Re: Feduccia on MANIAC

["Michael Mortimer" <mickey_mortimer111@msn.com>]

SeanSt8579@aol.com wrote-

> PS: By the way, what was the earliest MANIAC paper? Maybe Olshevsky's 
> strange
> version of it?

Nah, BCF isn't MANIAC.  Olshevsky includes some basal dinosauromorphs in 
Dinosauria, and actually excludes sauropods and maybe some basal 
sauropodomorphs, but Aves is inside Maniraptora, which is still inside 
Dinosauria.  Olshevsky just calls his hypothetical backbone of small 
arboreal/scansorial quadrupedal archosauromorphs "birds".
The first MANIAC papers I know of are the ones in Czerkas' horrible book.  
But even he had birds derived from "saurischian archosaurs", which ARE 
dinosaurs of course.  He just wanted to act like his theory was BAND.  I 
don't know where Feduccia (2002) thinks maniraptorans belong compared to 
other dinosaurs.  He seems to write off Dinosauria as being a poorly 
supported/defined group, which is BS to put it mildly.  I doubt he had any 
clear idea of how the relevent clades were related at the time, as he 
switched from ABSRD to MANIAC partway through his paper.  He still may not, 
we haven't heard from him for a while.  Martin (pers. comm.) was definitely 
ABSRD, as his Maniraptora derives from Longisquama relatives (which are 
prolacertiformes or something), but that isn't published.

Mickey Mortimer

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