Re: "Dinosaurs Died Within Hours After Asteroid Hit Earth..."

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2004 11:48 PM

> > This one... there are only 2 possibilities: either it's a loriid, means,
it
> > belongs to a _part_ of the crown group of Psittaciformes, or it's not a
> > psittaciform. The former seems quite unlikely, given e. g. the Eocene
> > psittaciform fossil record. There are many Cretaceous bird clades for
> > which
> > we don't know dentaries, or which we don't know from the LK so far...
>
> Spitting in the face of parsimony I see.

In that of purely morphological parsimony perhaps. If we only consider what
the jaw looks like, it's a lori. If we consider how old it is, this becomes
a quite weird suggestion. And if we consider how difficult it would be to
classify well-known Eocene and Paleocene birds from fragments like that one,
it becomes even more tenuous.

Sure, a big gap in the fossil record is nothing new, ever longer live the
champsosaurs. But this gap wouldn't span, say, the Middle Jurassic. It would
span the fossil-rich Eocene and the comparably fossil-rich Paleocene.

> Even if the vascular groove pattern is interpreted as being convergent
with
> lorrines, surely the other psittaciform characters of the mandible means
> it's more likely a pseudo-loriine parrot than some other group with less
> similar dentaries.  Or are basal psittaciform dentaries so unlike derived
> ones that they couldn't be told from non-psittaciform dentaries?

That's how I've understood it; I have yet to read the paper... I've only
just found out that the journal
http://www.cmnh.org/dinoarch/2001Dec/msg00675.html is accessible to me.