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Re: birds and/or/with dino's



> Or we could just use Paraxonia for Artiodactyla + Cetacea (assuming
> cetaceans aren't crown artiodactyls, as I increasingly suspect they
> are).

 I lean the other way: that cetaceans are *not* crown artiodactyls at
 all (despite - or maybe because of - what the molecular analyses
 say).

Why?

The way I see it, the great mystery is not the position of the whales anymore, but the position of the ruminants (next to whales + hippos according to molecular data, next to camels by morphology-with-way-too-few-fossils).

Sure, the latest morphological analysis (in the *Indohyus* paper) found whales + raoellids and artiodactyls as sister-groups, but that analysis was rather lacking in "anthracotheres", and I think all characters were unordered or something... have to check...

 Names coined for novel clades recovered by molecular analysis are
 unfortunately notorious for these kind of monikers (Cetartiodactyla,
 Euarchontoglires, Pegasoferae, etc).

Pegasoferae almost parodizes this approach. I like it. :-)

For Euarchontoglires, there's an alternative: Supraprimates Waddell et al. 1999 (supra = beyond). I've also seen "Glimates" ( = "Glires + Primates") a few times on the Internet, but that's not published.