Postorbital processes on jugals

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

I'm checking the distribution of absent postorbital processes around the
origin of birds and have come across more confusion than just the absence in
mononykines and the presence in confuciusornithids: HP Mickey Mortimer has
said onlist that basal Ornithothoraces still have the processes and has
mentioned the Spanish nestling, *Longipteryx* and *Yanornis*. Are there
others? The photo available of *Yanornis*
http://www.scichina.com/kz/0105/kzfm05.stm isn't detailed enough for me to
tell; does the paper get more specific? The photo of *Longipteryx*
http://www.scichina.com/ky/0111/kyfm11.stm is almost detailed enough and
seems to show one, but is that maybe a disarticulated quadrate? The paper on
the Spanish nestling explicitely speaks of a "jugal bar", labels no
postorbital process on it, and the quadrate in the photos (especially that
of the counterslab, Fig. 2) looks a lot like the feature in *Longipteryx*.
Both the photo of the main slab (Fig. 1) and the reconstruction drawings
(Fig. 3) do show an ascending process on the jugal, but it is far caudal,
lateral to the quadrate, so that I think it is the fused quadratojugal. How
far off am I with these interpretations? Are there other ornithothoracines
except confuciusornithids with postorbital processes on the jugals? Please
respond soon, I need it, as I'm writing an update to my paper, and I'll
claim that interpreting the absence of said processes in mononykines and
{Ornithothoraces > Confuciusornithidae} as a synapomorphy reversed in C. is
still as parsimonious as assuming convergence if nobody stops me :-)

Thanks in advance!

José L. Sanz, Luis M. Chiappe, Bernardino P. Pérez-Moreno, José J.
Moratalla, Francisco Hernández-Carrasquilla, Angela D. Buscalioni, Francisco
Ortega, Francisco J. Poyato-Ariza, Diego Rasskin-Gutman, Xavier
Martínez-Delclòs: A Nestling Bird from the Lower Cretaceous of Spain:
Implications for Avian Skull and Neck Evolution, Science 276, 1543 -- 1548
(6 June 1997)