As if groundbreaking movies and visual and sound effects—not to mention action figures and other products—weren’t enough, Star Wars creator George Lucas is trying his hand at book publishing. Next month, George Lucas Books, an imprint of JAK Films, Inc. (Lucas’s motion picture company), will release its first title, Cinema By the Bay by Sheerly Avni. The upmarket coffeetable book celebrates films produced by studios in the San Francisco Bay Area and directed by independent filmmakers living and working in Northern California. New York house Welcome Books produced and will distribute the book.

There might be an interesting book by George Lucas, or published by George Lucas, but this isn’t it.

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A Cretaceous terrestrial snake with robust hindlimbs and a sacrum

Sebastián Apesteguía1,2 and Hussam Zaher3

It has commonly been thought that snakes underwent progressive loss of their limbs by gradual diminution of their use1. However, recent developmental and palaeontological discoveries suggest a more complex scenario of limb reduction, still poorly documented in the fossil record2, 3, 4, 5. Here we report a fossil snake with a sacrum supporting a pelvic girdle and robust, functional legs outside the ribcage. The new fossil, from the Upper Cretaceous period of Patagonia, fills an important gap in the evolutionary progression towards limblessness because other known fossil snakes with developed hindlimbs, the marine Haasiophis, Pachyrhachis and Eupodophis, lack a sacral region. Phylogenetic analysis shows that the new fossil is the most primitive (basal) snake known and that all other limbed fossil snakes are closer to the more advanced macrostomatan snakes, a group including boas, pythons and colubroids. The new fossil retains several features associated with a subterranean or surface dwelling life that are also present in primitive extant snake lineages, supporting the hypothesis of a terrestrial rather than marine origin of snakes

Boo-ya!