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'''Effigia''' was an archosaur that lived in what is now New Mexico. The six-foot-long (2-meter) fossil was collected by Edwin H. Colbert in blocks of rock from the Ghost Ranch Quarry, which were excavated in 1947 and 1948. However, Colbert did not think any large vertebrates besides basal theropod dinosaurs were present in the quarry and as such did not even open the jackets of most of the blocks that were returned to the AMNH.
The fossil was rediscovered in January 2006 by graduate student Sterling Nesbitt at the American Museum of Natural History. Nesbitt was opening jackets of blocks in order to find new specimens of ''Coelophysis''. Upon finding the remains of ''Effigia'', he instantly recognized this was not a dinosaur and proceeded to track down the rest of the blocks from that area of the quarry. Nesbitt and Mark Norell, curator at the museum, named it ''Effigia okeeffeae'' in January 2006 after Georgia O'Keeffe, who spent many years at Ghost Ranch (her ashes are scattered there).
''Effigia'' is remarkable for its extreme similarity to ornithomimid dinosaurs. Nesbitt, in 2007, showed that ''Effigia'' was very similar to ''Shuvosaurus'', and is definitely a member of the crurotarsan group Suchia (in the line leading towards modern crocodilians), and that its similarity to ornithomimids represents a case of "extreme" convergent evolution. Nesbitt also demonstrated that ''Shuvosaurus'' was the same animal as ''Chatterjeea'', and that it belonged to an exclusive clade containing closely related suchians such as ''Shuvosaurus'' and ''Poposaurus'' (the Poposauridae). Within this group, ''Effigia'' forms an even more exclusive clade with ''Shuvosaurus'' and the South American ''Sillosuchus'' (the Chatterjeeinae).^[1]

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In popular culture

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In popular culture

In a January 30, 2006 episode of ''The Colbert Report'', Stephen Colbert satirically touted the fossil as disproving the "Darwinlutionists" ("who try to claim that every kind of creature had evolved from monkeys"). Colbert also believes that the fossil should not have been named after Georgia O'Keeffe, whose paintings "scare the hell out of [him]", and instead should have been named after Edwin H. Colbert (see List of The Colbert Report episodes).

References

1. Nesbitt, S. (2007). "The anatomy of ''Effigia okeeffeae'' (Archosauria, Suchia), theropod-like convergance, and the distribution of related taxa." ''Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History'', '302': 84 pp.

External links

★ MSNBC Story