How many new fossil species have been discovered this year? Enough to vote for favorites.
The academic journal PLOS One is currently hosting a vote for its readers on what the best vertebrate fossil finds were this year. It’s a wide category, and everything from fish to fowl to–of course–dinosaurs is represented. The only criteria are that the species must have been discovered this year and it had to have a backbone. The top ten will be announced at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting on October 27th.
PLOS One is looking for the most important academic finds, and readers are encouraged to consider the completeness of the find, the thoroughness of the description, and its importance in helping researchers understand evolutionary relationships when voting for a specimen. But given that no one at Popular Science felt qualified to cast a vote on those criteria, we’ve instead compiled a top ten list of the weirdest fossil finds of the past year.
