Re: New alvarezsaurid

["Matthew Troutman" <m_troutman@hotmail.com>]

>I forgot to mention something, mayber perhaps it's been said so many 
>times on the list, I thought I would be redundant to heck if I did say 
>it, but we can trace Aves' convergences because we have so much of the 
>group (nearly all of them are living, or were living, during our 
>timeline when we could study them) and many new fossils of them that 
are 
>clearly birds (*Confuciusornis*, *Protarchaeopteryx*, Archie and 
>*Rahona*, etc.) but when dealing with dinos (here's the redundant 
point) 
>we have so _little_ of the fossil record in existence and knowledge 
that 
>to try to trace a set of lineages by convergence as seen in Aves would 
>be, well, pardon me, foolish. It can be refuted, is equivocal, and so 
>on. I'm not saying it's wrong, though.

     Yes, it would be nice to a pod of dinosaurs living so we can learn 
a lot more about them, but we don't.


>Well, the habits aren't the point. The degree of convergence is also a 
>convergent characters, but because the character numbers seem to favor 
>an "true" avian *Shuvuuia* as opposed to an oviraptorosaurian one, I 
>will say that the evidence is on Archie's side, not Ovi's. Hmmm. Time 
>will tell, of course.

    The habits are the point in a way. One can look at the mandibles of 
a flamingo and a whale and see that they are convergence on one another 
because they have a similiar way of collecting food. 

MattTroutman

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