Among the most fascinating of Mesozoic theropods are the alvarezsaurids, a mostly small-bodied group of maniraptoran coelurosaurs characterized by modified, ‘pick-like’ forelimbs, a lightly built, shallow lower jaw, tiny, simple teeth and elongate, slender hindlimbs…
Caption: when alive, at least some alvarezsaurids (specifically those in the same clade as Mononykus from Mongolia) might have reminded us of long-legged birds like bustards or plovers, albeit equipped with shortened forelimbs and an owl-like facial disk. At left is the Mononykus design I and others devised for Prehistoric Planet; at right is the reconstruction included in my 2021 book Dinopedia. Images: © Apple TV / BBC Studios; Darren Naish.
The story of how we came to discover alvarezsaurids and work out what they are is complex and I don’t want to cover it here – see the section in Dinopedia (Naish 2021) for a summary – but suffice to say that we currently regard them as an early-diverging group within Maniraptora that are apparently specialized for a diet of social insects. Mononykus of Mongolia, named in 1993*, was the first member of the group to become scientifically well known, and much of the early discussion of what these animals were like and where they might fit, in phylogenetic terms, revolved around Mononykus specifically.
* It was originally published in April 1993 as Mononychus but this proved preoccupied by a weevil. A replacement spelling for the dinosaur appeared in May 1993.
Caption: it’s old hat now and no longer the source of discussion, but the phylogenetic position and unusual anatomy of Mononykus – the first alvarezsaurid to be well understood – was hot news in the 1990s, and a great many news pieces and toings and froings in the technical literature were devoted to where it might fit in the dinosaur family tree. Included here are the original Nature paper of 1993 as well as articles from Natural History, New Scientist and The Auk.
The possession within alvarezsaurids of highly sensitive hearing and a highly reduced hand that (in some taxa) is monodactyl have kept them in the news over recent years. At the time of writing, a new study on the evolution of body size within the group has also been deemed newsworthy, since it shows how modification in body size over the course of alvarezsaurid history was linked with key events that affected other aspects of their anatomy (Meso et al. 2024).
‘Seven Town’ bird backstory. In this article I want to talk about one alvarezsaurid – or possible alvarezsaurid, anyway – and that’s the poorly known Heptasteornis andrewsi Harrison & Walker, 1975 from the Maastrichtian of the Haţeg Basin in Romania. This name, which means ‘Andrews’s Seven Town bird’ (‘Seven Town’ is a reference to Szentpéterfalva, the Hungarian name for Sânpetru, the discovery site), was originally applied to A4359, a partial hindlimb element that involves the distal end of the tibia and the adjacent, mostly fused astragalus, one of the proximal tarsal bones. Because we’re talking about a compound bone that involves both the tibia and tarsus, it gets termed the tibiotarsus. A4359 has a width of about 3 cm and a thickness at its distal end of nearly 2 cm.
Caption: to my knowledge, the precise location from which Nopcsa collected his maniraptoran specimens remains unknown, but it was somewhere in the vicinity of Sânpetru (shown here), a village in Hunedoara County [UPDATE: I previously featured the wrong Sânpetru here, since there’s another, further to the east and in Brașov County, Transylvania]. The Retezat Mountains loom nearby. Image: Țetcu Mircea Rareș, CC BY-SA 3.0 (original here).
My aim here is to talk in particular about the backstory to a paper that Gareth Dyke and I published on this animal 20 years ago (Naish & Dyke 2004). Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve never done this before. So, yes, this is another introspective article.
Heptasteornis is one of several maniraptorans known from the Romanian Maastrichtian, nearly all of which are enigmatic and known from frustratingly incomplete remains. The exception is Balaur bondoc Csiki et al., 2010, known from a partial articulated skeleton as well as a partial forelimb from a second individual. Balaur is found in some studies to be a velociraptorine dromaeosaurid (e.g., Brusatte et al. 2013, Turner et al. 2021), and in others to be part of Avialae, the bird clade (Cau et al. 2015). I think that the latter is more likely correct, but – whichever hypothesis we prefer – this is an interesting case of different data sets finding different positions for the same taxon. Either way, Balaur was wholly unknown when the research discussed here was being performed.
