title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: Darius Rucker recorded a country version of the song with backing vocals from Lady Antebellum as the second single on his third solo project, "True Believers," released on Capitol Records. He joined Old Crow Medicine Show at the Grand Ole Opry July 6, 2012, "for a special rendition of 'Wagon Wheel'" where the fans "went crazy over Rucker's cover of the Old Crow Medicine Show hit." After this reception he tweeted out: "Secret out after @opry perf. I recorded a version of 'Wagon Wheel' for my new record and @ladyantebellum sings on track."


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: The song did not at first appeal to Rucker. "Somebody had played 'Wagon Wheel' for me years ago," he said. "It was one of those things that I didn't really get." The faculty band at his daughter's high school performing had a different effect, as he relates,


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: With guidance from Frank Liddell, Rucker cut the song with Lady A on backing vocals. He told Taste of Country: "Lady Antebellum took the song to a new level. Up until they added their vocals, I thought it was another song on the record."


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: Rucker had been introduced to Fuqua's source for Dylan's outtake years prior: "I got turned onto the Pat Garrett soundtrack when I worked retail back in the day. It's so different from a lot of his other stuff. It's such a cool record." Rucker also previously had had some experience with crediting Dylan on a song he'd performed. His group Hootie and the Blowfish's 1995 hit single "Only Wanna Be With You" quotes an entire verse from Dylan's 1975 song "Idiot Wind". When the record began selling big, the "Dylan camp" took issue, and Dylan was ultimately credited as a co-writer. As Rucker remembers, "They wanted some money, and they got it. We weren't trying to rip anybody off."


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: For Rucker it was largely an issue of musical genre and the high school group changing his thinking on it: "I knew the song, and to me it was such a perfect bluegrass tune that I didn't think I could do it. But they did a country version of it, with drums and pedal steel. I was like, 'Wait a minute. That would be a great country song.'" On deciding to go country with it, Rucker says:


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: When asked if he thought his recording would be nominated for a Grammy Award, Rucker responded: "If 'Wagon Wheel' doesn't get nominated for a GRAMMY, country music is screwed. It's as simple as that. I'm not saying I should win it, but it should be nominated."


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: Matt Bjorke of Roughstock gave Rucker's version a five-star rating. Billy Dukes of Taste of Country gave Rucker's version four and a half stars out of five. As to the reaction of the originating group, Rucker says, "I think the Old Crow Medicine Show guys are very happy about it, and that's all that matters to me." On Rucker's version of the song, Chris 'Critter' Fuqua of Old Crow Medicine Show says:


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: Rucker won the Grammy Award for Best Country Solo Performance at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards (held January 26, 2014) for his version of "Wagon Wheel". Rucker's win makes him only the second solo African American after Charley Pride to be both nominated for and win a vocal performance Grammy award in a country music category. Other nominees up for the same award were Lee Brice for "I Drive Your Truck", Hunter Hayes for "I Want Crazy", Miranda Lambert for "Mama's Broken Heart" and Blake Shelton for "Mine Would Be You".


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: In August 2016 Taste of Country placed the Rucker version of "Wagon Wheel" 17th on its list of "Top Country Songs of the Century".


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: Rucker released a music video of the song on March 21, 2013, which features Si, Jase, Sadie, Korie and Willie Robertson of the television show "Duck Dynasty", along with Charles Kelley of Lady A. It was filmed in Watertown, Tennessee.


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: The most popular song of his career, solo or otherwise, Rucker's "Wagon Wheel" debuted at No. 51 on the U.S. "Billboard" Country Airplay chart for the week of January 19, 2013. It also debuted at number 32 on the U.S. "Billboard" Hot Country Songs chart for the week of January 26, 2013. It debuted at No. 96 on the U.S. "Billboard" Hot 100 chart for the week of February 6, 2013; it debuted at 72 on the Canadian Hot 100 chart for the week of February 13, 2013. In its 10th chart week, March 20, 2013, Rucker's version made "a strong move" on Hot Country Songs, going from 11 to 5, and to 18 on Country Airplay (to 14.7 million, up 20%). Old Crow's original (from 2004) sold 15,000 and ranked 28 on Country Digital Songs the same week. The song reached number one on Hot Country Songs in its 12th week. It is his most successful song as a solo artist on the "Billboard" Hot 100, peaking at No. 15, as well as the Canadian Hot 100, where it peaked at number 23. By March 2014, the song has sold 2,678,000 copies in the United States, making it then the fifth best-selling song by a male country solo artist. As of October 2019, the song has sold 3,776,000 copies in the US. On October 27, 2022, the song became eleven times platinum. The song became the fourth country song to be certified diamond on October 29, 2022.


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: South Dakota Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rick Weiland sang a parody of the song "with lyrics rewritten to match his campaign message" at a campaign "folk-rock concert" at the Strawbale Winery north of Sioux Falls in October 2014. Parody lyrics included the line: "I can't run a nine million-dollar campaign, but I don't have EB-5 to explain". Senator and 2016 Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine played the song on harmonica with local act Nikki Talley and Jason Sharp at the Catawba Brewing Company in Asheville, North Carolina on August 15, 2016.


title: Wagon Wheel (song)

text: In 2019, as part of the release of Ken Burns' miniseries "Country Music", Bank of America released a video of the song, featuring six musicians from across the United States, with the tag line "Nothing connects the country like country." Each musician sang one line for the first six lines of the song.


title: El Shaddai

text: El Shaddai ( "ʾĒl Šadday"; ) or just Shaddai is one of the names of the God of Israel. "El Shaddai" is conventionally translated into English as "God Almighty" ("Deus Omnipotens" in Latin, الله عز وجل Allāh 'azzawajal in Arabic), but its original meaning is unclear.


title: El Shaddai

text: The translation of "El" as "God" or "Lord" in the Ugaritic/Canaanite language is straightforward, as El was the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion. The literal meaning of "Shaddai", however, is the subject of debate.


title: El Shaddai

text: The form of the phrase "El Shaddai" fits the pattern of the divine names in the Ancient Near East, exactly as is the case with names like El Olam", El Elyon" or El Betel". As such, "El Shaddai" can convey several different semantic relations between the two words, among them: the deity of a place called "Shaddai", a deity possessing the quality of "shaddai" and a deity who is also known by the name "Shaddai".


title: El Shaddai

text: The name "Shaddai" appears 48 times in the Bible, seven times as "El Shaddai" (five times in Genesis, once in Exodus, and once in Ezekiel).


title: El Shaddai

text: The first occurrence of the name is in , "When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, 'I am El Shaddai; walk before me, and be blameless,' Similarly, in God says to Jacob, "I am El Shaddai: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins". According to "Shaddai" was the name by which God was known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Shaddai thus being associated in tradition with Abraham, the inclusion of the Abraham stories into the Hebrew Bible may have brought the northern name with them, according to the documentary hypothesis of the origins of the Hebrew Bible.


title: El Shaddai

text: In the vision of Balaam recorded in the Book of Numbers 24:4 and 16, the vision comes from Shaddai, who is also referred to as El (God) and Elyon (Most High). In the fragmentary inscriptions at Deir Alla, though "Shaddai" is not, or not fully present, "shaddayin" appear (, the vowels are uncertain, as is the gemination of the "d"), perhaps lesser figurations of Shaddai. These have been tentatively identified with the š"edim" () of Deuteronomy 32:17 and Psalm 106:37–38, who are Canaanite deities.


title: El Shaddai

text: In the Septuagint "Shaddai" or "El Shaddai" was often translated just as "God" or "my God", and in at least one passage (Ezekiel 10:5) it is transliterated (""). In other places (such as Job 5:17) it is translated "Almighty" (""), and this word is used in other translations as well (such as the King James Bible).


title: El Shaddai

text: According to Ernst Knauf, "El Shaddai" means "God of the Wilderness" and originally would not have had a doubled "d". He argues that it is a loanword from Israelian Hebrew, where the word had a "sh" sound, into Judean Hebrew and hence, Biblical Hebrew, where it would have been "śaday" with the sound "śin". In this theory, the word is related to the word "śadé" meaning "the (uncultivated) field", the area of hunting (as in the distinction between beasts of the field, חיות השדה, and cattle, בהמות). He points out that the name is found in Thamudic inscriptions (as "'lšdy"), in a personal name "Śaday`ammī" used in Egypt from the Late Bronze Age until Achaemenid times, and even in the Punic name "bdšd" (Servant of Shadé or Shada).


title: El Shaddai

text: Another theory is that Shaddai is a derivation of a Semitic stem that appears in the Akkadian language "shadû" ("mountain") and "shaddā`û" or "shaddû"`a ("mountain-dweller"), one of the names of Amurru. This theory was popularized by W. F. Albright but was somewhat weakened when it was noticed that the doubling of the medial "d"  is first documented only in the Neo-Assyrian period. However, the doubling in Hebrew might possibly be secondary. According to this theory, God is seen as inhabiting a holy mountain, a concept not unknown in ancient West Asian mythology (see El), and also evident in the Syriac Christianity writings of Ephrem the Syrian, who places the Garden of Eden on an inaccessible mountaintop.


title: El Shaddai

text: The term "El Shaddai" may mean "god of the mountains", referring to the Mesopotamian divine mountain. This could also refer to the Israelite camp's stay at biblical Mount Sinai where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. According to Stephen L. Harris, the term was "one of the patriarchal names for the Mesopotamian tribal god", presumably meaning of the tribe of Abram, although there seems to be no evidence for this outside the Bible. In Exodus 6:3, El Shaddai is identified explicitly with the God of Abraham and with Yahweh. The term "El Shaddai" appears chiefly in Genesis.


title: El Shaddai

text: The root word ""shadad"" () means to plunder, overpower, or make desolate. This would give Shaddai the meaning of "destroyer", representing one of the aspects of God, and in this context it is essentially an epithet. The meaning may go back to an original sense which was "to be strong" as in the Arabic ""shadid"" () "strong", although normally the Arabic letter pronounced "sh" corresponds to the Hebrew letter sin, not to shin. The termination ""ai"", typically signifying the first person possessive plural, functions as a pluralis excellentiae like other titles for the Hebrew deity, Elohim ("gods") and Adonai ("my lords"). The possessive quality of the termination had lost its sense and become the lexical form of both Shaddai and Adonai, similar to how the connotation of the French word Monsieur changed from "my lord" to being an honorific title. There are a couple of verses in the Bible where there seems to be word play with "Shadday" and this root meaning to destroy (the day of YHWH will come as destruction from Shadday, כשד משדי יבוא, Is. 13:6 and Joel 1:15), but Knauf maintains that this is re-etymologization.


