Re: Pro(to)avis

[Phil Bigelow <bigelowp@juno.com>]

It would be nice to find Lagerstätten from the late Triassic, where small
fauna are in abundance.

<pb>
--

On Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:52:14 -0700 "T. Michael Keesey" <keesey@gmail.com>
writes:
> > At any rate, this taxon [hypothetical first bird] probably lived 
> sometime in the late Triassic or
> > earliest Jurassic. 
> 
> If we are defining "bird" as the Archie-modern bird node-based 
> clade,
> then I would not be surprised if the last ancestor existed as late 
> as
> early Late Jurassic (say, Oxfordian)--as has been noted,
> _Archaeopteryx_ is probably not terribly different from it--several
> million years should be easily enough to derive it, right? 
> (Especially
> with presumably short generation times for such a small dinosaur.)
> 
> I would be very surprised if it existed in the Triassic, since there
> aren't even any noncontroversial tetanurans from then, let alone
> coelurosaurs, maniraptoriforms, maniraptors, eumaniraptors....
> 
> ?Mike Keesey
>