Re: "Dinosaurs Died Within Hours After Asteroid Hit Earth..."

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 30, 2004 12:53 PM

> David Marjanovic wrote-
>
> > In that of purely morphological parsimony perhaps. If we only consider
> > what the jaw looks like, it's a lori. If we consider how old it is, this
> > becomes a quite weird suggestion. And if we consider how difficult it
would
> > be to classify well-known Eocene and Paleocene birds from fragments like
that
> > one, it becomes even more tenuous.
>
> That's too generalized to mean anything.  Are there any Paleogene taxa
with
> this loriine-like beak?

No.

> How about with a psittacid-like beak?

No.

> > Sure, a big gap in the fossil record is nothing new, ever longer live
the
> > champsosaurs. But this gap wouldn't span, say, the Middle Jurassic. It
> > would span the fossil-rich Eocene and the comparably fossil-rich
Paleocene.
>
> How many Paleocene and Eocene loons are known?

Paleocene: none (I wrote "comparably" -- absence of sites of the quality of
Quercy, the London Clay, the Green River Fm, let alone Messel...). Eocene:
one (*Colymboides anglicus*), according to Feduccia's book (1996).

> > OK, more convincing, but scapulae and femora are unknown for lots of
> > Mesozoic bird clades...
>
> Why do you insist on making that kind of argument?  It's like me saying
"You
> know, Tochisaurus' metatarsus shares a lot of synapomorphies with
> troodontids, but with Bagaraatan, paronychodonts and Richardoestesia
around
> at the time with unknown metatarsi, I don't feel secure in referring it to
> the clade."

We already have troodontids from this time and place, unlike the situation
with cormorants. And I have some trouble imagining cormorants and flying
hesperornithiforms coexisting... well... with anhingas and grebes and
sungrebes coexisting with cormorants today, this doesn't sound so convincing
anymore.

> And procellariiformes are distinct ecologically, supporting the notion
> neornithines/avians were diverse by the Mesozoic.

Which tells us nothing either way about parrots.