Re: Ruben Strikes Back

["ekaterina amalitzkaya" <eamalitz@hotmail.com>]

> >evidence of a Triassic animal that was essentially feathered. We were
> going to give it... Essentially, nobody at my lab was given a
> >slot at the podium.... We have effectively been silenced. And Prothero 
> has
> been humming and hawing about, well maybe he'll let us

Is this for real or some kind of premature observation of all Fool's Day. 
There is absolutely no reason for a Triassic archosaur not to have feathers. 
Dubious claims to that effect already exist regarding Longisquama, so why 
should any mafia want to prevent Ruben unless he himself has some really 
suspicious stuff.

In Sereno's Science review he makes an interesting statement that the 
ancestral tetanuran might have been a large bodied predator. If we accept 
this a size compression occurred only along the coelurosaurid line and may 
be this was the selective force for the origin of feathers/insulation. And 
in Gouldian wording flight may almost be an exaptation or a spandrel. Do the 
experts uniformly support a size compression along the coelurosaurid line or 
is just an artefact of sampling. Are the tyrannosaurs secondarily 
re-enlarged then?
Would forms like Deltadromeus represent the primitive large bodied state of 
coelurosaurs?  If the contraction is for real may be the coelurosaurs 
emerged from an island dwarf population that swept the world (just a 
speculation).
EA



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