Re: Dinosaurs with Pygostyles

["ekaterina amalitzkaya" <eamalitz@hotmail.com>]

A quick question (forgive my ignorance): Why is it that paleontologists do 
not carry out jackknife or bootstrap tests with the matrices they use to 
make their trees. If I understand correctly they can use their matrices as 
2,3,4 character nucleic acid strings and then use the standard bootstrapping 
that is used in molecular phylogenetics. Further I would like to ask if the 
paleontologists have ever devised a program like what protein sequence 
analysts use to search for protein similarities. Similarly in terms of 
paleontology one could have a database of characters and search it with such 
a program with the input as a character string for say a newly scored 
fossil. This may help in automating and removing ambiguities of relying on 
an expert provided the extreme value statistics is a good approximation for 
the character strings.

This apart i felt that Elzanowski's characters may be easily prone to 
convergence than some of the characters supporting the Dromeosaur-avian 
clade. Agains I ask why the plaeotologists do not follow a fixed score 
matrix to transform their characters with appropriate weights.
-EA

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