Re: Glishades ericksoni, a new hadrosauroid from Montana

[Daniel Madzia <daniel.madzia@gmail.com>]

>> 2010/5/13 Tim Williams <tijawi@yahoo.com>:
>> Saurolophidae was also used as a clade inside Hadrosauridae
>> in a previous paper (Prieto-Marquez & Wagner, 2009). I thought
>> it was odd here too.

Generally, using "-idae" within another "-idae" is not a big problem
to me. It's not elegant but if a name is well defined then I have all
I need. What I find problematical here is that not everyone willingly
accepts that some people just don't care about ranks and/or
standardized suffixes and that the only really important thing is the
phylogenetic context of the name (i.e., the branch of the tree of life
it "covers"). These people, therefore, may take one (or both?) of the
names out of the game and introduce (a) new name(s) in their papers
which - consequently - may cause a nomenclatural mess. That's the main
reason why I'm not satisfied with the way Prieto-Márquez uses
hadrosauroid clade names.

>> Interestingly, Prieto-Marquez (2010) recovers _Lambeosaurus
>> laticaudus_ as the sister taxon to _Hypacrosaurus_; so the new
>> combination _Hypacrosaurus laticaudus_ may be in order for the
>> Mexican hadrosaur.

Similarly, _H. stebingeri_ should probably be given a new genus name.
It's not the first time this taxon wasn't found as a close relative of
_H. altispinus_.

Best,
-- 
Daniel Madzia
web: www.wildprehistory.org
mail: daniel.madzia@gmail.com
skype: danielmadzia