title: El Shaddai

text: It has been speculated that the tell in Syria called Tell eth-Thadeyn ("tell of the two breasts") was called Shaddai in the Amorite language. There was a Bronze-Age city in the region called Tuttul, which means "two breasts" in the Sumerian language. It has been conjectured that El Shaddai was therefore the "God of Shaddai" and that the inclusion of the Abrahamic stories into the Hebrew Bible may have brought the northern name with them (see Documentary hypothesis).


title: El Shaddai

text: The root ""shad"" (שד) means "breast". Biblical scholar David Biale notes that, of the six times that the name "El Shaddai" appears in the Book of Genesis, five are in connection with fertility blessings for the patriarchs. He argues that this original understanding of "Shaddai" as related to fertility was forgotten by the later authors of Isaiah, Joel, and Job, who understood it as related to root words for power or destruction (thus explaining their later translation as "all-powerful" or "almighty").


title: El Shaddai

text: A popular interpretation of the name Shaddai is that it is composed of the Hebrew relative particle "she-" (Shin plus vowel segol followed by dagesh), or, as in this case, as "sha-" (Shin plus vowel patach followed by a dagesh). The noun containing the dagesh is the Hebrew word "dai" meaning "enough, sufficient, sufficiency". This is the same word used in the Passover Haggadah, Dayeinu, which means "It would have been enough for us." The song Dayeinu celebrates the various miracles God performed while liberating the Israelites from Egyptian servitude. The Talmud explains it this way, but says that "Shaddai" stands for "Mi she'Amar Dai L'olamo" (Hebrew: מי שאמר די לעולמו) – "He who said 'Enough' to His world." When he was forming the earth, he stopped the process at a certain point, withholding creation from reaching its full completion, and thus the name embodies God's power to stop creation. The passage appears in the tractate Hagigah 12a and reads:Reish Laqish said: What is the meaning of that which is written: ""I am the Almighty God" (El Shaddai)" (Genesis 35:11)? It means: I am He who said to the world "enough! [dai]," instructing it to stop expanding. Similarly, Reish Laqish [also] said: In the hour that the Holy One, blessed be He, created the sea, it started to expand – until the Holy One, blessed be He, reproached it. [Then] it dried out as it was said: "He reproaches the sea and makes it dry; and all the rivers makes desolate" (Nahum 1:4).This account has two parallel variants with some minute changes. One appears in Bereshit Rabbah 5:8, where Shaddai stops the world from expanding and in 46:3 where he limits the earth and heavens. What is common to all these instances is the cosmogonic context and the exposition provided by Resh Laqish, who explains the appellation as a compound form consisting of "she–" and "day". These passages have often been exposed in a sophisticated way as indicating the divine plan of drawing the borders between mind and matter, keeping the balance between his right and left hand or as an early manifestation of the kabbalistic idea of "tzimtzum". It seems however, that they should rather be approached in their immediate context and in relation to another parallel narrative which comes in BT Sukkah 53 a–b and reads:When David dug the Pits, the {watery chasm} arose and threatened to submerge the world. David asked: «is there anyone who knows whether it is allowed to inscribe the [divine] name upon a {piece of clay}, and cast it into the {watery chasm} that its waves would subside?" (…) He thereupon inscribed the name upon a {piece of clay}, cast (Aram. שדי) it into the {watery chasm} and it subsided sixteen thousand cubits.This story has its variants: in Makkot 11a David sees the "tehom" rising and stops it by means of the name inscribed upon a stone while Bereshit Rabbah 23:7 conveys the tradition that this was the abuse of the tetragram which brought about the flood. If to approach these passages from the structural perspective, it is possible to discern two basic essences engaged in the opposition: the active, dividing agent and passive amorphous matter. Moreover, each of the recalled accounts has strong cosmological undertones, what suggests assuming the comparative perspective. Accordingly, Shaddai limiting the expansionist outburst of the world fits well the pattern of the so-called "chaoskampf" – an initial divine battle followed by the triumph of the young and vivacious deity, subjugating the hostile, usually aquatic monster and building the palace or creating the cosmos.The mythological traditions of the ancient Near East are full of parallels: Babylonian Marduk and Tiamat, Ugaritic Baal and Yam, Egyptian Ra and Apep, etc. In fact, this rabbinic reiteration should not be surprising at all, given the semantic capacity of this myth. Not only does the Hebrew Bible recall the cosmic battle numerous times, especially in Psalms (e.g., 77:16–17; 89:10) and Prophets (e.g. Isaiah 51:9–10; Ezekiel 32:13) but also plays with this ancient motif reiterating it to convey a specific meaning. Yahveh blowing the waters of the flood in Genesis 8:1 to make place for the new creation or dividing the Sea of Reeds in Exodus 14–15 to let the Hebrews walk to the other side and start a new national existence – all of these may be read as the retellings of the initial cosmogonic conflict.


title: El Shaddai

text: "El Shaddai" may also be understood as an allusion to the singularity of deity, "El", as opposed to "Elohim" (plural), being sufficient or enough for the early patriarchs of Judaism. To this was later added the Mosaic conception of the tetragrammaton YHWH, meaning a god who is sufficient in himself, that is, a self-determined eternal being qua being, for whom limited descriptive names cannot apply. This may have been the meaning the Hebrew phrase "ehyeh asher ehyeh" (which translates as "I will be that which I will be") and which is how God describes himself to Moses in Exodus 3:13–15. This phrase can be applied to the tetragrammaton YHWH, which can be understood as an anagram for the three states of being: past, present and future, conjoined with the conjunctive Hebrew letter vav.


title: El Shaddai

text: There is early support for this interpretation, in that the Septuagint translates "Shadday" in several places as "ὁ ἱκανός", the Sufficient One (for example, Ruth 1:20, 21).


title: El Shaddai

text: The name "Shaddai" often appears on the devices such as amulets or dedicatory plaques. More importantly, however, it is associated with the traditional Jewish customs which could be understood as apotropaic: male circumcision, mezuzah and tefillin. The connections of the first one with the name Shaddai are twofold. According to the biblical chronology it is El Shaddai who ordains the custom of circumcision in Genesis 17:1 and, as is apparent in midrash Tanhuma Tzav 14 (cf. a parallel passages in Tazri‘a 5 and Shemini 5) the "brit milah" itself is the inscription of the part of the name on the body:The Holy One, blessed be He, has put His name on them so they would enter the garden of Eden. And what is the name and the seal that He had put on them? It is "Shaddai". [The letter] "shin" He put in the nose, "dalet" – on the hand, whereas "yod" on the {circumcised} [membrum]. Accordingly, {when} He goes to "{His eternal home}" (Ecclesiastes 12:5), there is an angel {appointed} in the garden of Eden who picks up every son of which is circumcised and brings him {there}. And those who are not circumcised? Although there are two letters of the name "Shaddai" present on them, {namely} "shin" from the nose and "dalet" from the hand, the "yod" (…) is {missing}. Therefore it hints at a demon (Heb. "shed"), which brings him down to Gehenna.Analogous is the case with mezuzah – a piece of parchment with two passages from the Book of Deuteronomy, curled up in a small encasement and affixed to a doorframe. At least since the Geonic times, the name "Shaddai" is often written on the back of the parchment containing the "shema‘" and sometimes also on the casing itself. The name is traditionally interpreted as being an acronym of "shomer daltot Yisrael" ("the guardian of the doors of Israel") or "shomer dirot Yisrael" ("the guardian of the dwellings of Israel"). However, this notarikon itself has its source most probably in Zohar Va’ethanan where it explains the meaning of the word Shaddai and connects it to mezuzah.


title: El Shaddai

text: The name "Shadday" can also be found on tefillin – a set of two black leather boxes strapped to head and arm during the prayers. The binding of particular knots of tefillin is supposed to resemble the shape of the letters: the leather strap of the "tefillah shel rosh" is knotted at the back of the head thus forming the letter "dalet" whereas the one that is passed through the "tefillah shel yad" forms a "yod"-shaped knot. In addition to this, the box itself is inscribed with the letter "shin" on two of its sides.


title: El Shaddai

text: The Septuagint (and other early translations) sometimes translate "Shaddai" as "(the) Almighty". It is often translated as "God", "my God", or "Lord". However, in the Greek of the Septuagint translation of Psalm 91:1, "Shaddai" is translated as "the God of heaven".


title: El Shaddai

text: "Almighty" is the translation of "Shaddai" followed by most modern English translations of the Hebrew scriptures, including the popular New International Version and Good News Bible.


title: El Shaddai

text: The translation team behind the New Jerusalem Bible (N.J.B.) however, maintains that the meaning is uncertain, and that translating "El Shaddai" as "Almighty God" is inaccurate. The N.J.B. leaves it untranslated as "Shaddai", and makes footnote suggestions that it should perhaps be understood as "God of the Mountain" from the Akkadian "shadu", or "God of the open wastes" from the Hebrew "sadeh" and the secondary meaning of the Akkadian word.


title: El Shaddai

text: In Book 5, Chapter 2 of the "Right Ginza", part of Mandaean holy scripture of the "Ginza Rabba", El Shaddai is mentioned as "ʿIl-Šidai".


title: El Shaddai

text: God is referred to as "Shaddai" throughout the 1682 Christian allegorical book, "The Holy War" by John Bunyan.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Dysgraphia is a learning disability of written expression, which affects the ability to write, primarily handwriting, but also coherence. It is a specific learning disability (SLD) as well as a transcription disability, meaning that it is a writing disorder associated with impaired handwriting, orthographic coding and finger sequencing (the movement of muscles required to write). It often overlaps with other learning disabilities and neurodevelopmental disorders such as speech impairment, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or developmental coordination disorder (DCD).


