A WEEKEND AT BOB'S:DROM. REFS

["D.W.Naish" <dwn194@soton.ac.uk>]

Gee troopers, good conversations...

OK well, I'm guess I'm not as well versed in Bakkerian philosophy as you might
have thought. Over the weekend I watched a videoed lecture Uncle Bob gave to
aspiring dino-artists a couple of months ago. This gave me the chance to get
well up to date with his theories, particularly concerning 'membership' of
Dinosauria. Now, as ya'll know, when he wrote Heresies in '86 or so, he was
arguing that pterosaurs and lagosuchids were bona fide Dinosauria. 

I said ('DINOSAUR ARGUMENT: THE RESOLVE') that he'd since abandoned that idea.
I said this because I heard him discussing the dinosaur family tree a couple of
years back and he didn't mention pterosaurs at all then (oh, sorry,
'pterodactyls' in Bakker-speak..). It's been pretty well proven that pterosaurs
are a dinosaur sister-group, so maybe, I thought, he'd finally bowed to peer
pressure. Well, no. 

Bakker now defines Dinosauria as archosaurs possessing two special characters;
an elongated s-curved neck; and a special cartilaginous wad that fits in a
groove on the back of the tibia. Obviously this definition differs from
Dinosauria as cladistically defined, so this definition must stand as 'Bob's
dinosaurs'. Lagosuchians and pterosaus share this feature, so to Bob they're
dinosaurs! I'm not fanning any flames here, but just trying to save my butt....
I was wrong in what I'd previously said.

DROMAEOSAUR REFS.

The stuff discussing the TRUTH about the Deinonychus skull can be found in;

GINGERICH, P.D. 1976. Phylogenetic inference and methodology as applied to the
vertebrate record. Evolutionary Biology 9: 353-363

PAUL, G.S.1988. The Small Predatory Dinosaurs of the Mid-Mesozoic: the horned
theropods of the Morrison and Great Oolite - Ornitholestes and Proceratosaurus -
 and the sickle-claw theropods of the Cloverly, Djadokhta and Judith River -
Deinonychus, Velociraptor and Saurornitholestes. Hunteria vol.2 no. 4

PAUL, G.S 1988. Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. Simon and Schuster (N.Y.)

"Whales sometimes form a defensive circle, tails pointing outward..."
 - P. Evans, 'Whales'.

"Get hold of some dead bodies... and cut into them..." - - Bob Bakker
"But Peter, who was very naughty, ran straight away to Mr. McGregor's garden,
and squeezed under the gate!" - - B. Potter
"Take me to Jabba now.."   "I take you to Jabba now..."

I'll be back shortly.. too many threads left dangling here..

DARREN NAISH
dwn194@soton.ac.uk