Re: Long-necked stegosaur, head tail mimicry?

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

Tim Williams writes:
 > > I should think so!  It would be disastrous to resurrect that name
 > > to denote a completely different clade from the one that it has
 > > been universally understood to mean.
 > 
 > Mike, I disagree completely and utterly with you here.  Now that
 > I've gotten that out of the way, here's why...

I'm not going to get sucked into this.  Happily, Upchurch and Wilson
agree with me.

 > > At least FOUR times -- in Mamenchisauridae, Diplodocidae (the
 > > neck of Supersaurus is best estimated at 15m, longer than any
 > > other), Brachiosauridae sensu stricto and once or more within the
 > > huge, ill-defined cloud that is Titanosauria.
 > 
 > True.  But I was referring specifically to the anatomical trait of
 > increasing neck length by wholesale recruitment of dorsals into the
 > cervical column.  As you know, diplodocids and brachiosaurids
 > lengthen the neck principally by elongation of pre-existing
 > cervicals.  _Euhelopus_ and mamenchisaurids go one better, and add
 > extra vertebrae into the neck, at the expense of the anterior
 > dorsals.  The stegosaur _Miragaia_ does this too - which
 > incidentally is how this thread originally started.

As does Barosaurus -- see McIntosh's (2005) article in Thunder Lizards.

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "I do not even own _a_ gun; let alone _many_ guns, that would
         necessitate an entire rack" -- Mike Myers, "Wayne's World"