Re: where have all the etc.[Pharris]

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

> > > > > With dozens to choose from, some disagreeing with others, some not
> including taxa that others do, which character list shall we start with?

All, of course. Grab all characters you can find. Where two papers disagree 
on which character state a given taxon has, check which is correct. If you 
can't check that (because the text and the illustrations are too imprecise 
and you haven't seen the fossil itself), then you have four possibilities --  
code it as "?" which is probably wrong, drop the taxon, drop the character, 
or be _VERY_ cautious about the results of your analysis (for example, try 
what changes if you drop the taxon or the character).
       That's one more reason why I don't trust my bird analysis too 
much -- even though it has more taxa than any published one and includes 
some corrected codings that haven't made it to published analyses yet. With 
the exception of some 2 or 3 entries, all my codings are from the 
literature, most of which is rather superficial.

> Extraordinary claims? Hardly. You should know that this study repeats
> the results of earlier work whenever similar taxa are employed.

Even the destruction of everything that resembles Archosauria?

> Often the introduction of novel taxa takes the form of using species or
> specimens rather than a priori suprageneric taxa.

Which reminds me: how much do you attempt to correct for ontogeny? A recent 
study on the phylogenetic placements of the neotenous salamanders is 
entitled "Ontogeny discombobulates phylogeny: [...]".

> Case in point: The only time (tell me if I'm wrong) that lizards and
> pteros both appeared together in a cladogram (Benton 1985) they showed
> up as sister taxa.

The big analysis in Senter's thesis has lizards and pterosaurs in their 
usual places, I hear.