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Re: birds and/or/with dino's
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Tim Williams <tijawi@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> David Marjanovic wrote:
>
>> What should really have been done would have been to
>> abandon the word Dinosauria and to make up a new term for
>> the entire clade, birds included. But it's too late for
>> that.
>
> Yep, that might have been a good idea. ÂSomething along the lines of
> "Dinoaves" - in the same way that the new name "Cetartiodactyla" was coined
> when whales (Cetacea) were put inside Artiodactyla.
On the other hand, there's a long list of names formerly used for
paraphyletic taxa which are now, at least sometimes, used for clades,
including Synapsida, Therapsida, Cynodontia, Dictyoptera, Blattodea,
Mecoptera, Osteichthyes, Sarcopterygii, Saurischia, Theropoda,
Coelurosauria, etc. Should we have renamed all of those?
Personally, I find the name "Cetartiodactyla" unnecessary, unless
pan-cetaceans are the sister group to pan-artiodactyls. Why not just
say cetaceans are (or aren't) artiodactyls?
--
T. Michael Keesey
Technical Consultant and Developer, Internet Technologies
Glendale, California
http://tmkeesey.net/