Dinosaur Genera List update #184

[Dinogeorge@aol.com]

As part of a little project I have embarked on, I sorted the Dinosaur Genera 
List by year and I can now aver unequivocally that 1970 is presently the 
"halfway year": Half of all the dinosaur names were published by sometime in 
the early part of that year, and the rest of the dinosaur names were 
published afterward. That is, as many dinosaur names were published in the 
past 32 years as were published during all the years before 1970. This is no 
longer an estimate or a guess or a feeling, it's now a documented fact. As 
new dinosaurs continue to be named, the halfway point will slowly move 
forward in time, so that in perhaps another year or so it will enter 1971.

In doing the sort and in preparing the text afterward, I discovered and fixed 
up a few minor typos that had inadvertently crept into the List. And then 
there's this little conundrum:

Previously, I listed the genus Pachysaurops, von Huene's replacement name for 
the preoccupied genus Pachysaurus, as having been created in 1961. Prompted, 
however, by a recent email (which I can't at the moment locate in my file of 
back emails) concerning Pachysaurops, I tracked the name down to the 1959 
supplement to von Huene's 1956 Palaeontologie und Phylogenie der niederen 
Tetrapoden (a photocopy of which I happen to have; thanks, Tracy!). My 
understanding is that although the supplement is dated 1959, this is a 
backdate done at von Huene's request in order to try to edge out Kuhn's rival 
replacement name Pachysauriscus, created in 1959. The real publication date 
was indeed 1961, but I should have had the 1959 date listed as well. So the 
entry now reads:

Pachysaurops von Huene 1961 (not 1959) [JOS â> Pachysauriscus]

By the way, I'd like to have somebody confirm that I have my facts straight, 
if possible. Kuhn's name Pachysauriscus won out in any case, and it's now 
considered a junior subjective synonym of Plateosaurus.

Finally, let me correct a previous DGL update. An email from Mark Norell 
noted that the head of "Ichabodcraniosaurus" is not known, and that the skull 
referred to by that name belongs to a different individual and maybe even to 
a different velociraptorine taxon.