title: Dysgraphia

text: In the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" ("DSM-IV"), dysgraphia is characterized as a learning disability in the category of written expression, when one's writing skills are below those expected given a person's age measured through intelligence and age-appropriate education. The DSM is unclear in whether writing refers only to the motor skills involved in writing, or if it also includes orthographic skills and spelling.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Dysgraphia should be distinguished from agraphia (sometimes called acquired dysgraphia), which is an acquired "loss" of the ability to write resulting from brain injury, progressive illness, or a stroke.


title: Dysgraphia

text: The prevalence of dysgraphia throughout the world is not known, due to difficulties in diagnosis and lack of research.


title: Dysgraphia

text: The word "dysgraphia" comes from the Greek words "dys" meaning "impaired" and γραφία "graphía" meaning "writing by hand".


title: Dysgraphia

text: There are at least two stages in the act of writing: the linguistic stage and the motor-expressive-praxic stage. The linguistic stage involves the encoding of auditory and visual information into symbols for letters and written words. This is mediated through the angular gyrus, which provides the linguistic rules which guide writing. The motor stage is where the expression of written words or graphemes is articulated. This stage is mediated by Exner's writing area of the frontal lobe.


title: Dysgraphia

text: The condition can cause individuals to struggle with feedback and anticipating and exercising control over rhythm and timing throughout the writing process.


title: Dysgraphia

text: People with dysgraphia can often write on some level and may experience difficulty with other activities requiring reciprocal movement of their fingers and other fine motor skills, such as; tying shoes, fastening buttons or playing certain musical instruments. However, dysgraphia does not affect all fine motor skills. People with dysgraphia often have unusual difficulty with handwriting and spelling which in turn can cause writing fatigue. Unlike people without transcription disabilities, they tend to fail to preserve the size and shape of the letters they produce if they cannot look at what they are writing. They may lack basic grammar and spelling skills (for example, having difficulties with the letters p, q, b, and d), and often will write the wrong word when trying to formulate their thoughts on paper. The disorder generally emerges when the child is first introduced to writing. There is accumulating evidence that in many cases individuals with SLDs and DCD do not outgrow their disorders. Accordingly, it has been found that adults, teenagers, and children alike are all subject to dysgraphia. Studies have shown that higher education students with developmental dysgraphia still experience significant difficulty with hand writing, fine motor skills and motor-related daily functions when compared to their peers without neurodevelopmental disorders.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Dysgraphia is nearly always accompanied by other learning disabilities and/or neurodevelopmental disorders such as dyslexia, attention deficit disorder or oral and written language learning disability "(OWL LD)" and this can impact the type of dysgraphia a person has. Tourette syndrome, ASD and dyspraxia are also common diagnoses among dysgraphic individuals. Developmental dysgraphia was originally described as being a disorder that occurs solely in dyslexic individuals. Dysgraphia was not studied as a separate entity until mid-20th century when researchers discovered there were different types that occur without dyslexia. Dyslexics and dysgraphics experience similar synchronization difficulties and issues with spelling. However, dyslexia does not seem to impair physical writing ability or dramatically impact fine motor skills and dysgraphia does not impact reading comprehension. Methods for evaluating, managing and remedying dysgraphia are still evolving, but there are three principal subtypes of dysgraphia that are recognized. There is little information available about different types of dysgraphia and there are likely more subtypes than the ones listed below. Some people may have a combination of two or more of these, and individual symptoms may vary in presentation from what is described here. Most common presentation is a motor agraphia resulting from damage to some part of the motor cortex in the parietal lobes.


title: Dysgraphia

text: There are several features that distinguish dyslexic-dysgraphia (sometimes called "linguistic dysgraphia") from the other types. People with dyslexic-dysgraphia typically have poor oral and written spelling that is typically phonemic in nature. Their spontaneously written work is often illegible, has extra or deleted syllables or letters, and contains unnecessary capitalization or large spaces in the middle of words which can make each individual word unrecognizable. They may also insert symbols that do not resemble any letter of the alphabet. Writing production generally requires long periods of contemplation and correction.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Dyslexic-dysgraphic individuals have fairly good copied work, and their ability to draw is also preserved. Their finger tapping speed (a method for identifying fine motor problems) is normal, indicating that the deficit does not likely stem from cerebellar damage. Impaired verbal executive functioning has also been related to this form of the disorder.


title: Dysgraphia

text: One study found that boys with ADHD and dysgraphia struggle primarily with motor planning rather than have a linguistic impairment but the prevalence of linguistic/dyslexic-dysgraphia compared to other subtypes is uncertain.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Motor dysgraphia (sometimes called "peripheral dysgraphia") is due to deficient fine motor skills, poor dexterity, poor muscle tone or unspecified motor clumsiness. Motor dysgraphia impairs both motor patterns and motor memory. Letter formation may be acceptable in very short samples of writing, but this requires extreme effort and an unreasonable amount of time to accomplish, and it cannot be sustained for a significant length of time, as it can cause arthritis-like tensing of the hand. Overall, their written work is poor to illegible even if copied by sight from another document, and drawing is impaired. Oral spelling for these individuals is normal, and their finger tapping speed is below normal. This shows that there are problems within the fine motor skills of these individuals. People with developmental coordination disorder may be dysgraphic and motor-dysgraphia may serve as a marker of dyspraxia. Motor-dysgraphics struggle with proper finger grip and writing is often slanted due to holding a pen or pencil incorrectly. Average writing speed is slower than that of non-dysgrapic individuals, but this seems to improve with age. Motor skill deficits appears to be a common cause of dysgraphia; 78% of children with the disorder present kinematic difficulties, while 58% of them display issues with pressure skills.


title: Dysgraphia

text: A person with spatial dysgraphia has a defect in the understanding of space. This impaired spatial perception causes illegible spontaneously written work, illegible copied work, abnormal spacing between letters and majorly impaired drawing abilities. They have normal oral spelling and normal finger tapping speed, suggesting that this subtype is not fine motor based. Symptoms in actuality may vary in presentation from what is listed here. Spatial dysgraphia may develop in individuals with lesions on the right hemisphere of the brain.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Other subtypes and informal classification systems have been proposed by researchers; this includes but is not limited to phonological dysgraphia, deep dysgraphia and surface dysgraphia.


title: Dysgraphia

text: The symptoms to dysgraphia are often overlooked or attributed to the student being lazy, unmotivated, careless or anxious. The condition may also be dismissed as simply being an expression of attention deficiency or having delayed visual-motor processing. In order to be diagnosed with dysgraphia, one must have a cluster, but not necessarily all, of the following symptoms:


title: Dysgraphia

text: The symptoms of dysgraphia can change as one ages. Dysgraphia may cause students emotional trauma often due to the fact that no one can read their writing, and they are aware that they are not performing to the same level as their peers. Emotional problems that may occur alongside dysgraphia include impaired self-esteem, lowered self-efficacy, reduced motivation, poorer social functioning, heightened anxiety, and depression. They may put in extra efforts in order to have the same achievements as their peers, but often get frustrated because they feel that their hard work does not pay off. Dysgraphia is a hard disorder to detect as it does not affect specific ages, gender, or intelligence. The main concern in trying to detect dysgraphia is that people hide their disability behind their verbal fluency/comprehension and strong syntax coding because they are ashamed that they cannot achieve the same goals as their peers. Having dysgraphia is not related to a lack of cognitive ability, and it is not uncommon in intellectually gifted individuals, but due to dysgraphia their intellectual abilities are often not identified.


title: Dysgraphia

text: There are some common problems not related to dysgraphia but often associated with dysgraphia, the most common of which is stress. Developing an aversion to writing is another common issue. Often children "(and adults)" with dysgraphia will become extremely frustrated with the task of writing specially on plain paper (and spelling); younger children may cry, pout, or refuse to complete written assignments. This frustration can cause the student a great deal of stress and can lead to stress-related illnesses. This can be a result of any symptom of dysgraphia.


title: Dysgraphia

text: The underlying causes of the disorder are not fully understood But dysgraphia is as well known to be a biologically based disorder with genetic and brain bases. More specifically, it is a working memory problem caused by specific neurodevelopmental dysfunction. In dysgraphia, individuals fail to develop normal connections among different brain regions needed for writing. People with dysgraphia have difficulty in automatically remembering and mastering the sequence of motor movements required to write letters or numbers. Dysgraphia is also in part due to underlying problems in orthographic coding, the orthographic loop, and graphmotor output (the movements that result in writing) by one's hands, fingers and executive functions involved in letter writing. The orthographic loop is when written words are stored in the mind's eye, connected through sequential finger movement for motor output through the hand with feedback from the eye.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Family history of specific learning disabilities may play a role. Children with developmental dysphasia, developmental dysgraphia and developmental dyslexia may be more likely to have family members with one of these conditions. Genetic studies suggest that verbal executive function tasks, orthographic skills, and spelling ability may have a genetic basis. Genes on chromosomes 6 and 15 may play some role with SLDs as they have linked to poorer reading, poorer spelling and lower phonemic awareness.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Unlike specific learning disabilities and neurodevelopmental disorders that have been more extensively studied, there is no gold standard for diagnosing dysgraphia. This is likely due to writing systems often differing substantially between countries and languages and there being considerable heterogeneity among the therapists who are charged with diagnosing dysgraphia. Consequently, there are several tests that are used to diagnose dysgraphia like Ajuriaguerra scale, BHK for children or teenagers, the Minnesota Handwriting Assessment, ETCH, SCRIPT, DASH and HHE scale.


title: Dysgraphia

text: With devices like drawing tablets, it is now possible to measure the position, tilt, and pressure in real time. From these features, it is possible to compute automatic features like speed and shaking and train a classifier to diagnose automatically children with atypical writing. The features extracted have different importances in the classification through development and allow to characterize different subtypes of dysgraphia that could have different origins, outcomes and could require different remediation strategies.


title: Dysgraphia

text: It is not uncommon for dysgraphic individuals to be intellectually gifted, possess a rich vocabulary and have strong comprehension of language when speaking or reading, though their disorder is often not detected or treated; which may also be in part to developmental dyslexia receiving far more academic and medical attention than developmental dysgraphia. In addition, gifted children with transcription disabilities seldom receive programming for their intellectual talents due to their difficulties in completing written assignments.


