Re: Bad as opposed to BADD

["Jonathan R. Wagner" <znc14@ttacs1.ttu.edu>]

At 11:25 AM 10/28/96 -0500, Ron Orenstein wrote:

>George's term "dino-bird" begs the question of whether the common
>ancestor of these animals would, if we had it, be classifiable as a
>non-bird dinosaur, a non-bird archosaur outside the dinosaur clade,
>or a bird (which would I suppose require that dromaeosaurids, or any
>other theropod this hypothesis fits, be nested within the clade that
>includes all taxa accepted as birds).

        As I have pointed out to Senor Olshevsky in the past, there is
already a fantastically concise and accurate cladistic taxon already defined
for an group of animals which sit about in trees randomly shooting off the
non-avian dinosaur lineages, and that name is Dinosauria (sensu cladistica
Owen. I apologize to all, the year escapes me, and for this I should be
flogged...).  Dinosauria is currently and probably insufficently (Holtz,
semi-pers. com.), defined as most recent common ancestor of _Triceratops_
and birds, and thus these "dinobirds" George keeps mentioning are for the
most part properly termed dinosaurs.
        "That which begets dinosaur is dinosaur."
        Wagner
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| Jonathan R. Wagner                    "You can clade if you want to,     |
| Department of Geosciences              You can leave your friends behind |
| Texas Tech University                  Because your friends don't clade  |
| Lubbock, TX 79409                               and if they don't clade, |
|       *** wagner@ttu.edu ***           Then they're no friends of mine." |
|           Web Page:  http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/~jrw6f             |
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