RE: Cope'd Law

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

> From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of
> ekaterina amalitzkaya
>
> I may be entirely wrong in this, but I was looking at some old books on
> Dinosauria- especially a stuffy volume of a certain Swinton.

Yeah, Swinton's book on dinosaurs was, for a long time, the ONLY
non-children's book devoted solely to that group of reptiles.

> This guy
> attributed something like the super carnosaur model to Abel from
> the Eastern
> Reich. However, when I hunted around for abel's own words I found
> none but
> instead found an interesting piece of his in German where he discuss some
> thing like character state matrix. What struck me was that he
> might actually
> have been the founder of phylogenetic analysis with matrices.
> Also he seems
> to concede a more darwinian evolutionary scenario.

It does seem that a number of early 20th Century workers began to approach
matters in a proto-cladistic manner.  Even had they continued, though, they
would have eventually run into an operational wall: in order to evaluate the
great number of possible trees in all but the simplest of scenarios, you
need to have some way of automating the procedure.  Much like multivariate
statistics, cladistics really needed the rise of electronic computers before
it could be successful.

> In any case thanks for the clarification of Osborn's  role in
> this matter.

No problem.

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-314-7843