title: Dysgraphia

text: Treatment for dysgraphia varies and may include treatment for motor disorders to help control writing movements. Helping dysgraphic students overcome writing avoidance and accept the purpose and necessity of writing may be needed. The use of occupational therapy can be effective in the school setting, and teachers should be well informed about dysgraphia to aid in carry-over of the occupational therapist's interventions. Treatments may address impaired memory or other neurological problems. Some physicians recommend that individuals with dysgraphia use computers to avoid the problems of handwriting. Dysgraphia can sometimes be partially overcome with appropriate and conscious effort and training. The International Dyslexia Association suggests the use of kinesthetic memory through early training by having the child overlearn how to write letters and to later practice writing with their eyes closed or averted to reinforce the feel of the letters being written. They also suggest teaching the students cursive writing as it has fewer reversible letters and can help lessen spacing problems, at least within words, because cursive letters are generally attached within a word.


title: Dysgraphia

text: It has been estimated that up to 10% of children in the world are affected by disabilities like dysgraphia, dyslexia, dyscalculia and dyspraxia. Estimates on the true prevalence of dysgraphia are not available due to lack of research on the disorder.


title: Dysgraphia

text: There is no special education category for students with dysgraphia; in the United States, The National Center for Learning Disabilities suggests that children with dysgraphia be handled in a case-by-case manner with an Individualized Education Program, or provided individual accommodation to provide alternative ways of submitting work and modify tasks to avoid the area of weakness. Students with dysgraphia often cannot complete written assignments that are legible, appropriate in length and content, or within given time. It is suggested that students with dysgraphia receive specialized instructions that are appropriate for them. Children will mostly benefit from explicit and comprehensive instructions, help translating across multiple levels of language, and review and revision of assignments or writing methods. Direct, explicit instruction on letter formation and guided practice will help students achieve automatic handwriting performance before they use letters to write words, phrases, and sentences. Some older children may benefit from the use of a personal computer or a laptop in class so that they do not have to deal with the frustration of falling behind their peers.


title: Dysgraphia

text: It is also suggested by Berninger that teachers with dysgraphic students decide if their focus will be on manuscript writing (printing) or keyboarding. In either case, it is beneficial that students are taught how to read cursive writing as it is used daily in classrooms by some teachers. It may also be beneficial for the teacher to come up with other methods of assessing a child's knowledge other than written tests; an example would be oral testing. This causes less frustration for the child as they are able to get their knowledge across to the teacher without worrying about how to write their thoughts. Dysgraphic students may benefit from special accommodation by their teachers when being required to write. Accommodations that may be helpful include but are not limited to; offering larger pencils or pencils with special grips, supplying paper with raised lines to provide tactile feedback, allowing extra time for classwork assignments, scaling down large written assignments and breaking down long written assignments into multiple shorter assignments.


title: Dysgraphia

text: The number of students with dysgraphia may increase from 4 percent of students in primary grades, due to the overall difficulty of handwriting, and up to 20 percent in middle school because written compositions become more complex. With this in mind, there are no exact numbers of how many individuals have dysgraphia due to its difficulty to diagnose and exact prevalence depends on the definition of dysgraphia. There are slight gender differences in association with written disabilities; overall it is found that males are more likely to be impaired with handwriting, composing, spelling, and orthographic abilities than females.


title: Dysgraphia

text: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5) does not use the term dysgraphia but uses the phrase "an impairment in written expression" under the category of "specific learning disorder". This is the term used by most doctors and psychologists. To qualify for special education services, a child must have an issue named or described in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). While IDEA does not use the term "dysgraphia", it describes it under the category of "specific learning disability". This includes issues with understanding or using language (spoken or written) that make it difficult to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or to do mathematical calculations.


title: Pteranodon

text: Pteranodon (); from Ancient Greek ("pteron", "wing") and ("anodon", "toothless") is a genus of pterosaur that included some of the largest known flying reptiles, with "P. longiceps" having a wingspan of . They lived during the late Cretaceous geological period of North America in present-day Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota and Alabama. More fossil specimens of "Pteranodon" have been found than any other pterosaur, with about 1,200 specimens known to science, many of them well preserved with nearly complete skulls and articulated skeletons. It was an important part of the animal community in the Western Interior Seaway.


title: Pteranodon

text: "Pteranodon" was not a dinosaur. By definition, all dinosaurs belong to the group Dinosauria; "Pteranodon" belongs to the group Pterosauria. Nonetheless, "Pteranodon" is the most famous pterosaur, frequently featured in dinosaur media and strongly associated with dinosaurs by the general public. While not dinosaurs, pterosaurs such as "Pteranodon" form a clade closely related to dinosaurs as both fall within the clade Avemetatarsalia.


title: Pteranodon

text: "Pteranodon" was the first pterosaur found outside of Europe. Its fossils first were found by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1871, in the Late Cretaceous Smoky Hill Chalk deposits of western Kansas. These chalk beds were deposited at the bottom of what was once the Western Interior Seaway, a large shallow sea over what now is the midsection of the North American continent. These first specimens, YPM 1160 and YPM 1161, consisted of partial wing bones, as well as a tooth from the prehistoric fish "Xiphactinus", which Marsh mistakenly believed to belong to this new pterosaur (all known pterosaurs up to that point had teeth). In 1871, Marsh named the find


title: Pteranodon

text: "Pterodactylus oweni", assigning it to the well-known (but much smaller) European genus "Pterodactylus". Marsh also collected more wing bones of the large pterosaur in 1871. Realizing that the name he had chosen had already been used for Harry Seeley's European pterosaur species "Pterodactylus oweni" in 1864, Marsh renamed his giant North American pterosaur Pterodactylus occidentalis, meaning "Western wing finger," in his 1872 description of the new specimen. He named two additional species, based on size differences: Pterodactylus ingens (the largest specimen so far), and Pterodactylus velox (the smallest).


title: Pteranodon

text: Meanwhile, Marsh's rival Edward Drinker Cope had unearthed several specimens of the large North American pterosaur. Based on these specimens, Cope named two new species, Ornithochirus umbrosus and Ornithochirus harpyia, in an attempt to assign them to the large European genus "Ornithocheirus", though he misspelled the name (forgetting the 'e'). Cope's paper naming his species was published in 1872, just five days after Marsh's paper. This resulted in a dispute, fought in the published literature, over whose names had priority in what obviously were the same species. Cope conceded in 1875 that Marsh's names did have priority over his, but maintained that "Pterodactylus umbrosus" was a distinct species (but not genus) from any that Marsh had named previously. Re-evaluation by later scientists has supported Marsh's case, refuting Cope's assertion that "P. umbrosus" represented a larger, distinct species.


title: Pteranodon

text: While the first "Pteranodon" wing bones were collected by Marsh and Cope in the early 1870s, the first "Pteranodon" skull was found on May 2, 1876, along the Smoky Hill River in Wallace County (now Logan County), Kansas, USA, by Samuel Wendell Williston, a fossil collector working for Marsh. A second, smaller skull soon was discovered as well. These skulls showed that the North American pterosaurs were different from any European species, in that they lacked teeth and had bony crests on their skulls. Marsh recognized this major difference, describing the specimens as "distinguished from all previously known genera of the order Pterosauria by the entire absence of teeth." Marsh recognized that this characteristic warranted a new genus, and he coined the name "Pteranodon" ("wing without tooth") in 1876. Marsh reclassified all the previously named North American species from "Pterodactylus" to "Pteranodon". He considered the smaller skull to belong to "Pteranodon occidentalis", based on its size. Marsh classified the larger skull, YPM 1117, in the new species "Pteranodon longiceps", which he thought to be a medium-sized species in between the small "P. occidentalis" and the large "P. ingens". Marsh also named several additional species: Pteranodon comptus and "Pteranodon nanus" were named for fragmentary skeletons of small individuals, while "Pteranodon gracilis" was based on a wing bone that he mistook for a pelvic bone. He soon realized his mistake, and re-classified that specimen again into a separate genus, which he named "Nyctosaurus". "P. nanus" was also later recognized as a "Nyctosaurus" specimen.


title: Pteranodon

text: In 1892, Samuel Williston examined the question of "Pteranodon" classification. He noticed that, in 1871, Seeley had mentioned the existence of a partial set of toothless pterosaur jaws from the Cambridge Greensand of England, which he named "Ornithostoma". Because the primary characteristic Marsh had used to separate "Pteranodon" from other pterosaurs was its lack of teeth, Williston concluded that "Ornithostoma" must be considered the senior synonym of "Pteranodon". However, in 1901, Pleininger pointed out that "Ornithostoma" had never been scientifically described or even assigned a species name until Williston's work, and therefore had been a "nomen nudum" and could not beat out "Pteranodon" for naming priority. Williston accepted this conclusion and went back to calling the genus "Pteranodon". However, both Williston and Pleininger were incorrect, because unnoticed by both of them was the fact that, in 1891, Seeley himself had finally described and properly named "Ornithostoma", assigning it to the species "O. sedgwicki". In the 2010s, more research on the identity of "Ornithostoma" showed that it was probably not "Pteranodon" or even a close relative, but may in fact have been an azhdarchoid, a different type of toothless pterosaur.


title: Pteranodon

text: Williston was also the first scientist to critically evaluate all of the pteranodon species classified by Cope and Marsh. He agreed with most of Marsh's classification, with a few exceptions. First, he did not believe that "P. ingens" and "P. umbrosus" could be considered synonyms, which even Cope had come to believe. He considered both "P. velox" and "P. longiceps" to be dubious; the first was based on non-diagnostic fragments, and the second, though known from a complete skull, probably belonged to one of the other, previously-named species. In 1903, Williston revisited the question of "Pteranodon" classification, and revised his earlier conclusion that there were seven species down to just three. He considered both "P. comptus" and "P. nanus" to be specimens of "Nyctosaurus", and divided the others into small ("P. velox"), medium ("P. occidentalis"), and large species ("P. ingens"), based primarily on the shape of their upper arm bones. He thought "P. longiceps", the only one known from a skull, could be a synonym of either "P. velox" or "P. occidentalis", based on its size.


