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

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

>   Age should be irrelevant to morphological comparisons.

And to the phylogenetic assignments that follow from them? Should it really
be _completely_ irrelevant to those?

> 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.

It was explicitely said to be a crown-group parrot. If it's not one, it
seemingly can't be a psittaciform at all... as I wrote, I have yet to copy
and read the *Psittacopes* paper.

> Only Mayr, it seems, thought that Stidham actually said it was a
> parrot, but Stidham himself responded by indicating he did not.

Then you've understood that response differently from me.

>   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.

1. I'm waiting for someone to test the hypothesis that that fragment could
be a ceratopsian instead. This is not adequately addressed in the paper.
2. Unlike the Eocene (of the northern hemisphere at least), the Jurassic of
northeastern Australia -- the place is supposed to have been rather
isolated -- is very poorly known, so big surprises are considerably more
probable there than in the Eocene.