Modern Antarctica and Cretaceous parrots

["Williams, Tim" <TiJaWi@agron.iastate.edu>]

Daniel Bensen wrote:
 
>Dogs on every continent but Antarctica (and I'm not even sure about >that),


The Madrid Protocol (Oct 1991; effective Jan 1998) bans the keeping and use
of dogs on Antarctica, and most (and perhaps by now, all) countries that
have research bases in Antarctica have removed their dogs.  I know Australia
and New Zealand relocated their Antarctic huskies to Minnesota.  However,
there may be dogs running wild in Antarctica - brought there by twentieth
century explorers.  


Fred Ruhe wrote:

>It wasn't assigned nor reffered to anything, but Stidham was "in between
>the lines" very clear: Psittaciformes, Loriidae. I don't buy it, nor do
>Dyke and Mayr. Please come up with evidence!  [snip] If you only >have
"gossip", please don't publish in "Nature". 

I'm slightly bewildered by the arguments raised against the existence of
parrots in the Late Cretaceous.  Our knowledge of early neornithine history
is so awful that perhaps we shouldn't be too hasty to dismiss the presence
of "advanced" psittaciforms at the end of the Mesozoic.  Perhaps the
non-parrot-beaked parrot from Messel is a relict form, and Stidham's polly
represents the true state of avian (or neornithine) evolution at the time.
A great many scenarios that attempt to reconstruct the history of the
Neornithes (and the Neognathae in particular) appear to be based principally
upon intuition, and supported by minimal paleontological evidence.

In other words, let's keep an open mind.  



Tim