Re: Unenlagia Pelvis

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

On an aside, before I get started, I wonder how people pronounce the name
*Unenlagia*? The etymology is clear on it's pronounciation struture being
essentially an Argentinean Spanish form of Mapuche, but the typography is
not at all elucidatory to this. The "n" is a ñ-character, and consequently
is pronounced "ny"; in transliterating this character, Salgado and Coria
proposed the species epithet *R. muniozi* (for *Rocasaurus*, a new
saltasaurine sauropod) for "Muñoz", thus chosing, as did de Klerk et al.,
in naming *Nqwebasaurus*, in taking an unconventional character (the "q",
and in the species epithet of *N. thwazi*, the "th") and rendering it to
an equivalent English spelling, even though it may only comprise a single
letter, rather than two. By extension, I render the pronounciation as
"oo-nyehn-LAH-gee-ah," for _uñen_ and _lag_. I would like to know if there
are any other interpretations. I think I follow Criesler, though I have
not checked his pronounciation out.

  Anyway,

  Rutger askes about the pelvic structure of the animal, and my only
comments are these: Material recovered from around Plaza Huincul,
including *Megaraptor*, *Unenlagia*, *Argentinosaurus*, *Giganotosaurus*
etc., are all in extremely fragmentary form and there are very few
elements that are whole, though collection yields entire elements. This
requires a lot of glue, and interpretation follows this. The pelvis was
recovered as a slightly disarticulated side in the ground, very well
associated compared to other stuff (nearly every single element of
*Argentinosaurus* was not found in the same spot, but scattered over
meters and meters, very little withing very much distance of eachother
(walking from ranch to ranch to find it all) and are all hypothesized to
belong to the same animal); Articulation is a matter of fitting the bones,
and I would be tentative regarding the orientation of fragmentary bones,
but in this case the elements are articulating in a difference of about 3
degrees _or less_ and do not offer much in the way of retroversion or
proversion of the pubis compared to the long axis of the ilium. The
illustration and thus Paul's reconstruction are by far the best idea for
the pelvis, and it is almost certainly, as in *Rahonavis* and
*Jewholornis*, mesopubic. I cannot see why, on another aside, how Zhang et
al were able to get away with opisthopuby in their illustration when
articulation of the ilium and pubis makes for a mesopubic dead-ringer for
*Rahonavis*, but hey, that's not my bit right now ...

  Cheers,

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