Re: David Hone on the Cope's Rule paper

["T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>]

On 5/20/07, Tim Williams <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Without contradicting what David [Hone] said, I would point out that 
> sauropods (the
> 'biggest of the big') do not appear to follow Cope's Rule.  Quite the
> opposite, in fact.  The most recent study (that of Carrano, 2005)
> demonstrated a trend of decreasing body size among Sauropoda in the later
> Cretaceous period.  This was largely due to the proliferation to certain
> 'undersized' titanosaurs in the Late Cretaceous, especially the
> Saltasaurinae.

You certainly can say that without contradicting David Hone, since in
an earlier paper he reached a similar conclusion: "Only the Cretaceous
sauropods [among large dinosaurs] do not follow the trend, and these
are characterized by their extreme variance of sizes" (Hone et al.
2005:594).

Hone, D. W. E., T. M. Keesey, D. Pisani & A. Purvis. 2005. Macroevolutionary
trends in the Dinosauria: Cope's rule. Journal of Evolutionary Biology
18:587-595.

--
Mike Keesey