"The mystery of the furcula"

[StephanPickering@cs.com]

To further buttress DinoGeorge's excellent reclassificatory movements, one could add these references:
       F.A. Jenkins, K.P. Dial, G.E. Goslow, 1988. A cineradiographic analysis of bird flight: the wishbone in
             starlings is a spring. Science 241:1495-1498
       Goslow, G.E., K.P. Dial, F.A. Jenkins
             1989 The avian shoulder: an experimental approach. American Zoologist 29(1):287-301
             1990 Bird flight: insights and complications. BioScience 40(2):108-115
       Walter Bock has done a phenomenal task in revising and sorting through the taxonomic chaos of family group names for avialian theropods: 1994, History and nomenclature of avian family-group names, Bulletin AMNH 222:1-281, with a 1995 Erratum available from AMNH's website. As for Aves itself...so many conflicting names, never properly defined in the literature. In 1885, Stejneger proposed various names: Ornithopappi for Archaeopteryx (= Haeckel's 1895 Archaeornithes); Pteropappi for Ichthyornis and Aptornis (= Haeckel's 1895 Ichthyornithes); and so on. All of these were put under Haeckel's Saururae within Aves Linnaeus 1758. It could be one could use Saururae to include...well, this is the difficulty: as Mike Benton has pointed out, the nomenclatural mess is in need of revision -- and a consensus.