title: Pteranodon

text: In 1910, Eaton became the first scientist to publish a more detailed description of the entire "Pteranodon" skeleton, as it was known at the time. He used his findings to revise the classification of the genus once again based on a better understanding of the differences in pteranodont anatomy. Eaton conducted experiments using clay models of bones to help determine the effects of crushing and flattening on the shapes of the arm bones Williston had used in his own classification. Eaton found that most of the differences in bone shapes could be easily explained by the pressures of fossilization, and concluded that no "Pteranodon" skeletons had any significant differences from each other besides their size. Therefore, Eaton was left to decide his classification scheme based on differences in the skulls alone, which he assigned to species just as Marsh did, by their size. In the end, Eaton recognized only three valid species: "P. occidentalis", "P. ingens", and "P. longiceps".


title: Pteranodon

text: The discovery of specimens with upright crests, classified by Harksen in 1966 as the new species "Pteranodon sternbergi", complicated the situation even further, prompting another revision of the genus by Miller in 1972. Because it was impossible to determine crest shape for all of the species based on headless skeletons, Miller concluded that all "Pteranodon" species except the two based on skulls ("P. longiceps" and "P. sternbergi") must be considered "nomena dubia" and abandoned. The skull Eaton thought belonged to "P. ingens" was placed in the new species Pteranodon marshi, and the skull Eaton assigned to "P. occidentalis" was re-named Pteranodon eatoni. Miller also recognized another species based on a skull with a crest similar to that of "P. sternbergi"; Miller named this Pteranodon walkeri. To help bring order to this tangle of names, Miller created three categories or "subgenera" for them. "P. marshi" and "P. longiceps" were placed in the subgenus "Longicepia", though this was later changed to simply "Pteranodon" due to the rules of priority. "P. sternbergi" and "P. walkeri", the upright-crested species, were given the subgenus "Sternbergia", which was later changed to "Geosternbergia" because "Sternbergia" was already in use ("preoccupied"). Finally, Miller named the subgenus "Occidentalia" for "P. eatoni", the skull formerly associated with "P. occidentalis". Miller further expanded the concept of "Pteranodon" to include "Nyctosaurus" as a fourth subgenus. Miller considered these to be an evolutionary progression, with the primitive "Nyctosaurus", at the time thought to be crestless, giving rise to "Occidentalia" (with a small crest), which in turn gave rise to "Pteranodon" with its long backwards crest, finally leading to "Geosternbergia" with its large, upright crest. However, Miller made several mistakes in his study concerning which specimens Marsh had assigned to which species, and most scientists disregarded his work on the subject in their later research, though Wellnhofer (1978) followed Miller's species list. and Schoch (1984) somewhat oddly published another revision that essentially returned to Marsh's original classification scheme, most notably sinking "P. longiceps" as a synonym of "P. ingens".


title: Pteranodon

text: During the early 1990s, S. Christopher Bennett also published several major papers reviewing the anatomy, taxonomy and life history of "Pteranodon".


title: Pteranodon

text: "Pteranodon" species are extremely well represented in the fossil record, allowing for detailed descriptions of their anatomy and analysis of their life history. Over 1,000 specimens have been identified, though less than half are complete enough to give researchers good anatomical information. Still, this is more fossils material than is known for any other pterosaur, and it includes both male and female specimens of various age groups and possibly species.


title: Pteranodon

text: Adult "Pteranodon" specimens from the two major species can be divided into two distinct size classes. The smaller class of specimens have small, rounded head crests and very wide pelvic canals, even wider than those of the much larger size class. The size of the pelvic canal probably allowed the laying of eggs, indicating that these smaller adults are females. The larger size class, representing male individuals, have narrow hips and very large crests, which were probably for display.


title: Pteranodon

text: Adult male "Pteranodon" were among the largest pterosaurs, and were the largest flying animals known until the late 20th century, when the giant azhdarchid pterosaurs were discovered. The wingspan of an average adult male "Pteranodon" was . Adult females were much smaller, averaging in wingspan. The largest specimen of "Pteranodon longiceps" from the Niobrara Formation had a wingspan of , body length of and body mass of . While most specimens are found crushed, enough fossils exist to put together a detailed description of the animal.


title: Pteranodon

text: Methods used to estimate the mass of large male "Pteranodon" specimens (those with wingspans of about 7 meters) have been notoriously unreliable, producing a wide range of estimates. In a review of pterosaur size estimates published in 2010, researchers Mark Witton and Mike Habib argued that the largest estimate of 93 kg is much too high and an upper limit of 20 to 35 kg is more realistic. Witton and Habib considered the methods used by researchers who obtained smaller mass estimates equally flawed. Most have been produced by scaling modern animals such as bats and birds up to "Pteranodon" size, despite the fact that pterosaurs have vastly different body proportions and soft tissue anatomy from any living animal.


title: Pteranodon

text: Other distinguishing characteristics that set "Pteranodon" apart from other pterosaurs include narrow neural spines on the vertebrae, plate-like bony ligaments strengthening the vertebrae above the hip, and a relatively short tail in which the last few vertebrae are fused into a long rod. The entire length of the tail was about 3.5% as long as the wingspan, or up to in the largest males.


title: Pteranodon

text: Unlike earlier pterosaurs, such as "Rhamphorhynchus" and "Pterodactylus", "Pteranodon" had toothless beaks, similar to those of birds. "Pteranodon" beaks were made of solid, bony margins that projected from the base of the jaws. The beaks were long, slender, and ended in thin, sharp points. The upper jaw, which was longer than the lower jaw, was curved upward; while this normally has been attributed only to the upward-curving beak, one specimen (UALVP 24238) has a curvature corresponding with the beak widening towards the tip. While the tip of the beak is not known in this specimen, the level of curvature suggests it would have been extremely long. The unique form of the beak in this specimen led Alexander Kellner to assign it to a distinct genus, "Dawndraco", in 2010.


title: Pteranodon

text: The most distinctive characteristic of "Pteranodon" is its cranial crest. These crests consisted of skull bones (frontals) projecting upward and backward from the skull. The size and shape of these crests varied due to a number of factors, including age, sex, and species. Male "Pteranodon sternbergi", the older species of the two described to date (and sometimes placed in the distinct genus "Geosternbergia"), had a more vertical crest with a broad forward projection, while their descendants, "Pteranodon longiceps", evolved a narrower, more backward-projecting crest. Females of both species were smaller and bore small, rounded crests. The crests were probably mainly display structures, though they may have had other functions as well.


title: Pteranodon

text: The wing shape of "Pteranodon" suggests that it would have flown rather like a modern-day albatross. This is based on the fact that "Pteranodon" had a high aspect ratio (wingspan to chord length) similar to that of the albatross — 9:1 for "Pteranodon", compared to 8:1 for an albatross. Albatrosses spend long stretches of time at sea fishing, and use a flight pattern called "dynamic soaring" which exploits the vertical gradient of wind speed near the ocean surface to travel long distances without flapping, and without the aid of thermals (which do not occur over the open ocean the same way they do over land). While most of a "Pteranodon" flight would have depended on soaring, like long-winged seabirds, it probably required an occasional active, rapid burst of flapping, and studies of "Pteranodon" wing loading (the strength of the wings vs. the weight of the body) indicate that they were capable of substantial flapping flight, contrary to some earlier suggestions that they were so big they could only glide. However, a more recent study suggests that it relied on thermal soaring, unlike modern seabirds but much like modern continental flyers and the extinct "Pelagornis".


title: Pteranodon

text: Like other pterosaurs, "Pteranodon" probably took off from a standing, quadrupedal position. Using their long forelimbs for leverage, they would have vaulted themselves into the air in a rapid leap. Almost all of the energy would have been generated by the forelimbs. The upstroke of the wings would have occurred when the animal cleared the ground followed by a rapid down-stroke to generate additional lift and complete the launch into the air.


title: Pteranodon

text: Historically, the terrestrial locomotion of "Pteranodon", especially whether it was bipedal or quadrupedal, has been the subject of debate. Today, most pterosaur researchers agree that pterosaurs were quadrupedal, thanks largely to the discovery of pterosaur trackways.


title: Pteranodon

text: The possibility of aquatic locomotion via swimming has been discussed briefly in several papers (Bennett 2001, 1994, and Bramwell & Whitfield 1974).


title: Pteranodon

text: The diet of "Pteranodon" is known to have included fish; fossilized fish bones have been found in the stomach area of one "Pteranodon", and a fossilized fish bolus has been found between the jaws of another "Pteranodon", specimen AMNH 5098. Numerous other specimens also preserve fragments of fish scales and vertebrae near the torso, indicating that fish made up a majority of the diet of "Pteranodon" (though they may also have taken invertebrates).


title: Pteranodon

text: Traditionally, most researchers have suggested that "Pteranodon" would have taken fish by dipping their beaks into the water while in low, soaring flight. However, this was probably based on the assumption that the animals could not take off from the water surface. It is more likely that "Pteranodon" could take off from the water, and would have dipped for fish while swimming rather than while flying. Even a small, female "Pteranodon" could have reached a depth of at least with its long bill and neck while floating on the surface, and they may have reached even greater depths by plunge-diving into the water from the air like some modern long-winged seabirds. In 1994, Bennett noted that the head, neck, and shoulders of "Pteranodon" were as heavily built as diving birds, and suggested that they could dive by folding back their wings like the modern gannet.


title: Pteranodon

text: "Pteranodon" was notable for its skull crest, though the function of this crest has been a subject of debate. Most explanations have focused on the blade-like, backward pointed crest of male "P. longiceps", however, and ignored the wide range of variation across age and sex. The fact that the crests vary so much rules out most practical functions other than for use in mating displays. Therefore, display was probably the main function of the crest, and any other functions were secondary.


title: Pteranodon

text: Scientific interpretations of the crest's function began in 1910, when George Francis Eaton proposed two possibilities: an aerodynamic counterbalance and a muscle attachment point. He suggested that the crest might have anchored large, long jaw muscles, but admitted that this function alone could not explain the large size of some crests. Bennett (1992) agreed with Eaton's own assessment that the crest was too large and variable to have been a muscle attachment site. Eaton had suggested that a secondary function of the crest might have been as a counterbalance against the long beak, reducing the need for heavy neck muscles to control the orientation of the head. Wind tunnel tests showed that the crest did function as an effective counterbalance to a degree, but Bennett noted that, again, the hypothesis focuses only on the long crests of male "P. longiceps", not on the larger crests of "P. sternbergi" and very small crests that existed among the females. Bennett found that the crests of females had no counterbalancing effect, and that the crests of male "P. sternbergi" would, by themselves, have a negative effect on the balance of the head. In fact, side to side movement of the crests would have required more, not less, neck musculature to control balance.


