Re: Dinosaur Man (was Re: Dinosaur = extinct animal)

["Grant Harding" <granth@cyberus.ca>]

Keith 90291 wrote:
><<  includes
> photos and text describing Ron Seguin's lifesize
> sculptures of a _Stenonychosaurus_ (_Saurornithoides_)
> and a "dinosauroid," >>
>
>By the way, the Stenonychosaurus sculpture/reconstruction is on long-term
>loan to the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History in Halifax.


It is?  There must be more than three, then.  I know one is still on display
at the CMN where it was built (trust me; I live practically around the
corner) and another is in the CMN's collections, where I just went on a tour
(really awesome!).

In addition, Andrew Gray wrote:
>There ARE dinosaurs (or at least animals directly descended from them)
alive
>today - over 8,000 different species of them! They're probably flying about
>outside your window as you read this.

Yes, but the point I was trying to make is that many people think that
*anything* that was around back then, whether or not it's alive today,
(sharks, frogs and, yes, probably some birds included) is a dinosaur.  I
wasn't disputing the fact that birds fall within the *real* definition of
Dinosauria.

The funny thing is that if the definition of dinosaur as "extinct animal"
were to be taken in the cladistic sense, that is to say the most recent
common ancestor of all extinct animals and all of its descendants, we would
be forced to conclude that Dinosauria = Animalia!  (Or perhaps that one is
nested just within the other; I don't know if Animalia is stem-based or
node-based.)

-Grant "the Dinosauroid wouldn't look like that anyway" Harding

--
Grant Harding
High school student/closet paleontologist
granth@cyberus.ca
Visit Grant Harding's Dinosaur Destination at
http://www.cyberus.ca/~sharding/grant/
"...I suspect he actually has a subspecies of _Stenonychosaurus_, though I
haven't decided for sure...small Triassic carnivore--two meters from pes to
acetabulum. In point of fact, a rather ordinary theropod..." -from
Crichton's _The Lost World_