Caption: this reconstruction, by Jaime Headden and created for Cau et al. (2015), depicts Balaur as it might look as a jeholornithiform-grade bird, rather than a dromaeosaurid. The differences are only obvious to a specialist but involve the form of the tail, shape of the snout and configuration of the teeth. As yet, no part of Balaur’s skull has been recovered. Image: Jaime Headden / Cau et al. (2015).
While discussing Late Cretaceous Romanian theropods during the early 2000s, Gareth and I realized that the ascending process of the astragalus in Heptasteornis was similar to that of Asian alvarezsaurids. In particular, it had an unusual wavy or notched median margin, a feature not seen in other theropods. Gareth had recently contributed to a paper that described a new specimen of the Mongolian alvarezsaurid Shuvuuia deserti (Suzuki et al. 2002), and his familiarity with the tibiotarsus of that animal (and other indisputable alvarezsaurids) is what led to the idea of Hepasteornis’s potential alvarezsaurid nature.
A4359 was not at all new at this time. It had, in fact, been discovered by famed nobleman and palaeontologist Baron Franz Nopcsa during the early 1900s and – together with several other, similar bones – was gifted by him to the British Museum. Here, they were studied and described by Charles W. Andrews (1913) who thought that they represented a new sort of cormorant-like bird that he named Elopteryx nopcsai. Andrews actually attached this name to a partial femur that Nopcsa had found. A4359, Andrews thought, probably belonged to the same species because both shared a “close similarity of the sculpturing of the surface of the bone” (p. 196) – remember that detail – even though he regarded the femur as being from a swimmer and the A4359 tibiotarsus as from an “ambulatory” bird.
Caption: at left, a montage of the Elopteryx specimens described by Andrews (1913). In the upper row, we see the proximal end of a left femur (specimen A1234), and in the lower row A4359, the fragment of tibiotarsus later named Heptasteornis andrewsi. At right, Jenny Halstead’s reconstruction from 1989 of Elopteryx as a “cormorant-like” seabird. Images: Andrews (1913); Jenny Halstead.
For much of the 20th century, authors were generally happy to regard Elopteryx as some sort of Cretaceous proto-cormorant, and a few books feature reconstructions of such an animal. However, things began to become a little more chaotic during the 1970s.
In fact, it might be fair to say that these specimens are, today, notorious in that they’ve been allocated various positions in the theropod family tree over the last six decades, and the whimsical title I chose for our paper (Naish & Dyke 2004: ‘Heptasteornis was no ornithomimid, troodontid, dromaeosaurid or owl: the first alvarezsaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from Europe’) is a deliberate reference to this. A cynical response is to mock this repeated reclassification and imply that the seemingly eternal reinterpretation of dinosaur remains that occurs in some corners of the literature is akin to tasseography or palmistry (Feduccia 2020). That’s naïve as well as unfair, since what it really reflects is that theropods of several groups – including birds – are highly similar in the anatomy of their tibiotarsi, and it can be difficult to spot the small details specific to the groups in question. Reclassification and reinterpretation of the sort discussed here also reflects the self-correction and scepticism that’s inherent to the scientific process.
The age of giant Cretaceous owls. Perhaps the best-known aspect of the Heptasteornis saga is that this taxon was identified by Harrison & Walker (1975) as an owl, as was Bradycneme draculae, another Romanian Nopcsa taxon recognised by the same authors, also based on the distal end of a tibiotarsus. Both were united by Harrison & Walker (1975) within Bradycnemidae, a group of supposed archaic owls. This explains why owls have been depicted as denizens of Late Cretaceous wildlife scenes on a handful of occasions.
Caption: a scene depicting Late Cretaceous life as imagined during the mid-1970s, by Italian artist Giovanni Caselli. It’s true that early members of modern groups of squamates, insects, plants and so on were present during the Late Cretaceous, but the once popular idea that archaic kin of rails, gulls, waders and so on were present at this time no longer appears correct. And... what’s that bird at far left? Image: Giovanni Caselli, from Halstead (1975).
