Re: [dinosaur] Party like it's 1758!

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

Gesendet:ÂMontag, 22. Juni 2020 um 08:59 Uhr
Von:Â"Jura" <pristichampsus@yahoo.com>
Â
> > The name Dinosauria did not change when birds (Aves) were included.
> > This reflects the phylogenetic reality that birds are a lineage of
> > dinosaurs, just as bats are a lineage of mammals.
>
> And look at the crapstorm that has created.

I've said it here years ago, and I'll say it again, that it would have been 
better to create some wholly new name to replace Dinosauria back in the 80s 
(hey, how about Ornithoscelida) and that it's way too late for that now.

(Really too bad, because the concept that birds are dinosaurs dates from the 
same time, indeed the same publications, as the return of the concept that 
_anything_ really is a dinosaur, i.e. that Ornithischia, Theropoda and 
Sauropodomorpha are each other's closest relatives and thus form a clade that 
should be named in the first place.)

However, a combined name like "Avedinosauria" would not have been a good idea 
at all, because it would imply that Aves and Dinosauria are equal in some 
important way, e.g. sister-groups.

> The glut of "non-avian dinosaur" in the literature also makes it pretty clear 
> that the old, paraphyletic definition still has merit.

Most of the time when people say "non-avian dinosaur", they really mean 
something quite different: "Mesozoic dinosaur", "extinct dinosaur", 
"non-pennaraptoran dinosaur", "non-pygostylian dinosaur", and so on. It is a 
very misleading state of affairs that these all get conflated so often, and the 
only reason they are is inertia.

> "non-cetacean artiodactyl"

Likewise, that tends to mean quite different things, excluding for example not 
Cetacea but just its crown-group, or not Cetacea but its fully aquatic members, 
or not Cetacea but its total group (with *Indohyus* that isn't all that 
different phenetically from an extant *Hyemoschus*).

> I can read a paper from the 50s, 70s, or 10s and know exactly what the 
> researchers are referring to when they say artiodactyl vs. cetartiodactyl.

Only if the authors were careful.

> Similarly, it's more common to see Sauropsida used when referring to reptiles 
> in a strictly monophyletic sense, as it's not bound by the conceptual baggage 
> of the term Reptilia.

I hope so!