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RE: Abydosaurus mcintoshi, a new sauropod from the Albian of Utah
Mike Taylor wrote:
<The paper is open-access -- help yourselves!
http://www.springerlink.com/content/lpn30h8tx2231223/
Truly awesome material (even if their brachiosaur taxonomy is misguided :-)>
Another can of worms:
Chure et al., page 1 of the digital, preprint paper:
"Based on numerous differences between overlapping parts of both holotypes,
Taylor (2009) proposed that the African species should be known as
*Giraffatitan brancai.* While we are open to this possibility, we do not
believe that it is sufficiently justified at present because the identified
differences have not been defended as separating genera, rather than species,
populations, or individuals. The sister-taxon relationship between the two
species recovered in the phylogenetic analysis performed by Taylor (2009)
neither supports nor refutes their generic-level separation. At this point, we
consider the decision to recognize the African species as a
genus apart to be arbitrary. We choose to retain the original nomenclature in
this contribution, distinguishing between the two species where appropriate."
It is nice to see a bunch of well-wrought paleontologists repeat what I said
when Taylor (2009) was published.
As the issue is taxonomic and not phylogenetic, the debate largely
influencing Taylor's change, being the lack of adequate use of *Brachiosaurus
altus* in the works of sauropod phylogenetics is the only point here worth
contending over. I would suggest supplementing analyses produced in the past
with separated codings to resolve the issue in an historical look, but so far
the most recent analysis to include both taxa separately even found them to be
sister taxa and that was Taylor (2009), and it did not separate the taxa in a
fashion that the nomenclature proposal of Paul would be useful.
Cheers,
Jaime A. Headden
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