At 01:05 PM 5/28/2005 +0200, David Marjanovic wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com> To: <dinosaur@usc.edu> Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 12:18 PM Subject: Martin 2004 critique
[snip]
Finally, the very studies Martin advocates HAVE been done, by Brochu and Norell (2001). They concluded deriving birds from any non-dinosaurian archosaur involved far more temporal inconsistancy and that the fossil record actually fits BAD rather well compared to other accepted tetrapod phylogenies.
But why should Martin read the JVP?
I think that's in the Ostrom Symposium volume.
He isn't interested in dinosaurs*. He's an ornithologist -- and refuses to understand that he can't make competent statements about the origin and early evolution of birds without being a dinosaur expert.
I'm sure he doesn't follow the discussion! Feduccia, likewise, didn't know any of the recent ( = newer than The Dinosauria I) work on Coelurosauria and seemingly still thought it was the old wastebasket before I sent him the long list of apomorphies from HP Oliver Rauhut's dissertation. Hey, in his 1996 book he still preassumed that hadrosaurs were aquatic and therefore (logically!) concluded the paleontologists must all have been too stupid to take their increased preservation potential into account when calculating predator-prey ratios!!! It's just like how most of us don't follow the apparently ongoing discussion about the monophyly of "Old World flycatchers"... except for the consequences.
* Except Korean brachiosaurs. He coauthored the description of the first "brachiosaurid" tooth from South (of course!) Korea a few years ago, as well as a paper on sauropod tracks from there...
[snip]