Re: Kerberosaurus manakini

[Mickey Mortimer <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com>]

Ken Carpenter wrote-


> what I find disturbing this the "need" some people have of doing a
cladistic analysis of every new
> specimen/taxa when the material clearly too fragmentary/incomplete to
produce anything meaningful. The > Kerberosaurus is a case in point.

Oh, I don't think such pessemism is warranted.  You can get a lot of
characters from one element alone, and Kerberosaurus preserves several
(including cranial and braincase elements that are said to be most
distinctive and variable in hadrosaurs).  If a taxon were too incomplete to
be useful for phylogenetic analysis, it would code identically to another
taxon.  Kerberosaurus codes uniquely even for the 21 characters used by
Bolotsky and Godefroit.

Mickey Mortimer