Re: Kerberosaurus manakini

[Ken Carpenter <KCarpenter@dmns.org>]

My comment is more of a generality than specifically about Kerberosaurus. There 
clearly has been a trend in recent years for authors to feel that they need to 
"justify" the naming of new taxon/description of a specimen in terms of its 
cladistic relationship to other taxa. In some cases, the specimen does not 
warrant such analysis and the results are extremely dubious as has been 
discussed on the D.M.L. before.
Ken

Kenneth Carpenter, Ph.D.
Curator of Lower Vertebrate Paleontology &
Chief Preparator
Dept. of Earth Sciences
Denver Museum of Natural History 
2001 Colorado Blvd.
Denver, CO 80205

Phone: (303)370-6392
Fax: (303)331-6492
email: KCarpenter@DMNS.org

For fun:
 http://dino.lm.com/artists/display.php?name=Kcarpenter


>>> Mickey Mortimer <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com> 20/Jun/04 >>>
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