send me a check. I had given his son and daughter adventures in reality. I took the son to a location in osuthern Utah where I knew a little digging in a sand bank would uncover dinosaur bones. The boy was 12 years old and had never been away from his parents overnight. We stayed a night in Escalante.The daughter worked for me in the lab and in the Dry Mesa dinosaur quarry in Colorado.”
To honor Lord Thomson dad named a dinosaur after him. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow when Dr. Padian and he determined that the naming was inaccurate, that the specimen represented a previously known genus. I don’t know whether or not dad ever told Lord Thomson but suspect he probably let it lie. The following article deleted the name Paleopteryx thompsoni because it was actually a small deinonychosaur or bird.
Jensen, J.A., and K. Padian. 1989. “Small pterosaurs and dinosaurs from the Uncompahgre Fauna (Brushy Basin Member, Morrison Formation: ?Tithonian), Late Jurassic, Western Colorado”. Journal of Paleontology. 63: 364-373. It is worthy to note how widely this article has been cited, which suggests that the article broke some new ground. I need to get a copy to see if it had anything to say about the ankle evolution issue. These are some of the websites that quote this title, some of them heavyweights: dml.cmnh.org/1995Aug/msg00367.html icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/40/4/486 www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e36_talk/challenge.html www.jpaleontol.geoscienceworld.org/content/vol63/issue3/index.html http://paleodb.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl?action=checkTaxonInfo&taxon_no=63788 www.dinoruss.org/de_4/5c8adcd.htm www.trueorigin.org/birdevo.asp www.talkorigins.org/faqs/archaeopteryx/challenge.html www.pterosaur.co.uk/species/UJP/unclass/mesadactylus.htm www.pterosaur.co.uk/Biblio/H-L/JensenJA.htm www.dinosaurjourney.org/Westerncolorado.htm www.natcenscied.org/icons/references.html http://taxonsearch.org/dev/biblio.php
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