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Re: Madagascan Flying Raptor is INDEED a Madagascan Flying Raptor...

David Marjanovic wrote-

All characters were unordered! Even the number of sacral vertebrae!!!
Someone needs to repeat the analysis to see what the data _really_ say. :-(

Good point. After ordering the appropriate characters though, the results are the same.

I wonder where *Shenzhouraptor* (incl. *Jeholornis*) and *Jixiangornis* go.
Would they stay birds when included? Would they become unenlagiines,
forming the sister-group of *Rahonavis*? Would *Shenzhouraptor* alone do
that while the more birdlike *Jixiangornis* would stay a bird? Would they
turn *Rahonavis* or maybe all Unenlagiinae back into birds? Oh, and then
there's *Yandangornis*...

I wondered the same thing. Unfortunately, only Xu and Zhang (2005) have included Shenzhouraptor (as Jeholornis) in the TWG matrix, and not only did they place the characters in different order (deleting and adding some as well), but I can't copy/paste their matrix (it pastes as squares instead of numbers). Add in the modified codings for some of Makovicky et al.'s characters, and his extra ones that would need to be coded for Shenzhouraptor, and it's too much work for me.

Here's something interesting though- Archaeopteryx shows all three unenlagiine synapomorphies. It has a vertical pubis (Wellnhofer, 1993), moderate-sized supracetabular crest (Paul, 2002), and some specimens have a dorsally concave postacetabular process (Novas, 2004). In fact, Achillobator has the latter too (Perle et al., 1999). These are all coded incorrectly by Makovicky et al.

So, correcting these and a few more codings I noticed while coding Buitreraptor in my analysis (Buitreraptor has maxillary teeth; Rahonavis has unknown tooth implantation), I reran Makovicky et al.'s matrix. And it still came out the same. Huh. Seems their results are fairly robust.

One analysis _does_ include Shenzhouraptor, Jixiangornis, Yandangornis as well as the paravians used by Makovicky et al. though. Mine. What does it say about Buitreraptor? Results coming soon.

Mickey Mortimer