This was always a fascinating idea, especially given that the owls concerned would have been gigantic. You’ll recall me saying that the A4359 tibiotarsus is about 3 cm wide. For comparison, in the biggest living owls the tibiotarsus is about 1 cm wide, so a conservative interpretation of Heptasteornis as an owl is that it was about 2 m tall in vertical standing pose. This was also a problematic idea given how other data on neornithine phylogeny shows that diversification within Neoaves (the clade that owls and their kin belong to) was predominantly a post-Cretaceous event.
Caption: yup, that’s an owl at left in the Caselli scene (from Halstead 1975) shown above. The owl doesn’t look that big; it looks something like an Athene owl (among the most familiar of which is termed the Little owl!). My photo isn’t blurry: this part of the painting in the book is slightly out of focus. It’s of some interest that Caselli’s painting was published so close in time to the publication of Harrison & Walker (1975). This makes me think that Caselli, presumably via Halstead, knew of that research before it was out, perhaps because Halstead was on the editorial board of the journal where it was published (his own research appeared there – that is, in the journal Palaeontology – several times). At right, Greg Irons’s 1978 illustration of a gigantic Bradycneme (accidentally mis-spelt Brachycneme), from the 1980 book The Last of the Dinosaurs. After discussing the small ankylosaur Struthiosaurus, the text states “He must have fled from the colossal owl Brachycneme [sic], standing five to six feet from beak to claw! The closely related Heptasteornis was nearly as large”.
Indeed, those authors who commented on the Cretaceous owl proposal – beginning with influential palaeornithologist Pierce Brodkorb in 1978 – disagreed with it, most usually saying that the specimens in question were indeterminate but surely non-avian (see Naish & Dyke 2004). Storrs Olson, never afraid to hold back when he sensed blood in the water, described Harrison and Walker’s owl idea as “Certainly one of the most egregious errors ever made in avian paleontology” (Olson 1985, p. 129).
An ode to Harrison and Walker. It’s useful at this point to have some awareness of Colin J. O. Harrison and Cyril Walker’s work on bird fossils and their approach to identification, since their paper on the Romanian ‘Cretaceous owls’ is no outlier.
Caption: at left, screengrab of that egregious Harrison & Walker (1975) paper. At right… there’s a Tet Zoo ver 3 article on Cyril Walker, published on his death in 2009, but an intact version is no longer findable. It’s here.
From the mid-1970s onwards, Harrison and Walker embarked on a career of identifying fragmentary fossil bird fragments (mostly from the European Paleogene) on the basis of their similarity to the bones of modern species, which they had ready access to thanks to the massive, world-class collections of the Natural History Museum today archived at Tring. Harrison and Walker were literally noting genus-level similarities for isolated toe bones, partial shoulder blades and mere fragments of skull bones. They got a lot wrong – this making it easy to criticise them – but they also got a lot right, and an argument can be made that a vast number of bird fossils were only reported in the published literature because Harrison and Walker regarded them as worthy of identification. I never did meet Colin, but I knew Cyril and always found him to be extremely generous with time and information, and also appropriately fair when faced with criticism. He’s also one of the few senior academics who – back when I was a new PhD student – asked me for my opinion during a conversation, something I wasn’t used to and which I’ve never forgotten.
Caption: this figure – from Harrison & Walker (1975) – gives an idea of how Harrison and Walker made the identifications they did. They noted superficial similarities between the fossil fragments and the bones of extant birds (initially coming up with these identifications thanks to their prior knowledge of anatomical characters), and then used detailed similarities and differences to work out how close the fossils were to their supposed extant kin. Image (a) here shows an extant Barred owl, this representing one of three groups deemed by these authors especially similar to the Romanian fossils. The others were (d) true falcons and (e) caracaras. Image: Harrison & Walker (1975).
Beyond the owls. In a ‘post-bradycnemid owl’ world – where the Romanian specimens were universally regarded as being from non-bird theropods but of uncertain sort – authors suggested various solutions to their identity.
