Re: GIVING CERATOSAURS THE BOOT

[theropod@garnet.berkeley.edu (John R. Hutchinson)]

Darren Naish says:

> A while back (while reporting on the Nov
>2nd SVPC), John Hutchinson said that the possibility now exists that
>ceratosaurs
>are carnosaurs.... so has anyone come up with a phylogeny that backs
>Ceratosauria as paraphyletic.

I'm not sure exactly what I said, but the gist of one or two phylogenies
presented at SVP was that _perhaps_ Ceratosaurus belongs as a more basal
Carnosaur. Which does present problems for the name "Ceratosauria" in a
way, but not for the grouping of the rest of the smaller ceratosaurs. I'm
doing a little project now on Segisaurus to follow up on Camp's original
description [it's been 60 years since anyone took a look at the guy
(Segisaurus, that is) in depth], and that will include a new Ceratosaur
phylogeny attempt.

One note about Segisaurus that I can make so far...Camp said its bones
weren't hollow -- wrong. Hollow. We're going to do some modern analyses of
the preervation to figure out once and for all what the deal is with the
odd bone preservation. A new look at the ?clavicle will definitely be done
as well. More later.

                        John R. Hutchinson
                  Evolving Evolutionary Biologist
                 Department of Integrative Biology
                  3060 Valley Life Sciences Bldg
                University of California - Berkeley
                        Berkeley, CA 94720
                          (510) 643-2109
         http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/people/jrh/homepage.html