Re: E and P of Pteros - Notes 1

["Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com>]

David Peters

> I'd like to see someone character code a number of the putative juvenile
specimens and see where they pop > up on the cladogram, rather than
prejudicially ignoring their potential contribution due to their apparent
> immaturity. Remember, there are bee-sized bats and birds in this world. It
is an apriori assumption not to
> consider the wee ones. At worst we could find that they lump in with some
putative adult. At best we might > find a clade of micro-pteros.

Is the latter possibility really "best"?  I know from my coelurosaur
analysis, juvenile enantiornithines (Liaoxiornis, Eoenantiornis, Chiappe's
two SVP 2002 specimens) clump together.  And I don't see why fooling PAUP
into analyzing character distributions under the assumption an oddly
chimaeric clade of taxa exists is useful, or beneficial.

Mickey Mortimer