Re: Who says dromaeosaurs can't fly?

[Ronald Orenstein <ornstn@rogers.com>]

At 10:43 PM 12/09/02 -0400, GSP1954@aol.com wrote:
> Steve may be polemical about it but so what, because he is correct that the
> cladistic cult - in which a methodology that is a merely one of a set of
> phylogenetic tools has widely been taken to be to the only legitimate means
> of restoring phylogeney - has been dealt a grevious and well deserved blow.
> It is now up to the cladists to try to explain how the methodology managed to
> ignore or deny the excellent evidence for dinosaurian neoflightlessness for
> two decades.

Umm - I still don't see this.  All cladistics does is produce a 
phylogenetic tree based on coded characters.  It says absolutely nothing 
about when, or how many times, flight evolved.  I don't see why you need to 
change the cladistically-derived tree at all based on flight or non-flight, 
as long as you are willing to assume that flight evolved within the 
maniraptorian complex more than once, or that it evolved more basally on 
the tree and was lost several times in the various cladistic 
branches.  Where is the contradiction?


--
Ronald I. Orenstein                           Phone: (905) 820-7886
International Wildlife Coalition              Fax/Modem: (905) 569-0116
1825 Shady Creek Court
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5L 3W2          mailto:ornstn@rogers.com