Re: Dinosauricon Phylogeny: in progress

["Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com>]

David Marjanovic wrote-

> BTW... remember when I promised some characters to unite Archie with
> *Rahonavis* + *Shenzhouraptor* to the exclusion of everything else? Last
> night I let the analysis run; I stopped it after 1195831 MPTs (length =
> 183); a few entries in the matrix were missing, so I don't have terribly
> much confidence in the results, plus there were some stupid settings that
> e. g. made the trees rooted on *Alexornis* (incredible!!!); 47 taxa, 62
> characters (yay); the strict consensus is a green pasture; the 50 %
> majority-rule consensus, shown as rooted on the allzero outgroup again
> (which looks AFAIK identical to, say, *Compsognathus* or
> *Sinosauropteryx*), is as follows...

I'm not a big fan of majority rule consensus trees, each MPT being just as
likely as any other, even if 99% of them agree in some way the other 1%
doesn't.  Doesn't mean the odd 1% of trees is less likely.  This is
especially true given the ease at which topologies are collapsed in nearly
any phylogenetic analysis.  Majority consensus isn't even a robusticity
measure like bootstrap (which is annoying itself in the exclusion of data).
It just depends on the proportion of trees with a certain topology that lets
another part of the tree vary.

> +--allzero outgroup
> `--+--*Caudipteryx* (all species lumped)
>    `--+--*Archaeopteryx* (both species lumped)
>       `--+--basal Troodontidae (*Sinovenator* + *-ornithoides* lumped)
>          `--+--*Microraptor* (both species lumped)
>             `--+--Scansoriopterygidae (both species lumped)
>                `--+--+--*Rahonavis*
>                   |  `--*Shenzhouraptor*
>                   `--+--*Hulsanpes*
>                      `--+--*Yandangornis*
>                         `--+--*Sapeornis*
>                            `--+--*Confuciusornis sanctus*
>                               `--+--*Vorona*
>                                  `--+--*Patagopteryx*
>                                     `--+--Euornithes (see below)
>                                        `--Enantiornithes (see below)

Nice to see your outgroup expanding.  I don't think the Patagopteryx
position is as odd as it seems.  It has oddly primitive coracoid morphology.
What keeps it outside Ornithothoraces in your trees?

> Does someone know what an *Ichthyornis* pelvis looks like in dorsal view?
> Are the ilia sigmoid, like in Neornithes and *Avimimus*, or rather
> straight and far apart, like in dromies, Archie and, as I saw yesterday,
> *Longipteryx*?

I can't tell from the horrible photocopy quality in Clarke's thesis, and
Marsh's drawing is inaccurate.

Mickey Mortimer