Re: Evidence For a Feathered Velociraptor...

[Dora Smith <villandra@austin.rr.com>]

I'm pretty sure that a number of cenozoic birds had teeth.   Google is 
confirming that, but having trouble coughing up details.

If other dinosaurs had wishbones and quill knobs, maybe they had more 
morphological similarities to birds.

If flighted dinosaurs who were not birds lost flight but maintained quill 
knobs and other morphological traits thought to be unique to birds, then I'd 
say there was alot of parallel evolution going on - or maybe simply broader 
evolution.

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, TX
tiggernut24@yahoo.com
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>
To: "DML" <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2007 10:30 AM
Subject: Re: Evidence For a Feathered Velociraptor...

> All known Cenozoic birds share a number of unique weirdnesses, for 
> example -- off the top of my head! -- 15-upwards sacral vertebrae, a bony 
> bridge over a tendon at the foot end of the shinbone, a complete lack of 
> teeth (that's not unique, but it's unique compared to the close relative 
> *Ichthyornis*), and probably dozens of others that must be hidden in huge 
> studies like the recent one by Livezey & Zusi.
>
> > What I'm saying is that if a number of lines of dinosaurs were structured
> > exactly like birds and were fully flighted, this supports the idea that
> > modern birds may not all be of one lineage.
>
> But...
>
> - wouldn't that amount of convergence be a bit improbable?



--
Internal Virus Database is out-of-date.
Checked by AVG. 
Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.12.1/965 - Release Date: 8/21/2007 4:02 PM