title: Pteranodon

text: In 1943, Dominik von Kripp suggested that the crest may have served as a rudder, an idea embraced by several later researchers. One researcher, Ross S. Stein, even suggested that the crest may have supported a membrane of skin connecting the backward-pointing crest to the neck and back, increasing its surface area and effectiveness as a rudder. The rudder hypothesis, again, does not take into account females nor "P. sternbergi", which had an upward-pointing, not backward-pointing crest. Bennett also found that, even in its capacity as a rudder, the crest would not provide nearly so much directional force as simply maneuvering the wings. The suggestion that the crest was an air brake, and that the animals would turn their heads to the side in order to slow down, suffers from a similar problem. Additionally, the rudder and air brake hypotheses do not explain why such large variation exists in crest size even among adults.


title: Pteranodon

text: Alexander Kellner suggested that the large crests of the pterosaur "Tapejara", as well as other species, might be used for heat exchange, allowing these pterosaurs to absorb or shed heat and regulate body temperature, which also would account for the correlation between crest size and body size. There is no evidence of extra blood vessels in the crest for this purpose, however, and the large, membranous wings filled with blood vessels would have served that purpose much more effectively.


title: Pteranodon

text: With these hypotheses ruled out, the best-supported hypothesis for crest function seems to be as a sexual display. This is consistent with the size variation seen in fossil specimens, where females and juveniles have small crests and males large, elaborate, variable crests.


title: Pteranodon

text: Adult "Pteranodon" specimens may be divided into two distinct size classes, small and large, with the large size class being about one and a half times larger than the small class, and the small class being twice as common as the large class. Both size classes lived alongside each other, and while researchers had previously suggested that they represent different species, Christopher Bennett showed that the differences between them are consistent with the concept that they represent females and males, and that "Pteranodon" species were sexually dimorphic. Skulls from the larger size class preserve large, upward and backward pointing crests, while the crests of the smaller size class are small and triangular. Some larger skulls also show evidence of a second crest that extended long and low, toward the tip of the beak, which is not seen in smaller specimens.


title: Pteranodon

text: The sex of the different size classes was determined, not from the skulls, but from the pelvic bones. Contrary to what may be expected, the smaller size class had disproportionately large and wide-set pelvic bones. Bennett interpreted this as indicating a more spacious birth canal, through which eggs would pass. He concluded that the small size class with small, triangular crests represent females, and the larger, large-crested specimens represent males.


title: Pteranodon

text: Note that the overall size and crest size also corresponds to age. Immature specimens are known from both females and males, and immature males often have small crests similar to adult females. Therefore, it seems that the large crests only developed in males when they reached their large, adult size, making the sex of immature specimens difficult to establish from partial remains.


title: Pteranodon

text: The fact that females appear to have outnumbered males two to one suggests that, as with modern animals with size-related sexual dimorphism, such as sea lions and other pinnipeds, "Pteranodon" might have been polygynous, with a few males competing for association with groups consisting of large numbers of females. Similar to modern pinnipeds, "Pteranodon" may have competed to establish territory on rocky, offshore rookeries, with the largest, and largest-crested, males gaining the most territory and having more success mating with females. The crests of male "Pteranodon" would not have been used in competition, but rather as "visual dominance-rank symbols", with display rituals taking the place of physical competition with other males. If this hypothesis is correct, it also is likely that male "Pteranodon" played little to no part in rearing the young; such a behavior is not found in the males of modern polygynous animals who father many offspring at the same time.


title: Pteranodon

text: Specimens assigned to "Pteranodon" have been found in both the Smoky Hill Chalk deposits of the Niobrara Formation, and the slightly younger Sharon Springs deposits of the Pierre Shale Formation. When "Pteranodon" was alive, this area was covered by a large inland sea, known as the Western Interior Seaway. Famous for fossils collected since 1870, these formations extend from as far south as Kansas in the United States to Manitoba in Canada. However, "Pteranodon" specimens (or any pterosaur specimens) have only been found in the southern half of the formation, in Kansas, Wyoming, and South Dakota. Despite the fact that numerous fossils have been found in the contemporary parts of the formation in Canada, no pterosaur specimens have ever been found there. This strongly suggests that the natural geographic range of "Pteranodon" covered only the southern part of the Niobrara, and that its habitat did not extend farther north than South Dakota.


title: Pteranodon

text: Some very fragmentary fossils belonging to pteranodontian pterosaurs, and possibly "Pteranodon" itself, have also been found on the Gulf Coast and East Coast of the United States. For example, some bone fragments from the Mooreville Formation of Alabama and the Merchantville Formation of Delaware may have come from "Pteranodon", though they are too incomplete to make a definite identification. Some remains from Japan have also been tentatively attributed to "Pteranodon", but their distance from its known Western Interior Seaway habitat makes this identification unlikely.


title: Pteranodon

text: "Pteranodon longiceps" would have shared the sky with the giant-crested pterosaur "Nyctosaurus". Compared to "P. longiceps", which was a very common species, "Nyctosaurus" was rare, making up only 3% of pterosaur fossils from the formation. Also less common was the early toothed bird, "Ichthyornis".


title: Pteranodon

text: It is likely that, as in other polygynous animals (in which males compete for association with harems of females), "Pteranodon" lived primarily on offshore rookeries, where they could nest away from land-based predators and feed far from shore; most "Pteranodon" fossils are found in locations which at the time, were hundreds of kilometres from the coastline.


title: Pteranodon

text: Below the surface, the sea was populated primarily by invertebrates such as ammonites and squid. Vertebrate life, apart from basal fish, included sea turtles, such as "Toxochelys", the plesiosaur "Styxosaurus", and the flightless diving bird "Parahesperornis". Mosasaurs were the most common marine reptiles, with genera including "Clidastes" and "Tylosaurus". At least some of these marine reptiles are known to have fed on "Pteranodon". Barnum Brown, in 1904, reported plesiosaur stomach contents containing "pterodactyl" bones, most likely from "Pteranodon".


title: Pteranodon

text: Fossils from terrestrial dinosaurs also have been found in the Niobrara Chalk, suggesting that animals who died on shore must have been washed out to sea (one specimen of a hadrosaur appears to have been scavenged by a shark).


title: Pteranodon

text: "Pteranodon" fossils are known primarily from the Niobrara Formation of the central United States. Broadly defined, "Pteranodon" existed for more than four million years, during the late Coniacian to late Maastrichtian stages of the Cretaceous period. The genus is present in most layers of the Niobrara Formation except for the upper two; in 2003, Kenneth Carpenter surveyed the distribution and dating of fossils in this formation, demonstrating that "Pteranodon sternbergi" existed there from 88 to 85 million years ago, while "P. longiceps" existed between 86 and 84.5 million years ago. A possible third species, which Kellner named "Geosternbergia maysei" in 2010, is known from the Sharon Springs member of the Pierre Shale Formation in Kansas, Wyoming, and South Dakota, dating to between 81.5 and 80.5 million years ago.


title: Pteranodon

text: In the early 1990s, Bennett noted that the two major morphs of pteranodont present in the Niobrara Formation were precisely separated in time with little, if any, overlap. Due to this, and to their gross overall similarity, he suggested that they probably represent "chronospecies" within a single evolutionary lineage lasting about 4 million years. In other words, only one species of "Pteranodon" would have been present at any one time, and "P. sternbergi" (or "Geosternbergia") in all likelihood was the direct ancestor species of "P. longiceps".


title: Pteranodon

text: Many researchers consider there to be at least two species of "Pteranodon". However, aside from the differences between males and females described above, the post-cranial skeletons of "Pteranodon" show little to no variation between species or specimens, and the bodies and wings of all pteranodonts were essentially identical.


title: Pteranodon

text: Two species of "Pteranodon" are traditionally recognized as valid: "Pteranodon longiceps", the type species, and "Pteranodon sternbergi". The species differ only in the shape of the crest in adult males (described above), and possibly in the angle of certain skull bones. Because well-preserved "Pteranodon" skull fossils are extremely rare, researchers use stratigraphy (i.e. which rock layer of the geologic formation a fossil is found in) to determine species identity in most cases.


title: Pteranodon

text: "Pteranodon sternbergi" is the only known species of "Pteranodon" with an upright crest. The lower jaw of "P. sternbergi" was long. It was collected by George F. Sternberg in 1952 and described by John Christian Harksen in 1966, from the lower portion of the Niobrara Formation. It was older than "P. longiceps" and is considered by Bennett to be the direct ancestor of the later species.


title: Pteranodon

text: Because fossils identifiable as "P. sternbergi" are found exclusively in the lower layers of the Niobrara Formation, and "P. longiceps" fossils exclusively in the upper layers, a fossil lacking the skull can be identified based on its position in the geologic column (though for many early fossil finds, precise data about its location was not recorded, rendering many fossils unidentifiable).


title: Pteranodon

text: Below is a cladogram showing the phylogenetic placement of this genus within Pteranodontia from Andres and Myers (2013).


title: Pteranodon

text: Due to the subtle variations between specimens of pteranodontid from the Niobrara Formation, most researchers have assigned all of them to the single genus "Pteranodon", in at least two species ("P. longiceps" and "P. sternbergi") distinguished mainly by the shape of the crest. However, the classification of these two forms has varied from researcher to researcher. In 1972, Halsey Wilkinson Miller published a paper arguing that the various forms of "Pteranodon" were different enough to be placed in distinct subgenera. He named these "Pteranodon (Occidentalia) occidentalis" (for the now-disused species "P. occidentalis") and "Pteranodon (Sternbergia) sternbergi". However, the name "Sternbergia" was preoccupied, and in 1978 Miller re-named the species "Pteranodon (Geosternbergia) sternbergi", and named a third subgenus/species combination for "P. longiceps", as "Pteranodon (Longicepia) longiceps". Most prominent pterosaur researchers of the late 20th century however, including S. Christopher Bennett and Peter Wellnhofer, did not adopt these subgeneric names, and continued to place all pteranodont species into the single genus "Pteranodon".