In 1988, Greg Paul argued that these specimens were sufficiently similar to the tibiotarsi of troodontids to be included in that group, and perhaps even regarded as representing a European species of Troodon (Paul 1988). A few subsequent authors followed this troodontid identification. Le Loeuff et al. (1992), however, thought that the remains were better referred to Dromaeosauridae, the Velociraptor family. Csiski & Grigorescu (1998) then argued that the tibiotarsi weren’t from maniraptorans at all. They thought that A4359 possessed a “cranial transverse groove on [the] astragalar condyles”, a structure lacking in maniraptorans. But that’s an error, since what they interpreted as a transverse groove is in fact a break, and it’s in the wrong place for the groove in question anyway (Naish & Dyke 2004).
Caption: identifications that have been published for Heptasteornis (my drawing of the holotype at upper left). 1. Alvarezsauridae. 2. Ornithomimidae. 3. Troodontidae. 4. Dromaeosauridae. Images: Darren Naish.
One final comment on Hepasteornis appeared in the literature prior to Naish & Dyke (2004), this time in a poorly known article (Martin 1997) published by palaeornithologist Larry Martin. Martin, who died in 2013, was a bit of a wildcard in his contribution to palaeontology and a lot could be written about him. He was fully committed to the ‘birds are not dinosaurs’ (BAND) movement, and in that context said and published things that were patently false and also inherently dishonest. But he was also brilliant, with an exceptional eye for detail and a skill in interpreting and identifying vertebrate fossils of all sorts. He was also a champion talker and highly entertaining speaker.
Anyway, Martin was very much against the idea – popular among some researchers for a time during the 1990s – that alvarezsaurids might be highly modified birds (this is another complex aspect of the alvarezsaurid story, and one I have to avoid here). He instead thought that they were ornithomimids (the group popularly known as ‘ostrich dinosaurs’ or ‘ostrich mimics’), and in a 1997 article titled ‘The difference between dinosaurs and birds as applied to Mononykus’, went through all the skeletal features of Mononykus in order to show that it was more like an ornithomimid than it was like a bird (Martin 1997). On getting to the tibiotarsus, he noted (citations removed for ease of reading)…
“It is fair to point out that many workers recognized the nonavian status of Mononykus. This is undoubtedly the result of its being well described and based on excellent material. More scrappy remains of a very similar animal Elopteryx from the Cretaceous of Transylvania was also described as a bird, and some of its referred material erroneously as a Cretaceous owl” (Martin 1997, p. 341).
Caption: Martin’s 1997 figure that compares the skeletal elements of Mononykus with those of ornithomimids. He wasn’t the last person to compare alvarezsaurids with ornithomimids and in fact other workers since have regarded the groups as closely related; this is less popular, however, than the hypothesis that alvarezsaurids are maniraptorans. (20) shows one of the Romanian tibiotarsal fragments and (22) the Elopteryx femur. Image: Martin (1997).
This wasn’t, actually, the first time that Martin had referred to the Romanian specimens. Back in 1983, and hence prior to the early 1990s recognition of alvarezsaurids, he discussed them in a section of an article titled ‘Fossils that are not birds’ and wrote “they appear to be struthiomimids in view of the extreme enlargement of the astragalus and reduction of the calcaneum (Martin 1983, p. 301). For ‘struthiomimids’, read ornithomimids.
What this means is that Larry Martin, not Naish and Dyke, wins credit as the first person to draw comparison between Heptasteornis and alvarezsaurids. However, I don’t recall being influenced by this when writing the paper.
On publishing fragmentary remains. When it comes to the publication of Naish & Dyke (2004), we were spurred to publish not just by the influence of the Suzuki et al. (2002) paper mentioned above, but also by Hutchinson & Chiappe’s (1998) then-recent suggestion that remains from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana also represented an alvarezsaurid. The material they used to make their claim wasn’t of the very best sort, involving a right pubis and part of an attached ischium.
Caption: initial evidence pointing to the presence of alvarezaurids in the Maastrichtian of North America was poor, but today enough is known that we consider their presence sufficiently supported by specimens. Trierarchuncus prairiensis, published in 2020, was named for ungual phalanges and a few other limb fragments, and other Maastrichtian remains from western North America presumably belong to it as well. Image: Badlands Dinosaur Museum / Boban Filipovic.
There’s a phenomenon here worth talking about. Once authors start proposing identifications based on fossil material of a certain, shall we say… lesser quality, others are inclined to follow suit. I do NOT mean to imply that this is a bad thing, since fragmentary and isolated fossil remains should be published, often being important and useful, and hypotheses of identity often alert others to the possible presence of the relevant animal group in a respective area or sedimentary unit.
