0000000000989198
AUTHOR
Alexander Nützel
Comment on the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) dated April 21, 2020 regarding “Fossils from conflict zones and reproducibility of fossil-based scientific data”: Myanmar amber
Motivation for this comment Recently, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) has sent around a letter, dated 21st April, 2020 to more than 300 palaeontological journals, signed by the President, Vice President and a former President of the society (Rayfield et al. 2020). The signatories of this letter request significant changes to the common practices in palaeontology. With our present, multi-authored comment, we aim to argue why these suggestions will not lead to improvement of both practice and ethics of palaeontological research but, conversely, hamper its further development. Although we disagree with most contents of the SVP letter, we appreciate this initiative to discuss scien…
Comment on the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) dated April 21, 2020 regarding “Fossils from conflict zones and reproducibility of fossil-based scientific data”: the importance of private collections
International audience
Gastropod evidence against the Early Triassic Lilliput effect
4 pages; International audience; Size reduction in the aftermath of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event has repeatedly been described for various marine organisms, including gastropods (the Lilliput effect). A Smithian gastropod assemblage from Utah, USA, reveals numerous large-sized specimens of different genera as high as 70 mm, the largest ever reported from the Early Triassic. Other gastropods reported from Serbia and Italy are also as large as 35 mm. Size frequency distributions of the studied assemblages indicate that they were not unusually small when compared with later Mesozoic and modern faunas. The occurrence of large-sized gastropods less than 2 Ma after the Permian-Trias…