THE PANOPLOSAURIDS AGAIN

["Darren Naish" <dwn194@soton.ac.uk>]

Hello.

Just to say that, though those of you with the lit will already know,
the source for all this banter about a family Edmontoniidae
(=Panoplosauridae) is good ol' Uncle Bob's classic _Hunteria_ paper:

BAKKER, R.T. 1988. Review of the late Cretaceous Nodosauroid
Dinosauria.  _Hunteria_ 1 (3): 3-23

OK, so I'm eight years slow, but I've only just received a copy of
this paper.  _Hunteria_ is quite literally impossible for the
non-professional to get hold of in this country, bit of a pain. All I
need now is the _Nanotyrannus_ paper.

So, if per chance you don't know, Bakker suggests in this paper that
his edmontoniids (consisting of Panoplosaurinae [_Panoplosaurus_] and
Edmontoniinae [_Edmontonia_, _Denversaurus_ and _Chassternbergia_])
are part of a nodosauroid radiation (_Silvisaurus_ and _Sauropelta_
are the nodosauroid outgroups to Edmontoniidae in his cladogram) that
is nested within the Stegosauria!  Ankylosaurids, in his cladogram,
diverged prior to stegosaurs. Needless to say, few (if any) of
Bakker's controversial notions have been generally accepted - see Ken
Carpenter's paper in _Dinosaur Systematics_ for an approach to
_Denversaurus_ and _Chassternbergia_. The stegosaurian affinities of
'nodosauroids' have not been commented upon ASAIK, in effect this idea
is relegated to the historic wayside. Right?

At the risk of turning myself into a walking advertisement for George
Olshevsky and Tracy Ford, I must recommend that, if you _really are_
interested in dinosaurs, it is *essential* that you buy Dino Folios. I
just got my first bunch, and they are awesome - stacks of information
dealing with all the species that, unless you own just about
everything dinosaurian that has ever been published, can be analyzed
together in a helpful format for the first time.

"You don't think you'll win do you?"
(I'd best use it before I for it..)

DARREN NAISH