This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
It's Friday and I'm about to go away on fieldwork for a while, so let's have some fun (even though substantial media interest in the new Isle of Wight azhdarchoid pterosaur Vectidraco continues unabated). Why not knock yourself out and have a go at identifying this bizarre skeletal tetrapod, surely one of the weirdest things you've ever seen (yes yes, hyperbole). Hey, if you're a regular reader and have never bothered to go through all that hassle of registering with Scientific American in order to finally leave comments... maybe now's the time to change your ways and finally join the elite. Yes? Of course.
In actuality, the thing shown here is - as (nearly) always - actually dead easy to identify, and to those of you who can get it straight away, may I please ask you to show a little restraint and let the less gifted/nerdy have a few bashes first. Go on, let them; it can be funny. If you really can't help yourself, at least have fun by peppering the comments thread with clues.
While we're here, a reminder that there's now a Tet Zoo podcast. We (= myself and John Conway) recently released episode 3, an entire 1.5 hrs or so devoted to discussion of bigfoot, inspired mostly by the incredible Ketchum et al. (2013) DNA study. Feedback so far has been great (see this article at Sharon Hill's Doubtful News, for example). Please consider sponsoring to help cover our hosting costs (even tiny sums of cash are helpful), and note also that we like receiving listener's questions. Ok, until next time.
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Ketchum, M. S., Wojtkiewicz, P. W., Watts, A. B., Spence, D. W., Holzenburg, A. K., Toler, D. G., Prychitko, T. M., Zhang, F., Bollinger, S., Shoulders, R. & Smith, R. 2013. Novel North American hominins, next generation sequencing of three whole genomes and associated studies. Denovo 1 (1) 13 February 2013.