Re: Details on SVP Thursday talks and posters (Part 1)

Paul, 2001. Increasing evidence for an arboreal origin of dinosaur-avian flight and for losses of flight in post-urvogel dinosaurs. JVP 21(3) 88A.

Paul had a lot of characters supposedly present in deinonychosaurs, troodontids and oviraptorosaurs, but absent in Archaeopteryx. [...] An interesting fact was that Sinornithosaurus and cf. Sinornithosaurus have an expanded manual phalanx II-1, like pygostylians and more derived than Archaeopteryx. Intriguing.

Just checked on http://research.amnh.org/vertpaleo/dinobird.html, the description of Sinornithosaurus and a photo of the Berlin specimen. It's true. However, phalanx II-2 is not expanded, leaving me scratching my head and asking why. (If both were expanded, like they are in pygostylians, the purpose -- better support for the wing feathers -- would be clear.)

His cladogram had the following topology, missing several groups I couldn't copy down in time.

|-+-Abelisauridae
| `-Megalosauridae

Still? Like in PDW (when that was apparently mainstream)?

`-+-Archaeopteryx
   `-+-+-Sinornithosaurus
      | `-+-Velociraptor
      |     `-Deinonychus
      `-+-Troodontidae
         `-+-Oviraptorosauria
            `-Pygostylia

Reminds me of something...

+--+--Archaeopteryx

| `--+--Sinornithosaurus

| `--+--Velociraptor

| `--Deinonychus

`--+--Troodontidae (and probably "the rest of Arctometatarsalia")

`--+--Oviraptorosauria (and the rest of "Enigmosauria"

`--Pygostylia (and Yandangornis and whatnot)

Based on probably totally different (and probably much fewer) characters (and not actually a cladogram, as not run through a computer), but strangely similar, isn't it? :-)

Parabelievable.

:-D :-D :-D I had to laugh for a minute about that! Congratulations!!! That was the technical term that was missing! :-)

* CBL basically is the same as FABL

What do these abbreviations mean?

Looking forward for tomorrow! :-)