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Re: BAD vs. BADD (was: Re: Most popular/common dinosaur misconceptions)

Yo!  *Raises hand*  Over here!  :-)

[...]

While an argument can be made that species are "more real than" genera
for extant taxa (in which the biological species concept can be
tested) you will surely concede that for dinosaurs at least the
species-level taxonomy is more arbitrary that genus-level, and that
the wild variations in speciosity of different genera represents a net
signal loss.

So I counted genera. What would you have done?

Dinosaur genera are indeed usually LITUs, and counting LITUs is what counting species ideally is.

There are, however, methods of calculating diversity by taking the tree into account. One is the Phylogenetic Diversity Index developed by someone called Daniel Faith last decade. Unfortunately I don't know by heart how it is calculated, but it's pretty simple and quite convincing (I've read the papers). I'll try to get the references tomorrow.

"Conclusion: is left to the reader (see Table 2).
Acknowledgements: I wrote this paper for money" -- A. A. Chastel,
_A critical analysis of the explanation of red-shifts by a new
field_, A&A 53, 67 (1976)

And that got published! Wow. :-)