Re: Sinusonasus, Aberratiodontus and other birds

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

David Marjanovic wrote-

> > shorter tail,
>
> Are you sure the end of the tail is preserved? To me, it looks like the
tail
> ends very suddenly, and could be broken and/or partly hidden in the
> sediment.

It looks like a tapered tip to me.  Which would make about twenty-seven
vertebrae.

> > The cranial reconstruction is terrible
>
> The shapes of the elements are terrible, but their topological
relationships
> are not all that bad.

So I should be thankful it's not terrible in both ways, like Hou's Jibeinia
skeletal reconstruction? ;-)

> > I don't see clear evidence for a postorbital,
> > the structure identified as such could
> > easily be a quadrate instead.
>
> The thing you identify as a quadrate ought to be one -- if not a
pterygoid.
> The thing cranial to it, though, is in the right position for a
postorbital,
> and contacts more or less the right bones.

If you mean the narrow strip roughly connecting the distal quadrate with the
broad triangular postorbital process of the frontal, I agree.  But this is
far more delicate than the huge postorbital identified by Gong et al., which
seems to be what I call a quadrate (Gong et al. and I agree on
identification of the supratemporal fenestra).

> I can't find the tail, BTW. I wonder if it's on the counterslab (which is
> not figured and may not exist).

Why not the structure directly ventral to the distal upper tibiotarsus, or
the structure ventral and perpendicular to that?

> >
http://students.washington.edu/eoraptor/Pygostylia.htm#Aberratiodontuswui
>
> You could add the peculiar heterodonty to the diagnosis.

True, and I need to replace "maxilla" with "dentary", since it was a typo of
Gong et al. to state it had more than twenty-one maxillary teeth.

Mickey Mortimer