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Well, it's not like these are particularly deranged propositions - they all predate Peters/were independently proposed by other authors. And at least superficially, the Casea-Eunotosaurus skull comparison in Fig. 27 is convincing.
Thomas Yazbeck
From: dinosaur-l-request@mymaillists.usc.edu <dinosaur-l-request@mymaillists.usc.edu> on behalf of Mickey Mortimer <mickey_mortimer111@msn.com>
Sent: Friday, April 2, 2021 11:45 PM To: dinosaur-l@usc.edu <dinosaur-l@usc.edu>; David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> Subject: Re: [dinosaur] Chinlechelys (Triassic turtle) morphology and pareiasaur origin of turtles (free pdf)
Interestingly, the paper's two heterodox main ideas are the same as David Peters'- Pappochelys related to placodonts, and Eunotosaurus related to caseids. Yet Peters is nowhere mentioned.
Mickey Mortimer
From: dinosaur-l-request@mymaillists.usc.edu <dinosaur-l-request@mymaillists.usc.edu> on behalf of David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>
Sent: Friday, April 2, 2021 2:45 PM To: dinosaur-l@usc.edu <dinosaur-l@usc.edu> Subject: Re: [dinosaur] Chinlechelys (Triassic turtle) morphology and pareiasaur origin of turtles (free pdf) I have rather more to say about this paper (good, bad, and ugly...) than would fit here, but there's one thing that qualifies as a failure of peer review: the astonishing lack of awareness of any molecular analyses of amniote phylogeny
published after 2012 (apart from a study from 2013 that used the presence/absence of genes as characters).
>From a morphological point of view, I'm not any happier with it than the authors or the reviewers, but it is a fact that the sister-group relationship of turtles and archosaurs to the exclusion of the lepidosaurs has been consistently and robustly supported in the phylogenetic analyses of molecular data since then. For example, it's one of the strongest nodes in the tree of 100 species of gnathostomes by Irisarri et al. (2017). It's not going away on its own. I'm not saying there can't possibly be anything wrong with all these molecular analyses (for example, the lepidosaurs in general and the squamates in particular often have a suspiciously long branch, and squamate phylogeny is itself a similar case), but, being unaware of the very issue, the authors make no attempt to come up with a hypothesis for what might be going on there. And why is the presence of sutural surfaces on an interclavicle supposed to tell us anything about cleithra, which aren't supposed to contact the interclavicle...? Gesendet: Freitag, 02. April 2021 um 17:59 Uhr Von: "Ben Creisler" <bcreisler@gmail.com> Free pdf: Chinlechelyidae fam. nov. Asher J. Lichtig and Spencer G. Lucas (2021) Chinlechelys from the Upper Triassic of New Mexico, USA, and the origin of turtles. Palaeontologia Electronica 24(1):a13. |