Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Review of 2022

Well, I succeeded in posting more last year than I did in 2021, at least. However, most of the posts I made were not research-heavy informational articles about maniraptors, as I've intended this blog to focus on. Instead, I was motivated to write by the release of Prehistoric Planet, the return of in-person conferences, and a sudden urge to talk about a childhood icon.

If my relative silence on here reflects anything, it's probably that 2022 was a big year for me. Most conspicuously, I graduated with my PhD from the University of Bath and started a postdoctoral position at the University of Cambridge. In addition, a paper I co-authored was published: spearheaded by my labmate Juan Benito Moreno, we described the postcranial anatomy of Ichthyornis based on 40 new specimens. I also finished drawing an infographic on bird phylogeny, on which I'd been working intermittently for about two years (and planning for even longer than that), and was fortunate enough to be invited for an interview about my research and outreach by science communicator Jon Perry. Miraculously, I was able to continue updating New Dinosaur Alert and Through Time and Clades fairly consistently. Between research, peer reviewing, networking, and a well of other personal projects either in progress or on the horizon, I'm fully expecting activity on this blog to remain low in the foreseeable future. There are still elements of blogging I enjoy, however, so I certainly don't intend to stop posting entirely.

My infographic on bird phylogeny, which can be viewed in detail here.

I will be making a few changes to this year's review of new maniraptoran research. First of all, I will not be writing a separate post going over new species in detail, as I think the time and effort spent on that would be largely redundant with respect to my work on New Dinosaur Alert. Secondly, though listing studies by publication month has been convenient for me in previous years, I suspect that that format is not particularly useful to most readers. Instead, I will try out a rough phylogenetic organization of the stories here. As always, my coverage of papers about modern birds is necessarily going to be incomplete, so I put more focus on those that have more direct connections to paleontology, such as studies on anatomy, ontogeny, and higher-order phylogeny.

General and non-paravian maniraptors

Estimated gape limits in oviraptorosaurs, from Meade and Ma (2022).
General and non-neornithean paravians

Holotype of Daurlong wangi, from Wang et al. (2022).

Schematic skeletal of Janavis finalidens with preserved bones shown, from Benito et al. (2022).
General crown birds 

Developmental history of the avian pelvis compared to its evolutionary history, from Griffin et al. (2022).

Associations between ornament elaboration and body condition or fitness in mutually ornamented bird species, from Nolazco et al. (2022).

Distribution of diving behavior in aquatic neoavians, from Tyler and Younger (2022).
 Paleognaths

Variation in the casque of southern cassowaries, from Green et al. (2022).
Galloanserans

Skeletal reconstruction of Annakacygna hajimei, from Matsuoka and Hasegawa (2022).

Holotype of Centuriavis lioae, from Ksepka et al. (2022).
Miscellaneous neoavians

Strisoreans

Plumage color diversity in hummingbirds, from Venable et al. (2022).
Gruiforms and charadriiforms

Time-scaled phylogeny of shorebirds, from Černý and Natale (2022).
Phaethoquornitheans

Holotype of Nasidytes ypresianus, from Mayr and Kitchener (2022).
Telluravians

Skull and endocast of the letter-winged kite, from Keirnan et al. (2022).

Holotype of Miosurnia diurna, from Li et al. (2022).

Skull of the holotype of Danielsraptor phorusrhacoides, from Mayr and Kitchener (2021). (The print version of the journal retroactively dates the paper to 2021, but really, the paper was first released in 2022.)

Experimental setup for studying composite tool use in Tanimbar corellas, from Osuna-Mascaró et al. (2022).

Distribution of mimetic traits in juvenile tyrannidans, from Londoño et al. (2022).

Phylogeny of corvideans, from McCullough et al. (2022).

Hybrid between rose-breasted grosbeak and scarlet tanager, from Toews et al. (2022).

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