UPCHURCH ON TITANOSAURS

[darren.naish@port.ac.uk]

Tom Holtz (who?) wrote..

> There are two currently debated positions for titanosaurs.  The 
> traditional position, and one still upheld by Paul Upchurch (unless 
> his new analysis presented this spring supports otherwise) is that 
> titanosaurs and diplodocoids are sister taxa. 

Paul is now, indeed, supporting a closer relationship between 
brachiosaurids and titanosaurs (pers. comm. 1998). As I mentioned 
previously, Jainu and Weishampel recently showed Paul's latest 
cladogram as an overhead in a talk they gave, and brachiosaurids and 
titanosaurs were close.

I note that Paul Sereno is now saying that nemegtosaurids are 
brachiosaurids, and not diplodocoid diplodocimorphs. In this he is 
agreeing with Calvo. This requires for massive parallelism between 
nemegtosaurids and diplodocoids.

Hooray for the Camel Spewtum Local Fauna.

"This R2 unit has a bad motivator"

DARREN NAISH
darren.naish@port.ac.uk