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Re: [dinosaur] New Konzhukovia species (temnospondyl) from Permian of South America + Early Triassic polar coprolites + more papers



Mickey Mortimer <mickey_mortimer111@msn.com> wrote:

> There should be a petition to the ICZN in that case, and also a detailed 
> redescription of Deinodon's syntypes that compared them in depth to other 
> taxa.

Great idea!  Who's going to do all of this?   You?    ;-)


> It doesn't mean we have to include Deinodon in an analysis, only that we have 
> to use evidence to place it somewhere in a phylogeny.  Maybe that would be 
> morphometric evidence, as that's commonly used based on expansions of Smith's 
> tooth
> measurement sample.  Of course adding Deinodon to a phylogenetic analysis is 
> itself scientifically interesting- to tell us something quantitative about 
> where it belongs in the tree of life.

As we all know, _Deinodon_ is known from a handful of teeth that Leidy
decided to dignify with a name.  The fact that _Deinodon_ has a name
is the only reason it gets any attention at all.  I'm not certain how
"scientifically" interesting plugging it into an analysis would be.  I
suspect it might be a grand waste of time.


> Here's the thing (and we've probably been over this before, but I forget your 
> answer...)- Yeah, renaming Tyrannosauroidea Coeluroidea is silly.  But why 
> are you against petitioning the ICZN to prevent this, instead of just 
> ignoring the rules whenever you think
> they don't function well?  That is the reason petitioning exists, after all.

PhyloCode makes such a petition redundant and pointless.  I believe
this was Matt's point (although he expressed it far more articulately
and diplomatically than I am).


> I don't think phylogenetic nomenclature has anything to do with this.  If we 
> didn't have a phylogenetic definition for Tyrannosauroidea or 
> Tyrannosauridae, you'd no doubt still think using Deinodontidae and 
> Coeluroidea is silly.  Right?

Right.  Let's pick a name, and stick with it.  Tyrannosauroidea is a
great name, and it's widely used.  More importantly, it's also been
explicitly defined as a clade.  Why ditch it in favor of
Deinodontoidea or Coeluroidea?


Jocelyn Falconnet <j.falconnet@gmail.com> wrote:

> If we have to forget names based on nomina dubia... what about
> ceratopsians and other Ceratops-derived names ?

We're only talking about coordinated family-level names
(superfamily/-oidea, family/-idae, subfamily/-inae, tribe/-ini).