Re: My Phylogeny: Growing Science (and growing e-mails)

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

David Marjanovic wrote-

> So it has an obturator process. One less question mark...

Actually..... it turns out Jaime drew the dotted lines in himself.  However,
he assures me Kurzanov said the distal and ventral edges are broken, we just
don't know how much.  Jaime's reconstruction looks oviraptorid, Kurzanov's
avian.  I'd recommend coding it as ?, I think that's the way I have it.

> Strange, strange. I assume they don't say so just in a character matrix?
:-)

Norell and Makovicky state it in their paper (it's the 1997 Velociraptor
paper in AMN, so there is no matrix).  Randall Irmis recently told me photos
of the Solnhofen specimen show an ischial symphysis, so that's more evidence
it was present in Archaeopteryx.

> Like
> +--+--Dromaeosauridae
>  |    `--*Bambiraptor*
>  `--+--*Sinornithosaurus*
>       `--+--*Archaeopteryx*
>            `--*Yandangornis* and the rest?

Usually, yes.  But those eumaniraptorans never stay still.

> Good. I'll add it.

Why don't you first make sure you can see a difference between pygostylian
and basal tetanurine feet in this regard, then be certain you can define the
character state well.  I see that ornithurines have distinctive metatarsi,
but the pygostylians are another matter.

> They don't say the tip is preserved, do they?

Nope.  They don't even cover the tail in the vertebral section, just a
couple sentences at the beginning of the main description.

> Memory failing. Was that *Velociraptor*? I believe I have read something
in
> your Details on Achillobator...

Velociraptor has five sacrals (Norell and Makovicky, 1997), but I can assure
you I never said Achillobator has more than five in my Details on
Achillobator post.

> So should I add it as an OTU? (It's a bit fragmentary...)

That's what I did, but it sometimes makes huge polytomies.

> Not all birds have pneumatic tails. This is one reason why I wrote
> "occurring" and not "present" :-) ... IMHO it does tell something that it
> _never_ occurs in known dromaeosaurs and many other theropods except
> carcharodontosaurids (size-related feature, judging from the sauropods
which
> also have it).

_Never_ occurs in dromaeosaurs.... except for Achillobator :-) .  Don't
think it's size related.  Carcharodontosaurus and Acrocanthosaurus have it-
not Giganotosaurus.  And tyrannosaurids don't, they can get pretty big.

> Which is juvenile, and *Archaeopteryx* has dromaeosaur-like ridges and
> lacrimal hornlets in both a drawing and the text of PDW.

Yes, I remember Paul's excellent head restoration.  Try to find it in the
literature or on an actual specimen though.  You can't code from a
restoration.

> > Padian, K.; Ji Q.; & Ji S.-a. 2001. Feathered dinosaurs and the origin
of
> > flight. p. 117-135.
>
> Which journal? :-)

Oh, sorry.  It's in-
Tanke, D.H. & Carpenter, K. (eds.); Skrepnick, M.W. (art ed.) 2001.
_Mesozoic Vertebrate Life: New Research Inspired by the Paleontology of
Philip J. Currie_. Indiana University Press (Bloomington & Indianapolis
[Indiana]) 577 pp.

Mickey Mortimer