Re: Dietary factors & giant land mammals - birds

["T. Mike Keesey" <tmk@dinosauricon.com>]

On Tue, 8 May 2001, T. Mike Keesey wrote:

> On Tue, 8 May 2001 MarkEShelly@aol.com wrote:
>
> >   I wish we had a word to seperate the bulk of dinosaurs from the
> > feathered, toothless, tailess, handclaw-less dinosaurs, similar to
> > what the semi-scientific term dinosaur used to mean!
>
> Which of the traits?
>
> non-feathered: non-maniraptoran _Dinosauria_ (so far as we know)
> pygostyle-less*: non-pygostylian _Dinosauria_
> handclaw-less: non-ornithuran _Dinosauria_
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ whoops! That should be "with handclaws". And actually,
a few ornithurans (_Opisthocomo_, _Phorusrhacidae_, etc.) *do* have manual
unguals, so that's not entirely accurate.

(* correction on "pygostyle-less" -- that's what I was assuming you meant
by tailed, not by tailless. And actually there is now a non-pygostylian
with a pygostyle (_Nomingia_, an ?oviraptorosaur), so that isn't quite
accurate.)

I forgot toothless/toothed. If you're just talking about the toothlessness
of modern birds, then you would use non-neornithean _Dinosauria_. But many
non-neornithean dinosaurs are also toothless, including
_Oviraptorosauria_, _Ornithomimoidea_, _Confuciusornithidae_, and
_Enantiornithiformes_. So, heck, you might just want to say "toothed
dinosaurs".

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