Re: My Phylogeny: Growing Science (and growing e-mails)

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer11@msn.com>
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2001 12:14 AM
Subject: Re: My Phylogeny: Growing Science (and growing e-mails)


> > So should I add it as an OTU? (It's a bit fragmentary...)
>
> That's what I did, but it sometimes makes huge polytomies.

So I won't add it at the moment. Problems later :->

> > Not all birds have pneumatic tails. This is one reason why I wrote
> > "occurring" and not "present" :-) ... IMHO it does tell something that
it
> > _never_ occurs in known dromaeosaurs and many other theropods except
> > carcharodontosaurids (size-related feature, judging from the sauropods
> which
> > also have it).
>
> _Never_ occurs in dromaeosaurs.... except for Achillobator :-) .

I _knew_ there was something unexpected in dromaeosaurids!
Or, wait, weren't that only the sacrals?


> > Which is juvenile, and *Archaeopteryx* has dromaeosaur-like ridges and
> > lacrimal hornlets in both a drawing and the text of PDW.
>
> Yes, I remember Paul's excellent head restoration.  Try to find it in the
> literature or on an actual specimen though.  You can't code from a
> restoration.

The photos I can find of the Eichstätt specimen suggest it IMHO, at least
they don't contradict it. Because of the lacking quality of all these -- and
of the fossils -- this is in danger of becoming subjective.

> > > Padian, K.; Ji Q.; & Ji S.-a. 2001. Feathered dinosaurs and the origin
> of
> > > flight. p. 117-135.
> >
> > Which journal? :-)
>
> Oh, sorry.  It's in-
> Tanke, D.H. & Carpenter, K. (eds.); Skrepnick, M.W. (art ed.) 2001.
> _Mesozoic Vertebrate Life: New Research Inspired by the Paleontology of
> Philip J. Currie_. Indiana University Press (Bloomington & Indianapolis
> [Indiana]) 577 pp.

Ah, yeah. I have this book but still haven't read it. Just found the
article. It turns out everything is broken, incomplete and, in
*Protarchaeopteryx*, even incompletely ossified, so that not even fusion can
be ascertained. If, as the authors suggest, the "furcula" of *P.* is just
the right ramus, the entire thing must have looked like in tyrannosaurids. A
sensation is the report of what "appears to be a thin remnant of a partial
clavicle about halfway along the ventral border of one coracoid. It is less
than 2 mm thich, so does not resemble the broad, fused, boomerang-shaped
clavicles seen in many other tetanurans (allosaurids, tyrannosaurids,
oviraptorids, etc.[...])." So question marks everywhere. :-(