MESENOSAURUS ERRATA.

[Luis Rey <luisrey@ndirect.co.uk>]

> .
>
> P.S. An interesting aspect of Luis' book is an illustration of the
> (unintentional) synapsid origin of birds...  That is, the BCF illustration
> (am I correct that this was from DinoGeorge's Omni article??) has a
> progression from Mesenosaurus through protodinosaurs to Archaeopteryx.
> Unfortunately, Mesenosaurus (see photo and illustration here:
> http://www.sec.state.la.us/MUSEUMS/SHREVE/DINO-6-99/catalog/1.htm) is a
> varanopseid pelycosaur-grade synapsid (as originally recognized by Efremov
> when he named it and demonstrated recently by Reisz and Berman (Annals of
> Carnegie Mus. 70: 113?132)), and not an archosaur as thought by Ivakhnenko &
> Kurzanov in the 1970s.  Of course, that particular critter wasn't critical
> to the BCF hypothesis.
>
>                 Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.

One thing that I have learned working in book editions too fast and demanding
more and more stuff in a hurry is that no matter how much you try, there's
always something that will go awry and details will be wrong, dated or missing.
Many of the illustrations on Extreme Dinosaurs are already 'memorabilia'. and I
wanted to show it like that.  Extreme Dinosaurs originally was going to show a
progression in a historical sense of my own 'dinosaur trip' during these last
15 years towards the future. Unfortunately, the project  got diverted and
modified beyond recognition.
So yes, I apologize for the inclusion of Mesenosaurus as part of the bird
lineage. That is obviously the Past. That illustration is from 1994 OMNI
magazine BCF article. For an update (and what George Olshevsky also propose
now: instead of Mesenosaurus a prolacertilian) see the new 'BCF' article in the
new Dinopress Vol 4. and the next one Vol 5.

There we had the chance to correct the old, unintentional mistake.

On the other hand there's that hairy Ornithischian thing there... the future
maybe?


Luis Rey

Visit my website on http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~luisrey