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Re: Pro(to)avis
It would be nice to find Lagerstätten from the late Triassic, where small
fauna are in abundance.
<pb>
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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
>