Another issue worth noting here is that making identifications on the basis of fragmentary remains is a substantially risky endeavour. Speaking from experience, I know how easy it is to become convinced that a single skeletal element can look like that of a group you know, only to be proved completely wrong down the line. One random example: ichthyosaur expert Chris McGowan kept identifying ichthyosaur coracoids from the Late Cretaceous of North America. But, as he admitted himself (McGowan 1991), he had ‘ichthyosaur bias’, and other workers showed that his specimens were plesiosaurian pelvic bones, not ichthyosaurian coracoids at all (Baird 1984). Seen from that point of view, our alvarezsaurid identification is risky and – while I’m fine to see it advocated for now, in the absence of better data – I won’t be surprised if it proves wrong in future. Ditto for other supposed alvarezsaurid fragments from Romania.
A paper is (eventually) published. Whatever the caveats, by early 2003 we were ready to attempt publication. We initially submitted a manuscript (with Cyril Walker on the authorship) to Journal of Paleontology but got rejected for the usual ‘we have too many submissions’ reason. We then tried Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association (by now without Cyril; he didn’t feel that he’d contributed enough to warrant authorship), who rejected it for being ‘too specialized’ for their readership. In August 2003, it was submitted to our third and final venue: Neues Jahrbuch, a good venue for short papers on mildly controversial specimens, and it was out and published by November 2004. At least, that’s when my reprints arrived.
Incidentally, one version of the manuscript included a throw-away speculation that the specimen’s relatively large size relative to other alvarezsaurid tibiotarsi might be related to the evolution of this animal in an island setting. Gareth made me remove that bit, wisely I’m sure. So I was interested to see Meso et al. (2024) recently calculate that Heptasteornis would have a mass of 6.1 kg and a length of 1.8 m, which is smaller than the sizes estimated for ancestral members of the alvarezsaurid lineage but larger than a good number of the taxa close to Mononykus (Meso et al. 2024).
Caption: Greg Paul kindly provided a skeletal reconstruction of a mononykin alvarezsaurid for use in Naish & Dyke (2004) (Mononykini is a clade within Parvicursorinae, the alvarezsaurid clade that includes the majority of taxa and not the early-diverging ones). It’s mostly based on the Djachokhta Formation taxon Shuuvia deserti, specimens of which were originally assumed to be additional Mononykus individuals. Image: © Greg Paul.
Post-2004, I have to say that the paper has mostly been mentioned and cited fairly and appropriately in relevant literature (Kessler et al. 2005, Csiki et al. 2010, Brusatte et al. 2013, Csiki-Sava et al. 2015, Mayr et al. 2020, Stoicescu et al. 2024, Meso et al. 2024). A common complaint among publishing scientists is that there exist all too many cases whereby authors have failed to credit the work of their colleagues, or are so insufficiently familiar with the literature that they’ve missed relevant stuff. Gareth and I did kick up a bit of a fuss when the paper wasn’t mentioned in Xu et al.’s (2011a) article on alvarezsaurid evolution and distribution (Dyke & Naish 2011), and Xu et al. (2011b) put up a spirited defence to this challenge.
Our proposed identification has also had the impact we hoped it would among Romanian specialists, who post-2004 started to look at theropod remains from their country with a potential alvarezsaurid identification in mind. Kessler et al. (2005) looked anew at a partial Haţeg Basin femur – the ‘Scoabă specimen’ – and found it more similar to the corresponding region of the alvarezsaurid skeleton than anything else, and suggested that this was an additional Romanian alvarezsaurid specimen.
Caption: at left, the distal part of a right femur known from the La Scoabă locality at Sânpetru, and described by Kessler et al. (2005). At right, the proximal end of a right femur from Nălaț-Vad (lower row) compared with Andrews’s original illustrations of the partial Elopteryx femur from Sânpetru (here flipped for comparison), reported by Stoicescu et al. (2024).
