Non-monophyletic Pterodactyloidea

[Unwin <h0662eka@rz.hu-berlin.de>]

Non-monophyletic Pterodactyloidea?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, or so goes the 
traditional saw. 

Pterodactyloidea is universally (well almost) accepted as monophyletic. 
Characters supporting this clade can be found in papers/books/theses by 
Bennett, Howse, Kellner, Kuhn, Padian, Plieninger, Unwin, Wellnhofer, and 
others. My personal favourites (in the Geol. Soc. special volume) will be 
available for you to peruse at leisure later this year. In the meantime 
some of them are listed in Unwin (1995), but if this is not enough you 
should also check out Bennett (1994) and Kellner (1996). 

If the monophyly of the Pterodactyloidea is to be challenged (an 
extraordinary claim - but perhaps not quite as extraordinary as some) 
then the onus is on the challenger to put forward some real evidence, 
either in a paper, or here on the DML if they so wish. I am sure that, 
like me, everyone in DML land is eagerly awaiting to here of characters, 
or character states, that are common to some, but not all basal pterosaur 
clades and some but NOT all pterodactyloid clades. And when a cladistic 
study with explicitly defined characters, a character data set, node 
support values, and so on, is published with evidence that 
Pterodactyloidea is non-monophyletic maybe we can start to take this idea 
seriously. 

Cheers,

Dave 


Literature:

Bennett, S. C. 1994. Taxonomy and systematics of the Late Cretaceous 
pterosaur Pteranodon (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea). Occasional Papers 
of the Natural History Museum, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, 
Kansas, 169, 1-70. 

Kellner, A. W. A. 1996. Description of new material of Tapejaridae and 
Anhangueridae (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea) and discussion of pterosaur 
phylogeny. 547 pp., Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University (publ. University 
Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, 1997). 

Unwin, D. M. 1995. Preliminary results of a phylogenetic analysis of the 
Pterosauria (Diapsida: Archosauria). In: Sun Ailing & Wang Yuanqing 
(eds.), Sixth Symposium on Mesozoic Terrestrial Ecosystems and Biota. 
Short Papers, 69-72. China Ocean Press, Beijing.