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Re: Coelurus (and the "food fight")


Mickey and Jaime,
I think Jaime meant to say "inside", not "outside" a node....
It may look like I'm picking on Tom Holtz in particular, but I'm not. In fact, when I used the phrase "even Ornithomimus", I was indicating that this was a good choice compared to most other coelurosaurs.
I was just using this as an example of why such taxa should be named informally, not formally. I won't even formally recognize a coelurosaur clade (which has a far more stable content), although I obviously recognize this clade in my classification.
Coelurosauria is not destabilizing, and I know the content of the group. So I will continue to use the informal term coelurosaur. But when you say maniraptoriform or maniraptor, I have to guess whether you are following Sereno (who includes the tyrannosauroids) or not (not to mention compsognathids and a quite a few genera). It would be far less confusing and more concise (in terms of content) just to say "coelurosaurs minus blah, blah, blah" (or draw a cladogram, which I convert to a coding sequence), so I will no longer use either maniraptoran or maniraptoriform.
You are slicing up the tree into too many *formal* pieces, and as Benton has noted, it going to just get messier and messier. I not saying Linnean classification doesn't have it problems, but at least it was a palatable stew of sorts. Soon we will either have "mush" or one faction of "cooks" will have to try to oust the other group of cooks, and we will have one big food fight that could paralyze the nomenclatural restaurant for years.
You can continue fighting over which cookbook is best, I'm going to continue trying to combine them into a single, improved cookbook. Once the food fight escalates, I'm going to my own kitchen and others of a like mind will be welcome to join me. I will no longer participate once a relatively friendly food fight turns nasty, and Benton and I are not the only ones who think it will.
-------Ken
P.S. And remember that the phylogeny of coelurosaurs is a picnic compared to some groups (like arthropods or bilateral metazoans).
********************************************************* 
From: "Mickey_Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer11@email.msn.com>
Reply-To: Mickey_Mortimer11@email.msn.com
To: <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Subject: Re: Coelurus a maniraptoran (for how long?)
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 23:49:26 -0700

Jaime A. Headden wrote-

> However, let me start off with this
> statement: in only one analysis published using cladistic
> methods, Sereno's in 1999, plus his preliminary support at this
> in 1998 (same analysis), tyrannosaurs move outside of a node
> defined as the most recent common ancestor of *Ornithomimus* and
> Neornithes, which Tom Holtz, 1995b, named Maniraptoriformes.

Not so.  Tyrannosaurs are not maniraptoriformes in several studies
including-
- Sues 1997
- Forster et al. 1998
- Sues and Makovicky 1998
- Xu et al. 1999
.... as well as my own and Tom's newest analyses :-)

Mickey Mortimer 

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