Re: Protoavis & Drepanosauridae (sensu Renesto, 1999)

[Dinogeorge@aol.com]

In a message dated 4/28/01 0:23:30 AM EST, qilongia@yahoo.com writes:

<< What has happened was that the specimens that Chatterjee has
 designated type and paratypes are completely disarticulated but
 located near each other in the same quarry. >>

Tracy Ford and I talked at some length with Bryan Small, who actually found 
the Protoavis fossils, back in the late 1980s or early 1990s (whenever it was 
that we took a road trip through Lubbock, Texas). We were wondering whether 
there was anything to the rumors of a composite nature of the material. Bryan 
told us he found the jumbled material in one or two rather small concretions 
in the quarry, and that there was virtually no chance that the material 
belonged to more than one kind of animal. That's right from the horse's 
mouth. This business about Protoavis being part megalancosaur, part theropod, 
part prolacertiform, part lots of other stuff is just nonsense. Like any 
early archosaur, it probably had some features of all these kinds of animals; 
and it also had heterocoelous cervicals, which are strictly an advanced avian 
feature among vertebrates, as far as I know. If there were more than one kind 
of animal mixed into the material, one would expect to find things like two 
or more differently shaped humeri, or left and right limb elements that don't 
match, and so forth. Nothing like this was found. All the elements are of the 
right size and shape to fit together to comprise two individuals of the same 
species, one somewhat smaller than the other. Sankar restored some of the 
missing pieces, but not in any unreasonable way as far as I can tell. Unless 
you are accusing Sankar of deliberate fraud -- and if you're going to 
maintain that, you better have some >awfully good< evidence, not just vague 
suppositions and innuendos -- his >peer-reviewed< descriptive work should be 
accepted at face value.