Re: Pterosaur diversity (was: Re: Waimanu)

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

> Interestingly, the Cope's rule apply well to other archosaurs -
> particularly dinosaurian - taxa too.

Yes, but only in the Late Cretaceous, and for most but not all clades... and 
it all depends quite heavily on the taxon sampling. Anyway, that's what 
comes out in my thesis, watch out for a publication in, say, 2 years maybe, 
when the discoveries of new fossils will have changed the results several 
times.

> It seems that there was a trend to gigantism in ornithopoda,
> ceratosauria, pachycephalosauria, sauropoda, coelurosauria
> and crocodylia.

For the presacral vertebral column length of sauropods I get a statistically 
insignificant decrease. I haven't investigated Coelurosauria alone, but the 
birds are a very diverse clade that starts with a big dip in size... For 
pachycephalosaurs I'll simply say too few species are known from measurable 
remains for any kind of reliable statistics. I got 5 species together. 
Ceratosaurs aren't much better known.

> Fortunately today there is no such thing like _Quetzalcoatlus_ flying
> above us - it would be a hard time to clean the car after parking
> bellow a tree on which a bunch of gigantic pterosaur was hanging down.

Forget the hanging down. Pterosaur feet don't have any of the adaptations 
that bat feet have. :-)