What about the other Romanian maniraptorans? Because the Heptasteornis distal tibiotarsus is only one of several Late Cretaceous theropod fragments from the same region of Romania – all of which tend to get discussed alongside one another – it didn’t seem right to ignore those others in our project. The original partial Elopteryx femur? It lacks alvarezsaurid characters and the presence of a trochanteric crest (a tall ridge on the bone’s proximal edge that overhangs the shaft on its anterior face) and posterior trochanter (a mound-like muscle attachment site on the bone’s outside edge) led us to prefer either a troodontid or early-diverging pygostylian identity (Naish & Dyke 2004).
What about the Bradycneme tibiotarsus? It doesn’t possess a distinctively curvy ascending astragular process like Heptasteornis, but is at least shaped like a maniraptoran tibiotarsus, so we identified it as Maniraptora indet. And a second partial tibiotarsus referred by Harrison & Walker (1975) to Heptasteornis (A1528) is also not sufficiently well preserved to allow an identification beyond Maniraptora to be resolved.
Caption: the maniraptoran specimens discussed in this article share a very unusual sculptured, textured or wrinkled bone surface. It’s definitely a real anatomical thing and not a product of preparation or, apparently, taphonomy, and I understand that it’s associated with an unusual histology. At left is the posterior face of the Bradycneme holotype, at right the left foot and tibiotarsus of Balaur (from Csiki et al. 2011). Images: © Natural History Museum, London; Csiki et al. (2010).
The elopterygid hypothesis. I said above that the alvarezsaurid hypothesis proposed by Naish & Dyke (2004) was risky, based as it is on scant data. On that note, if these remains aren’t those of alvarezsaurids, what might they be from? You see, there’s another, very different hypothesis out there. I’m calling it the ‘elopterygid hypothesis’.
Here’s where we come back to that intriguing detail of the Romanian maniraptoran fossils mentioned earlier in this article: the “sculpturing of the surface of the bone” that Charles Andrews mentioned in 1913. The weird thing is that this sculpturing is present in the Elopterx femora, the Heptasteornis and Bradycneme tibiotarsi, the Scoabă specimen and Balaur too.
This similarity is hard to explain away unless these animals are all close relatives, and part of a group that’s distinct from other maniraptorans. If this is so, suggestions that Heptasteornis might be an alvarezsaurid, that Balaur is a dromaeosaurid, or that some Elopteryx remains might be from troodontids would be in error. Instead, we’d be looking here at a new clade, perhaps deserving of the name Elopterygidae (a moniker first suggested, albeit as a dromaeosaurid clade, and as the ‘subfamily’ Elopteryginae, by Le Loeuff et al. (1992)). Thus, ‘elopterygid hypothesis’.
Caption: a much simplified maniraptoran cladogram, showing some possible positions for an ‘elopterygid’ lineage. If these animals are within Paraves, they might be outside the Troodontidae + Avialae clade, or maybe they’re closer to birds (and thus perhaps within Avialae). Image: Darren Naish.
Or… would this hypothetical clade not be termed Elopterygidae, but Gargantuaviidae? A partial pelvis from Romania, reported by Mayr et al. (2020), looks consistent in size and anatomy with the Elopteryx femora, has similarities with the pelvis of Balaur, and has features suggestive of an affinity with Gargantuavis, an emu-sized maniraptoran from the Maastrichtian of France and Campanian of Spain, initially interpreted as a flightless bird belonging to Ornithuromorpha, the clade that includes crown-birds but excludes enantiornithines. A few authors have now mooted this (Mayr et al. 2020, Stoicescu et al. 2024).
If this proves correct, it might be that Balaur and Elopteryx are synonymous. Heptasteornis would presumably remain distinct, since it looks different from the more strongly fused distal tibiotarsus of Balaur (then again, is this difference a product of variation or ontogeny?). Again, it’s inconsistent with all of those specific hypotheses proposed for the identification of Balaur (a supposed dromaeosaurid), Heptasteornis (a supposed alvarezsaurid), and Gargantuavis (a supposed ornithuromorph).
Caption: the Balaur bondoc holotype EME (Transylvanian Museum Society, Dept. of Natural Sciences, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) PV.313, on display in 2011. It represents an animal that would have been about 2 m long when complete, though some ambiguity about this length exists as a bird identity for the animal would suggest a slightly shorter tail than a dromaeosaurid one. Image: Darren Naish.
