Re: dinosaur taxonomy

[Jeffrey Martz <martz@holly.ColoState.EDU>]

> It seems to me that many of the synonymies Greg proposed have been
> essentially ignored, with no justification given.  

    Thats because a lot of the synonymies were proposed with no
justification given.  
     Keep in mind that Greg Paul is not the ONLY guy out there studying
theropods, and ten years have passed since the publication of PDW.  Most
of the genera and species, especially the better known ones,  have thier
specialists who have devoted considerable time to them.  In other words,
for just about every genus and species, there is probably SOMEBODY who has
spent more time studying them then Greg Paul, and they are fully qualified
to question or disagree with his evidence for synonymizing.  Greg Paul has
devoted a lot of energy to theropods, but he is not the only one.

> question that Tyrannosaurus rex and T. bataar are congeners?  I continue to
> see Tarbosaurus used as if Greg's book never existed.  

    Lots of people (including Tom Holtz and Kenneth Carpenter) consider
"Tarbosaurus" bataar as a species of Tyrannosaurus.  Tarbosaurus probably
gets tossed around as a sort of informal nickname because it sounds
neat and is shorter than saying Tyrannosaurus bataar.

> We have all of these
> monospecific dinosaur genera with apparently no basis in biology.

    How do you determine wether or not fossil species could interbreed or
not?  If you look at the osteology of modern species, you will find that
some different species have skeletons that are virtually identical, and
others have a huge amount of variation WITHIN the species.  Specific
distinctions in the fossil record have to be based on morphology because
it is all we have to go on, and in all likelyhood, even in the case of
well known forms, we are lumping what were biologically isolated speices
in some cases and splitting up biologically unified species in others.
Unfortunately, we will probably never figure it out for most fossil
species.  
     Take _Daspletosaurus_; G.P. refers to it as a subgenus of
_Tyrannosaurus_; how do you recognize  a "subgenus" in the fossil record?

LN Jeff
O-