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Re: The Croc That Wanted to Be a Dinosaur

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2006 4:06 AM
Subject: The Croc That Wanted to Be a Dinosaur

I will not, for the sake of the online publication,
use the name Nesbitt and Norell propose for their taxon, not because I consider
it useless but because I'd rather wait for the print version unless
_Proceedings of the Royal Society, series B_ has joined the digital publication
age in committing to digital nomenclature, as in _Naturwissenschaften_ and
_Palaeontologica Electronica_.

Apparently both Proc. R. Soc. B, or at least its supplements, have joined the trend of publishing digitally first -- and so has Nature. (Search the pdf on the complete sequencing of the mammoth mitochondrial genome. You will find it marked as "18 December 2005", a day that no Nature issue appeared, lacking an issue number, and having the page numbers 1 to 4.)

Besides, there is _really_ no use in not mentioning the name *Effigia*. You could not possibly jeopardize valid publication -- the print version is at most a few days away; nobody can scoop that.

However, several features reveal the crocodilian nature of the skeleton,

The only clade it belongs to whose name starts with "croc" is Crocodylotarsi. Apart from that, it is a member of Suchia. It is outside Crocodylomorpha, the largest clade ever called "crocodiles" in at least the last few decades.

Note that not only is *Lagerpeton* included is a phylogeny testing the early
placement of various crurotarsans, but so is *Marasuchus* and both are
dinosauromorphans. Technically, so is Pterosauria.... 

By definition it's not.

It should also be worthwhile to note that *Lotosaurus*, a
semi-finback with edentulous jaws from China, is the sister taxon to
*Shuvosaurus* + the new taxon, which are nested as "ctenosauriscids" (when
referring to Nesbitt's work on *Arizonasaurus*).


Having *Lotosaurus* in there is the really weird part!

 Rauhut, O. W. M. 1997. Zur schadelanatomie von *Shuvosaurus
  inexpectatus* [On the cranial anatomy of *Shuvosaurus
  inexpectatus*], pp. 17-21, in Sachs,  S., O.W. M. Rauhut & A.
  Weigert (eds.) _Treffen der deutschsprachigen
  palaeoherpetologen_ [Meeting of the German-Speaking
  Palaeoherpetologists]. (Germany: Alfred-Wegener-Stiftung.) [in
  German]

Unfortunately this is how Nesbitt & Norell cite it. But it's "Schädelanatomie" and "Palaeoherpetologen" (...though most people, including myself, would spell the latter with ä instead of ae). Apart from the importance of the dots for pronunciation, German Does Not Have Separate Rules for Headlines; all nouns always start with a capital letter, and nothing else ever does (unless part of a proper name).