Re: coelurosaurs and phylogeny type stuff

["Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer11@msn.com>]

Nick Longrich wrote-

Great advice Nick.  These characters we work with have a lot of variation
and often have distributions we don't realize.  People (me included) base
too much off of others' data matrices.

> I wanted to club myself over the head after I got a good look at an
> uncrushed caenagnathid femur and realized that while I was correctly
> grouping the femoral heads according to their morphologies, I was
> *completely* wrong on the homologies (disregard anything I've said
> about femoral homologies in the past year...).

Good thing I didn't get to redefining my trochanteric characters or codings.
So, you now agree that most maniraptoriformes (ornithomimids, oviraptorids,
etc.) have unfused anterior and greater trochantors?

> Seems
> to me this is circular, since how do I know what's homoplastic until
> I've thrown everything into the mix and run the matrix? Maybe what I
> think is signal is actually homoplasy and vice versa? Is real
> phylogenetic signal like pornography- you know it when you see it? Or
> like pornography in the sense that it's difficult to see because it's
> often scrambled?

LOL

> Anyways, keep at it. Mickey's done some pretty impressive
> stuff, better than some of the published things I've seen. I think he
> may be onto something with Bagaraatan, maybe it's a very derived
> theropod which has done something really weird to its tail.

Thanks a lot!

Mickey Mortimer