Re: Pygostyles, Crises,..

["Mickey Mortimer" <mickey_mortimer@email.msn.com>]

John Jackson wrote-

>Whatever one's position on secondary flightlessness (2F) in mani.
dinosaurs,
>it is perhaps much easier to agree on a very important feature of it :
that
>it is intrinsically unparsimonious.
>
>As such, it could never be expected to appear in a cladogram even if it
>existed; the (hypothetically) true structure would be transformed into
>something else.


I'll tell you what, Nick.  Once I get my character list completed (a couple
weeks from now), I'll make a separate data matrix just for you with
"flighty" characters deleted.  I'm sure I won't catch all of them, but most
things related to flight are easy to see (involving arm and pectoral
girdle).  If you or anyone else would like to inform me on flight-related
characters not in the pectoral limb or girdle, I'll be glad to consider them
as well.  Then I'll run PHYLIP or PAUP (if I have it in time) on the new
censored data and see how the results are different from the standard data's
results.  If your hypothesis is correct, we'll see secondary flightlessness,
if not Aves will only include Archaeopteryx, Rahonavis and pygostylians.

Mickey Mortimer