Carlton University in Ottawa, CA has a press release about the PhD student that has been involved in recently describing two new Mazon Creek vertebrates. Earlier this year, Diabloroter bolti (paper) and Infernovenator steenae (paper) were published. The research has been conducted by Arjan Mann, Jason D Pardo, and Hillary C Maddin of the Department of Earth Sciences at Carlton. This press release describes some of Arjan's work. It's interesting that this research was done by reexamining specimens that were collected many years ago and then donated somewhat recently to the Field Museum in Chicago. The two papers are just the first two of many, with a bunch of others still in progress. ESCONI member David Duck provided life-like models for the research.
Hell hunter and devil digger. When Arjan Mann names a species, he doesn’t mess around.
As part of his PhD research into carboniferous period creatures, the Carleton Earth Sciencesstudent identified two new species. The two species date from about 310 million years ago, when the ancestors of modern reptiles, birds and mammals were moving permanently on to land.
The first he named Diabloroter — devil digger. Mann studied the specimen at the Field Museum in Chicago, where it had been preserved in a devilishly red latex peel. Its hard skull is similar in structure to modern animals that burrow, digging into the earth by compacting soil with their heads.
The second of the two creatures was an elongated, short-limbed animal that would have moved by sidewinding — much like a modern snake. He called it Infernovenator (hell hunter) to stick with the hellish theme.
Known as recumbirostrans — or colloquially as microsaurs — the two creatures were preserved in the Francis Creek Shale at Mazon Creek, Illinois. The site is about a 90-minute drive south of Chicago and has been attracting palaeontologists and collectors since the early 1900s. A boom in private collecting that began in the 1960s depleted it of its most obvious specimens and palaeontologists moved along to more productive locations.