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

[Mickey Mortimer <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com>]

David Marjanovic wrote-

> 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.

That's too generalized to mean anything.  Are there any Paleogene taxa with
this loriine-like beak?  How about with a psittacid-like beak?

> 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.

How many Paleocene and Eocene loons are known?

> > Very poor argument.  First of all, the specimens Hope (2002) describes
are a
> > scapula and a femur.  She lists three scapular synapomorphies to support
> > this, and six femoral ones (two of which are unique to the clade).
>
> OK, more convincing, but scapulae and femora are unknown for lots of
> Mesozoic bird clades...

Why do you insist on making that kind of argument?  It's like me saying "You
know, Tochisaurus' metatarsus shares a lot of synapomorphies with
troodontids, but with Bagaraatan, paronychodonts and Richardoestesia around
at the time with unknown metatarsi, I don't feel secure in referring it to
the clade."  Ridiculous.  You'll always have taxa with unknown parts, and
completely unknown taxa.  They're no reason to doubt the referral of
isolated elements to a comparable taxon.

> > As for the albatross, there's also Lonchodytes, which seems to be a
> > procellariiform.
>
> But not an albatross. :-) -- Procellariiforms in general are expected from
> the presence of loons.

And procellariiformes are distinct ecologically, supporting the notion
neornithines/avians were diverse by the Mesozoic.

Mickey Mortimer