Re: CRETACEOUS NEORNITHINES

[Betty Cunningham <bettyc@flyinggoat.com>]

there is a toothless, parrot-beak-like pterosaur, _Tapejara_.
What would preclude this beak from being a possibly similar pterosaur,
if it's not a really a parrot?

-Betty Cunningham

darren.naish@port.ac.uk wrote:
> The Hell Creek parrot jaw described by Stidham and suggested to have
> affinities with loriids has not been accepted by the majority of
> ornithologists. Several authors - I will not mention their names but
> see if you can guess - have stated that it simply can't be a parrot
> because, well, it can't. Because of its antiquity I suppose. Gareth
> Dyke and Gerald Mayr have been working on early parrot evolution,
> mostly new specimens from Messel and the London Clay, and they argued
> in a response to Stidham that the jaw most probably was _not_ from a
> parrot: fossils show that the advanced parrot jaw is restricted to
> psittacids (=psittacoids), the psittaciform crown-group, and these
> did not evolve until the Oligocene or Miocene. Eocene parrots with
> complete skulls do not have psittacid-style jaws and in cladistic
> analyses are basal to psittacids. Of course, this still leaves the
> problem as to what the Hell Creek specimen IS and Stidham responded
> to Dyke and Mayr that, regardless of their arguments, all he had done
> was propose an identity based on morphological characters. Personally
> I think it unlikely that crown-group modern-style parrots were around
> in the Cretaceous: this would invoke long ghost lineages both for
> this group and for the Eocene parrots that are apparently basal to
> modern parrots.
> 
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