A lament we often made on fieldwork while in Romania was that the additional fragmentary fossils forever being added to the canon were just making the situation ever more complex and confusing. Ultimately, we can’t resolve any of this without substantially better fossils. Will good Heptasteornis remains turn up and vindicate an alvarezsaurid identity?* Or might we be shocked when it turns out to be an ‘elopterygid’ with Balaur-like features? As ever, we live in hope, cursed by a cruel and fickle fossil record…
* Shortly after publishing our paper, Gareth and I were both told that alvarezsaurid material had been discovered in the Upper Cretaceous rocks of France and were soon to see print. Twenty years later though and nothing further there has transpired.
Caption: I’m one of many researchers who’s visited the Balaur discovery site (Sebeş Glod, Alba County, Romania) in the hopes of finding more material of this intriguing taxon. It, and other fossils from the site, are found literally on the riverbed as well as in the banks. The bones are white, and hence stand out from the red, silty mudstone that forms the outcrop. Brandon Jardine is standing at right, a photo from March 2013. Images: Darren Naish.
The mistakes and the regret. Finally, published works are very often strewn with errors. I blame a number of reasons for the errors I’ve introduced into the publishing literature, but the primary one is that virtually every bit of science I’ve ever published – or tried to get published – has been done in a rush, in moments snatched between the actual jobs that burn up my time. It’s a terrible excuse, but a non-trivial one as far as I’m concerned.
Among the things I don’t like about Naish & Dyke (2004) is that we used an awful photo of A4359 (it’s Fig. 2A in the paper). We did actually arrange to get proper photos of the specimen taken, but a mix-up meant that we ended up with high-quality images of the Bradycneme holotype, not the Heptasteornis one. I still own them and they haven’t been published.
Caption: at left, the Bradycneme draculae holotype in anterior view, a photo provided by © The Natural History Museum, London, and unpublished to date. The specimen figures in Naish & Dyke (2004) should look like this. But they don’t: instead we have the image shown here at upper right, which shows the Heptasteornis andrewsi holotype. It’s not great. At lower right is my diagrammatic interpretration of the same specimen. Images: © The Natural History Museum, London; Naish & Dyke (2004).
And a major embarrassment is that at the last minute – literally on the day of submitting the final version of the manuscript to the publisher – I opted to change the spelling of nopcsai to the incorrect ‘nopscai’, purely because I’m not capable of remembering the correct spelling of Nopcsa (how goddam Anglocentric of me, I know). That incorrect version is the one that made it into print.
And there we have my thoughts on Naish & Dyke (2004). I really didn’t intend to write so much, but… here we are.
For previous Tetrapod Zoology articles connected to issues covered here, see…
Cyril Walker, May 2009
The Romanian Dinosaur Balaur Seems to Be a Flightless Bird, June 2015
The “Birds Are Not Dinosaurs” Movement, November 2017
My New Book: Dinopedia from Princeton University Press, December 2021
Alan Feduccia’s Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology, October 2023
Refs - -
Andrews, C. W. 1913. On some bird remains from the Upper Cretaceous of Transylvania. Geological Magazine 10, 193-196.
Baird, D. 1984. No ichthyosaurs in the Upper Cretaceous of New Jersey … or Saskatchewan. The Mosasaur 2, 129-133.
Csiki, Z. & Grigorescu, D. 1998. Small theropods from the Late Cretaceous of the Hateg Basin (western Romania) – an unexpected diversity at the top of the food chain. Oryctos 1, 87-104.
Csiki, Z., Vremir, M., Brusatte, S. L., Norell, M. A. 2010. An aberrant island-dwelling theropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Romania. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, 15357-15361.
Feduccia, F. 2020. Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology. BrownWalker Press, Irvine, Boca Raton.
Halstead, L. B. 1975. The Evolution and Ecology of the Dinosaurs. Peter Lowe / Eurobook Ltd, Frome, Somerset.
Harrison, C. J. O. & Walker, C. A. 1975. The Bradycnemidae, a new family of owls from the Upper Cretaceous of Romania. Palaeontology 18, 563-570.
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