Re: Bambiraptor complete!

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

> >There is anyway evidence for several "birds" in LJ Germany. First of
> >all, the isolated feather falls at the lower end of the range of flying
> >birds in its asymmetry, unlike *Archaeopteryx*.
>
> Could it have been a tail feather, rather than from the wing?

Who knows? But it is _more_ asymmetric than Archie's _wing_ feathers, so
that's IMHO not a very parsimonious hypothesis.

> Or, maybe the isolated feather didn't come from a bird at all, but from a
> non-avian theropod.  Who says non-volant theropods couldn't have
asymmetric
> feathers?

Indeed nobody. Wing feathers of recent flightless birds don't stop where
flying birds begin, there is quite some overlap in their ranges of
asymmetry... though very few flightless birds have such asymmetric wing
feathers.

> As for "Saurier und Vögel des Weissjura am Harz entdeckt" (a publication
by
> that esteemed ancient paleontologist Anonymous), all we have is the title
to
> go on.

Yep. It is very suggestive, however: "*.saurs and birds of the White [ =
Upper] Jurassic discovered at [the foot of] the Harz [mountains]", and Aves
in the key words.

> By the way, I have no ideological objection to there being more than one
> archaeopterygid genus or species from Solnhofen; _A. bavarica_ should
> probably be kept as a distinct species, IMHO.

I'm not even sure about that. The main reason for this assignment is the
ossified sternum, right? Preservation... preparation (the Berlin specimen
lies on its unprepared ventral side)... individual variation... and I'm
still not sure whether that bone represents a fusion of both sterna or just
one of them, but it's not like I had seen the fossil.
        The only argument for *A. recurva* are the namegiving teeth, which
could still represent a somewhat extreme ontogenetic variation, though no
more extreme than in *Albertosaurus/Gorgosaurus libratus*.