title: Pteranodon

text: In 2010, pterosaur researcher Alexander Kellner revisited H.W. Miller's classification. Kellner followed Miller's opinion that the differences between the "Pteranodon" species were great enough to place them into different genera. He placed "P. sternbergi" into the genus named by Miller, "Geosternbergia", along with the Pierre Shale skull specimen which Bennett had previously considered to be a large male "P. longiceps". Kellner argued that this specimen's crest, though incompletely preserved, was most similar to "Geosternbergia". Because the specimen was millions of years younger than any known "Geosternbergia", he assigned it to the new species "Geosternbergia maysei". Numerous other pteranodont specimens are known from the same formation and time period, and Kellner suggested they may belong to the same species as "G. maysei", but because they lack skulls, he could not confidently identify them.


title: Pteranodon

text: A number of additional species of "Pteranodon" have been named since the 1870s, although most now are considered to be junior synonyms of two or three valid species. The best-supported is the type species, "P. longiceps", based on the well-preserved specimen including the first-known skull found by S. W. Williston. This individual had a wingspan of . Other valid species include the possibly larger "P. sternbergi", with a wingspan originally estimated at . "P. oweni" ("P. occidentalis"), "P. velox", "P. umbrosus", "P. harpyia", and "P. comptus" are considered to be "nomina dubia" by Bennett (1994) and others who question their validity. All probably are synonymous with the more well-known species.


title: Pteranodon

text: Because the key distinguishing characteristic Marsh noted for "Pteranodon" was its lack of teeth, any toothless pterosaur jaw fragment, wherever it was found in the world, tended to be attributed to "Pteranodon" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This resulted in a plethora of species and a great deal of confusion. The name became a wastebasket taxon, rather like the dinosaur "Megalosaurus", to label any pterosaur remains that could not be distinguished other than by the absence of teeth. Species (often dubious ones now known to be based on sexual variation or juvenile characters) have been reclassified a number of times, and several subgenera have in the 1970s been erected by Halsey Wilkinson Miller to hold them in various combinations, further confusing the taxonomy (subgenera include "Longicepia", "Occidentalia", and "Geosternbergia"). Notable authors who have discussed the various aspects of "Pteranodon" include Bennett, Padian, Unwin, Kellner, and Wellnhofer. Two species, "P. oregonensis" and "P. orientalis", are not pteranodontids and have been renamed "Bennettazhia oregonensis" and "Bogolubovia orientalis" respectively.


title: McCartney (album)

text: McCartney is the debut solo album by English musician Paul McCartney, released on 17 April 1970 by Apple Records. McCartney recorded it in secrecy, mostly using basic home-recording equipment at his house in St John's Wood. Mixing and some recording took place at professional London studios. In its loosely arranged performances, "McCartney" eschewed the polish of the Beatles' past records in favour of a lo-fi style. Apart from occasional contributions by his wife, Linda, McCartney performed the entire album alone by overdubbing on four-track tape.


title: McCartney (album)

text: McCartney recorded the album during a period of depression and confusion, following John Lennon's private departure from the Beatles in September 1969. Conflicts over the release of McCartney's album further estranged him from his bandmates, as he refused to delay the album's release to allow for Apple's previously scheduled titles, notably the Beatles' album "Let It Be". A press release in the form of a self-interview supplied with UK promotional copies of "McCartney" led to the Beatles' break-up.


title: McCartney (album)

text: "McCartney" received mostly negative reviews, while McCartney was vilified for seemingly ending the Beatles. The record was widely criticised for being under-produced and for its unfinished songs, although the ballad "Maybe I'm Amazed" was consistently singled out for praise. Commercially, "McCartney" benefited from the publicity surrounding the break-up; it held the number 1 position for three weeks on the US "Billboard" Top LPs before yielding that position to "Let It Be". It peaked at number 2 in Britain.


title: McCartney (album)

text: In later years, the album was credited for having had an impact on DIY musicians and lo-fi music styles. McCartney also recorded two successor albums: "McCartney II" (1980) and "McCartney III" (2020). In 2011, the first "McCartney" record was reissued with bonus tracks as part of the "Paul McCartney Archive Collection".


title: McCartney (album)

text: After John Lennon requested a "divorce" from the Beatles in a band meeting on 20 September 1969, Paul McCartney withdrew to his farm in Campbeltown, Scotland. Author Robert Rodriguez describes his frame of mind as "brokenhearted, shocked, and dispirited at the loss of the only job he had ever known". While Lennon's departure was not made official, partly for business reasons, McCartney's period in seclusion with his family coincided with widespread rumours in America that he had died – an escalation of the three-year-old "Paul Is Dead" rumour. The rumour was dispelled by journalists from BBC Radio and "Life" magazine, who tracked him down at his farm, High Park.


title: McCartney (album)

text: McCartney's two months in Scotland created an estrangement between him and his bandmates, further to the division caused by their appointment of Allen Klein as business manager in May that year. McCartney later cited Klein's appointment as the first "irreconcilable difference" within the Beatles, since he continued to favour New York lawyers Lee Eastman and John Eastman – father and brother, respectively, of his wife Linda. For McCartney, the period following Lennon's departure was also marked by a bout of severe depression, during which, in his own estimation, he came close to suffering a nervous breakdown.


title: McCartney (album)

text: In his book "Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney", Howard Sounes writes of the McCartneys' exile at High Park: "This was grim for Linda. She had a seven-year-old and a baby to look after, with a husband who was depressed and drunk. She later told friends it was one of the most difficult times in her life, while Paul reflected that he might have become a rock 'n' roll casualty at this point in his career." With Linda's encouragement, McCartney began to consider a future outside the Beatles, by writing or finishing songs for his first solo album, "McCartney".


title: McCartney (album)

text: McCartney and his family returned to London shortly before Christmas 1969, and he started work on the album at his home in Cavendish Avenue, St John's Wood. The recordings were carried out on a recently delivered Studer four-track tape recorder, without a mixing desk, and therefore without VU displays as a guide for recording levels. McCartney described his home-recording set-up as "Studer, one mike, and nerve". He played all the musical instruments on the album – from acoustic and electric guitars and bass to keyboards, drums and various percussion instruments – with Linda supplying backing vocals on some songs.


title: McCartney (album)

text: The album's recordings eschewed the musical sophistication that distinguished the Beatles' work with producer George Martin, particularly the band's 1969 release "Abbey Road". According to "The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll", "McCartney" is "a one-man-studio-band LP" with "a pronounced homemade quality; it was spare and sounded almost unfinished". Rodriguez writes that in his avoidance of the "Abbey Road" studio aesthetic, "In his own way, [McCartney] was fulfilling the 'as-nature-intended' theme of the aborted 'Get Back' sessions, albeit as a one-and-a-half man band."


title: McCartney (album)

text: McCartney first taped a 45-second portion of a song he wrote in Campbeltown, "The Lovely Linda". As with much of the album, McCartney sang the composition accompanied by acoustic guitar before filling the remaining tracks on the Studer with a second guitar part, bass and percussive accompaniment. Although this performance of "The Lovely Linda" was only intended as a test of the new equipment, it would be included on the official release, as the opening track, complete with the sound of McCartney giggling at the end of the recording. Reflected in the sequencing of the album, the second and third songs McCartney taped were "That Would Be Something", also written in Scotland, and the instrumental "Valentine Day". The latter was one of three selections on "McCartney" that its creator "ad-libbed on the spot", he later claimed, along with the similarly rock-oriented "Momma Miss America" and "Oo You".


title: McCartney (album)

text: On 3 January 1970, he interrupted work on "McCartney" to participate in the Beatles' final recording session, when he, George Harrison and Ringo Starr recorded the Harrison composition "I Me Mine" at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios). The next day, the three musicians revisited McCartney's "Let It Be", a song recorded by the band in January 1969 for their forthcoming "Get Back" film project.


title: McCartney (album)

text: On 12 February, McCartney took his Studer tapes to Morgan Studios, in the north-west London suburb of Willesden, in order to copy all the four-track recordings onto eight-track tape, to allow for further overdubbing. Keen to maintain secrecy about the project, McCartney worked at Morgan under the pseudonym "Billy Martin". By this point, he had also taped "Junk" and "Teddy Boy" at Cavendish Avenue, two songs he began writing during the Beatles' 1968 visit to India and had rehearsed with the band in January 1969. The other recordings transferred to eight-track included "Glasses" – a sound effects piece featuring "wineglasses played at random", in McCartney's description – and "Singalong Junk", an instrumental version of "Junk" to which he now added a strings part played on a Mellotron. Among other overdubs on these eight-track mixes, McCartney supplied a vocal to the previously instrumental "Oo You".


title: McCartney (album)

text: While at Morgan, he also taped "Hot as Sun", a "Polynesian-influenced" instrumental dating from the late 1950s, according to author Bruce Spizer, and "Kreen-Akrore", which Sounes describes as an "experimental percussion track". Begun on 12 February, "Kreen-Akrore" was McCartney's attempt to sonically describe a hunt by the Kreen-Akrore tribespeople of the Brazilian Amazon, after he had watched an ATV documentary on their way of life. Amid musical interludes featuring electric guitar, organ and piano, McCartney used a bow and arrow he purchased at the Knightsbridge department store Harrods, according to engineer Robin Black. The latter was among the few people who knew that McCartney was making a solo album. Linda contributed the breathing and animal-like sounds, with McCartney, on "Kreen-Akrore".


title: McCartney (album)

text: On 21 February 1970, McCartney moved to the more familiar EMI Studios, with the booking again under the name of Billy Martin. There, he carried out further mixing on the previously recorded material, as well as taping new selections. On 22 February, McCartney recorded "Every Night" – another composition rehearsed during the "Get Back" sessions, and a song that authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter note as the "first 'professional' recording" on the finished album, given its position as track 4, following "Valentine Day". The same day McCartney recorded "Maybe I'm Amazed", a piano-based ballad dedicated to Linda, and, in Madinger and Easter's description, "the most elaborate instrumental track on the LP". The final new recording for "McCartney" was "Man We Was Lonely", which he taped on 25 February, having composed it earlier that day. It is the track on the album on which Linda's vocals are most audible.


