Re: New Article in Experimental Zoology

["T. Michael Keesey" <mightyodinn@yahoo.com>]

--- "Mortensen, Bruce" <bruce_mortensen@Affymax.com> wrote:

>     I think that the abstract gives the main points of the paper, but note
> that the research seems to be restricted to digit development.   I'm still
> waiting for someone to publish an article that can explain all the other
> skeletal similarities shared by birds and maniraptorans to the exclusion of
> all other archosaurs.  To paraphrase a line from a popular movie "Show me
> the data!"
[...]

If avian digits really are II-III-IV and there was no frame shift, then it
seems more likely to me that all tridactyl _Theropoda_ have digits II-III-IV,
all tetradactyl _Theropoda_ have digits II-III-IV-V, and any similarity between
the manual digits of subpentadactyl (is that a word?) _Theropoda_ and the
manual digits of known basal, pentadactyl _Dinosauria_ like _Herrerasauridae_,
_Eoraptor_, etc. are convergent.

But I thought the point of "frame shift" was that the "information" for making
a certain digit is transferred to another digit. Thus the fact that the digits
grow from the anlagen in the II-III-IV positions doesn't mean that they can't
be growing according to genes that once controlled I-II-III, right?

=====
=====> T. Michael Keesey <keesey@bigfoot.com>
=====> The Dinosauricon <http://dinosauricon.com>
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