Re: Greg Paul is right (again); or "Archie's not a birdy"

[Mike Keesey <keesey@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 6:03 AM, Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com> wrote:
>
> Surprisingly enough, what Charig (1985:26) actually wrote was "Let us
> define a class Aves as the clade that is demarcated from its
> antecedents by the appearance of the evolutionary novelty ‘feathers’"
> (quoted from Senter 2005:4).
>
> So, yeah, an explicit clade definition.  Albeit not a very good one.

Yes, note that it lacks a species or specimen to anchor the apomorphy
to. Given that "feather" can refer to non-homologous structures in
other organisms (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathering_(horse)
), it's potentially meaningless. (Although a reasonably charitable
interpretation would make it synonymous with _Avipinna_.)

-- 
T. Michael Keesey
http://tmkeesey.net/