title: McCartney (album)

text: Final mixes of songs such as "Junk" and "Teddy Boy" were completed at Morgan Studios along with the remaining tracks on the album. During this process, "Hot as Sun" and "Glasses" were segued into a medley, ending with a snippet of McCartney performing the song "Suicide" on piano. Unacknowledged in the track listing for the album, "Suicide" was a composition that he had intended for Frank Sinatra to record. He also edited two separate instrumental pieces into one for "Momma Miss America"; McCartney can be heard shouting the first portion's original title, "Rock 'n' Roll Springtime", on the recording.


title: McCartney (album)

text: On 23 March, while American producer Phil Spector began mixing the "Get Back" tapes for release as the Beatles' "Let It Be" album in EMI's Studio 4, McCartney completed work on his album in Studio 2. Although McCartney has frequently maintained that he was ignorant of Spector's involvement until receiving an acetate copy of "Let It Be" for approval, author Peter Doggett writes that after "several weeks", McCartney had finally "answered the string of messages he'd received about Phil Spector" and had agreed to let him prepare "Let It Be" for release.


title: McCartney (album)

text: For the album's gatefold cover, artist Gordon House and designer Roger Huggett worked on a design concept by McCartney. Photos by Linda McCartney featured throughout the packaging, including a collage of 21 family snapshots in the jacket's inner spread. The images depicted Paul, Linda, seven-year-old Heather (Linda's daughter by her first marriage), newborn Mary, and the McCartneys' sheepdog, Martha. The gatefold cover of "McCartney" was the first of close to 30 years of albums by her husband to feature Linda McCartney's photography.


title: McCartney (album)

text: Set against a black background, the front cover image consisted of a bowl of cherry-red liquid placed on a cream-coloured wall and surrounded by loose red cherries, as if the fruit had been emptied from the bowl. On the back cover, a photo taken by Linda in Scotland showed her husband with Mary tucked inside his fur-lined leather jacket. Madinger and Easter comment that, unlike Lennon, McCartney did not feel the need to include his wife on the cover, and her back-cover photo was a "stunning" contribution from the former professional photographer. In a 2013 news article recalling the album's release, the Philadelphia radio station WMMR described the photo of McCartney and his baby daughter as "iconic" and reflective of "his ultimate message: 'Home, family (and) love'."


title: McCartney (album)

text: McCartney said that he "boycotted" Apple's offices after Klein's arrival in 1969. His continued isolation in 1970 led to Lennon, Harrison and Starr making business decisions without McCartney's input. One decision concerned the release of the "Let It Be" documentary, a necessity in order to fulfil the Beatles' contractual obligations to film company United Artists. McCartney privately agreed to a mid-April release date for "McCartney" with Apple Records executive Neil Aspinall, one of the few people associated with the Beatles who was aware of the project. Its late addition to Apple's schedule clashed with the imminent release of the "Let It Be" album, and of Starr's solo debut, "Sentimental Journey", which was due out on 27 March. On 25 March, after discovering that Klein arranged to have the release of "McCartney" postponed, McCartney received an assurance from Harrison, as a director of Apple Records, that his solo album would be issued on 17 April, as planned.


title: McCartney (album)

text: The situation then changed when Spector reported that work on the "Let It Be" album was almost complete, meaning that it could be issued to coincide with the film's world premiere, which was scheduled for 28 April, in New York. Doggett writes that "the solution was obvious", since "Let It Be" was "a multimedia package" and, as a band venture rather than a solo album, it "should automatically take precedence". Harrison and Lennon therefore wrote to McCartney on 31 March to say that they had instructed EMI, Apple's parent label, to postpone his album until 4 June; they also explained the need to stagger the various new releases, particularly in America, where the "Hey Jude" compilation had been issued on 26 February. Rather than have a member of staff deliver the letter to McCartney at Cavendish Avenue, Starr decided to take it to him personally.


title: McCartney (album)

text: McCartney later described the tone of Starr's message as "the party line", to which he reacted badly: "I told [Starr] to get out. I had to do something like that in order to assert myself because I was just sinking ... I was getting pummelled about the head, in my mind anyway." According to Starr, McCartney "went crazy", threatening: "I'll finish you now. You'll pay!" Although the other Beatles backed down over the release of "McCartney", the confrontation initiated what Rodriguez terms "a three-against-one war" within the band.


title: McCartney (album)

text: On 9 April, McCartney released a Q&A package to the British press, in which he explained his reasons for making his solo album and described its overall theme as "Home, Family, Love". Compiled with the help of Apple executives Derek Taylor and Peter Brown, the self-interview also contained questions McCartney imagined he would be asked regarding the possibility of the Beatles splitting up. While stopping short of saying that the band was finished, McCartney stated that he did not know whether his "break with the Beatles" would be temporary or permanent and that it was based on business, personal and creative differences. He also said that he had not missed Starr's drumming, nor any of his bandmates' contributions, when making the album, and could not envisage a time when he and Lennon would write together again. When asked whether Klein and his company ABKCO would be "in any way involved with the production, manufacturing, distribution or promotion of this new album", McCartney said, "Not if I can help it", and he stressed that Klein was in no way his business representative. Although McCartney later recalled that he was responding to questions put to him, Brown said that McCartney wrote all the questions, as did Taylor.


title: McCartney (album)

text: That same day, McCartney called Lennon at the clinic where he was undergoing primal scream therapy with his wife, Yoko Ono. McCartney told him that he was following Lennon's example and leaving the Beatles, but he made no mention of making his departure public. Doggett suggests that McCartney's intention was not necessarily to break up the band, and cites Beatles confidant Ray Connolly's recollection that McCartney was "devastated" by the media's interpretation of his self-interview. The first reaction from the press was a piece by Don Short of the "Daily Mirror", on 10 April, titled "PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES". From there, in author Mark Hertsgaard's description, "newspaper headlines around the world reduced the story to screaming variations of PAUL BREAKS UP THE BEATLES".


title: McCartney (album)

text: "McCartney" was released in Britain on 17 April 1970 (as Apple PCS 7102), and three days later in America (Apple STAO 3363). While the reports about the Beatles' break-up resulted in McCartney's standing among Beatles fans to plummet, they also ensured that the album was highly publicised. Adding to this exposure in the US, McCartney commissioned a second set of print advertisements for the album, to counter what Doggett describes as Klein's "incendiary statement of fact" in the official advertisements that Apple was "an ABKCO-managed company".


title: McCartney (album)

text: In the UK, "McCartney" debuted at number 2, where it remained for three weeks behind the best-selling album of 1970, Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water". By 15 May, "McCartney" had sold over 1 million copies in the US, and from 23 May, began a three-week stay at number 1 on the "Billboard" Top LPs chart, eventually going double platinum. Despite "Maybe I'm Amazed" receiving considerable airplay on US radio, McCartney refused to issue it or any other song from the album as a single.


title: McCartney (album)

text: McCartney's former bandmates viewed his making the band's break-up public as a betrayal in light of how Lennon had acquiesced to the group's interests by staying silent about his departure the previous year, and as McCartney using the end of the Beatles as a way to promote his solo album. When asked for his opinion of the album shortly after its release, Harrison described "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "That Would Be Something" as "great", but the rest, he said, "just don't do much for me". Harrison added that, unlike Lennon, Starr and himself, McCartney was probably too "isolated" from other musicians, such that: "The only person he's got to tell him if the song's good or bad is Linda." In a December 1970 interview with "Rolling Stone" editor Jann Wenner, which was re-published the following year as the book "Lennon Remembers", Lennon dismissed "McCartney" as "rubbish" and "Engelbert Humperdinck music"; he said that his primal therapy-inspired album "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" would "probably scare [McCartney] into doing something decent". Lennon rejected Wenner's interpretation of the back cover portrait as a possible reference to Ono's recent miscarriage; instead, he read it as an example of the McCartneys slavishly following his and Ono's lead by releasing a family-oriented album.


title: McCartney (album)

text: "McCartney" was followed by two sequels, "McCartney II" (released in 1980), and "McCartney III" (released in December 2020), both sharing the same recording technique as this album.


title: McCartney (album)

text: On release, "McCartney" was widely criticised for being under-produced and for its unfinished songs. In addition, according to Nicholas Schaffner in his 1977 book "The Beatles Forever", McCartney's attempt to use the Beatles' break-up to promote his solo album, while presenting himself as a happy family man, "apparently backfired", since "many observers found the whole thing contrived, tasteless, and rather vicious." Madinger and Easter write of the album receiving a "critical lambasting" and that the "general sentiment" among reviewers was "something to the effect of 'He broke up the Beatles for "this"?!?'" Richard Williams of "Melody Maker" suggested that "With this record, [McCartney's] debt to George Martin becomes increasingly clear ..." Williams found "sheer banality" in all the tracks save for "Maybe I'm Amazed" and described "Man We Was Lonely" as "the worst example of his music-hall side".


title: McCartney (album)

text: In a favourable assessment, for the "NME", Alan Smith wrote that while on first listen he found "McCartney" "too harmlessly mild", his view had changed with time, such that: "Listening to it is like hearing a man's personal contentment committed to the sound of music. Most of the sounds, effects and ideas are sheer brilliance; much of the aura is of quiet songs on a hot summer night; and virtually all of the tracks reflect a kind of intangible roundness. 'Excitement' is not a word to use for this album ... 'warmth' and 'happiness' are."<ref name="Smith/NME"></ref> In his combined review of all the former Beatles' 1970 solo releases, Geoffrey Cannon of "The Guardian" dismissed it as an album that had "no substance". Cannon continued: "Paul reveals himself in it as a man preoccupied with himself, and his own situation. The music is boastfully casual … He seems to believe that anything that comes into his head is worth having. And he's wrong." John Gabree of "High Fidelity" magazine similarly bemoaned the expectation that "we should dig his every little noise" and found the reasons for the album's failure evident in the "Let It Be" film, where McCartney appeared to be "the only Beatle who has stagnated as a human being", as well as "incredibly arrogant" in his treatment of his bandmates. Gabree added that "Perhaps the greatest disappointment lies in the songs, although most of them could have been saved by better performances, especially the instrumentals."