Unexpected collaborations with thoracosaur skulls
In late 2021, Dr. Adam Cossette and I were awarded an internal grant from NYITCOM-AR that provided funds to cover the gathering of preliminary data for a project that we were working on. Part of that project involved scanning a lot of crocodylian skulls. During the summer of 2022, Dr. Cossette and I set out to obtain those scans. One of the animals we wound up scanning for the project was a little-known critter called Eothoracosaurus mississippiensis. This taxon is a member of a largely understudied group of crocodylians that kind of look a bit like modern-day gharials (a separate can of worms for a different day).
As I am known to do for these early projects, I showcased some of what we were scanning as "sneak peaks" on Twitter. In this case, my "sneak peak" of E. mississippiensis caught the attention of Dr. Paul M. Burke, who reached out to Dr. Cossette and myself about access to the scan data for this critter and for his Ph.D. student, Sophie Boerman's project looking at the endocranial anatomy of these interesting beasts. This ultimately led to my lab's collaboration on the project, where we were able to add some additional functional morphology aspects to the study along with the scan data. For a nice writeup of the study, check out this article by The Brussels Times.
This was one of those fun and unexpected roads that one ends up going down when working in science. Congratulations to Sophie and the team for putting together the study and working through a more labyrinthine publication process than normal.
Boerman, S.A.C.M., Burke, P.J., Perrichon, G., Vellekoop, J., Smith, T., Cossette, A.C., Bourke, J.M., Mannion, P.D., Martin, J.E. 2026. The endocranial anatomy of 'thoracosaur' crocodyliforms: Implications for their ecology and phylogenetic affinities. Palaeontology. Vol. 69(5):e70086. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pala.70086
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