Re: Prolacertiformes and Protorosauria

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

Oh, and, we've had a private conversation about your manuscript and its 
peer-review where I told you exactly what I've now told you again. Don't you 
remember that either?

I can't find the comment anymore where you say that if you can make an 
analysis of amniote phylogeny in extremely little time, then so can I. 
Anyway, my point is that _you can't_. Finding out which characters are 
correlated is _necessary_, and it's work you simply didn't do. Finding out 
which characters should be ordered in which ways is _necessary_, and again 
it's work you simply didn't do. Finding out if you've correctly interpreted 
the illustrations in the literature is _necessary_, and... in an offlist 
message you once showed me a mistake you made that's so embarrassing I 
withhold it here; it had to do with the position of the pterygoids. The way 
you manage to do it so quickly is to do it extremely sloppily. Yes, I could 
do that; you're right that far. There'd just not be any point in doing it.

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Peters" <davidpeters@att.net>
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 3:05 PM

> Yes, there is some intuition that goes into judging results.

But, really, there shouldn't be.

> ie. placing mesosaurs with pareiasaurs = bad.

How close to pareiasaurs? If you put 20 million years between their common 
ancestor and the first pareiasaur, I don't see a problem. (Especially not if 
procolophonoids, lanthanosuchids, millerettids etc. etc. are closer to the 
pareiasaurs than the mesosaurs are.)

> More importantly, there is some experience at work here too. Yes, I've 
> done the larger, more inclusive study, that indicates the breaks are real 
> and taxon exclusion is the culprit.

That's your analysis, not your experience. Your result, not you. :-)