RE: New Article in Experimental Zoology

["Williams, Tim" <TiJaWi@agron.iastate.edu>]

Dinogeorge wrote:

>One weakly arboreal feature, for example, would be marked forelimb-
> hindlimb disparity (including as an extreme case, bipedality), 

How do reconcile this statement with the fact that modern arboreal animals
tend to have forelimbs and hindlimbs of nearly equal length.  Having limbs
of comparable length is better suited for climbing trees.

> The reason I call them "weakly" arboreal is that they are the kinds of 
> features that would show up in the descendants of arboreal animals but 
> might also show up as a result of other kinds of lifestyles: They 
> support BCF essentially because they do not falsify it.

Run that by me again.

> The common ancestors of sauropods and other dinosaurs, for example, 
> remain hidden in the Middle Triassic or earlier. 

Let's see what Madagascar reveals - there's a Middle Triassic site there
that's already yielded dino bones.




Tim