Re: Triassic Sauropods

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Williams" <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com>
To: <mbonnan@hotmail.com>; <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 10:55 PM
Subject: Re: Triassic Sauropods


> And if that piece of jaw from the Early Jurassic of Lufeng really
> does belong to a therizinosauroid (and not to a prosauropod as some
workers
> have suggested), then the great maniraptoran radiation probably had its
> roots very early in the Mesozoic (?Late Triassic).
>
> (After all, Sankar Chatterjee has identified birds,

Not only his *Protoavis* (I _will_ write the next parts of "Details on",
just I don't know when :-| ), but also tracks called *Plesiornis pilulatus*.
All I can say at the moment is that the latter do look like bird tracks and
are small.

> ornithomimosaurs and

Whatever *Shuvosaurus* is (a rauisuchian or a bizarroid basal theropod), it
is surely not an ornithomimosaur.

> pachycephalosaurs from the Late Triassic.

That's news to me...

However, as HP Mickey Mortimer has posted in December, the tooth record of
dromaeosaurids _sensu latissimo_ extends all the way back to the Early
Jurassic of Antarctica. Together with MJ troodontids (teeth from England),
LJ ornithomimosaurs (a finger from England), possible MJ tyrannosauroids
(*Iliosuchus*) and LJ ?oviraptorosaur vertebrae, an LT radiation of
coelurosaurs is surely not impossible.