Archaeopteryx

I read in science news today that in the Aug 5 edition of science, the CT scan team at U of Texas scanned the brain case of the london specimen of Archaeopteryx. There were a couple of things that struck me right away. I saw this presented on at SVP last year and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't the same people presenting as are now getting the paper in Nature. Also, then it was the Berlin Specimen, which actually has a brain case that is only half crushed. The London specimen is actually missing its head entirely. I don't know if this is an error on the part of Science news or what but I am definately glad to see that this particular team did the ct scan. They do good work and it means that they will eventually post it on http://www.digimorph.org . It also occured to me that in order to present at last years svp, they would have had to have had an abstract ready by April 2003. Is that how long it takes a paper to get into nature these days? I'm not sure if that's a long time or not, but I don't think that the science is moving fast enough (Nature needs to be weekly now instead of biweekly) The report went on to say that the digital endocast had enlarged regions for sight (optic lobes and optic tectum), muscle controle and had a very birdlike middle ear with an elongate hearing aparatus similar to modern birds.
Speaking of brain cases, I've decided that I'm going to compare the brain cases of helodermata, amphisbainids, snakes, dolichosaurs and mosasaurs to hopefully refute some of the groups as a sister group to snakes. Personally, I'd also like to find out where dolichosaurs are phylogenetically (descendants of basal mosasaurs or some other lizard group entirely?). Onfortunately though, when I tried to read Rieppel's paper comparing mosasaurs, snakes and varanids, I think I understood the abstract, the intro and the discussion but only about every third word in the actual body of the paper. It's going to be an interesting year. Hopefully since I won't have a tv I'll actually get alot done.