Re: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of New Papers

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

> ABSTRACT: Most titanosaur dinosaurs are represented by incomplete skeletal
> elements lacking articulated pes. An exceptionally preserved specimen from
> the Late Campanian-Early Maastrichtian strata of Patagonia (Argentina)
> provides new data on pedal morphology and the evolutionary trends of these
> huge dinosaurs. This finding is one of the few articulated titanosaur pes
> known in the world

I'd just like to mention that, although you can't tell that from looking at 
the word, the plural of pes is pedes. (Fortunately it doesn't follow the 
pattern of manus.) That's why the adjective is "pedal". Incidentally, 
stapes/stapedes works the same way.

> ABSTRACT: Recent finds of well-preserved temnospondyl skeletons [...]
> vomerine fangs greatly enlarged to occupy entire width of element;

Man. :-o

> Hone, D.W.E., and Benton, M.J. 2008. A new genus of rhynchosaur from the
> Middle Triassic of south-west England. Palaeontology 51(1):95-115. doi:
> 10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00739.x.

Ah, so it's out now.

> The new
> cladistic analysis, for which many more characters were coded for Fodonyx
> than before (a rise from 39 to 75 per cent), counter-intuitively produced
> less well-resolved results: the new codings of previously uncoded 
> characters
> introduced conflict so that Fodonyx turns out to be less like the Late
> Triassic rhynchosaur clade than had been assumed before.

Yes, it happens that having too few characters in a matrix masks conflicting 
signals. This can also happen when multistate characters that should be 
ordered are unordered.