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

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

David Marjanovic (david.marjanovic@gmx.at) 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.>

  Age should be irrelevant to morphological comparisons. But, as Stidham
and Clarke indicate, it is only a jaw, not the whole bird. It LOOKS a lot
like loriids extant today, but it was never applied to BE a loriid.
Stidham himself has never had his work regarded against except by Mayr,
who feels that the _suggestion_ made the study erroneous by nature. Only
Mayr, it seems, thought that Stidham actually said it was a parrot, but
Stidham himself responded by indicating he did not.

<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.>

  So? Apparently the entire upper Early Jurassic, Middle Jurassic, and
Late Jurassic separate the Cretaceous dicynodont in Australia from the
previously youngest dicynodont. This gap is significant, but age should
not be a condition if morphology shows an alternate interpretation. That
age was in fact Mayr's _primary_ argument against psittaciform
relationships speaks of this; he ignored the morphology for the most part,
and used age alone to attempt to disprove Stidham's
morphologically-founded hypothesis.

  Cheers,

=====
Jaime A. Headden

  Little steps are often the hardest to take.  We are too used to making leaps 
in the face of adversity, that a simple skip is so hard to do.  We should all 
learn to walk soft, walk small, see the world around us rather than zoom by it.

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)


        
                
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