Re: SV: 55 million year old parrot found

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

> And their radiation could be tentatively dated to the late Eocene/early 
> Oligocene, given that a cockatoo bone indistinguishable from modern 
> _Cacatua_ was found at Riversleigh, and that a) the Cacatuinae are an 
> ancient but probably not *the* most ancient extant psittaciform lineage, 
> while b) _Cacatua_ is very advanced among the cockatoos (meaning that the 
> black cockatoo and palm cockatoo lineages for example must also have been 
> distinct by the time the Riversleigh cockatoo lived).

Riversleigh is early Miocene, isn't it? (It seems to oscillate in the 
literature between Oligocene and Miocene.)

> (There is a mol-phyl paper that proposes a Mesozoic origin of Psittacidae, 
> but they use a bad clock. And citing the "mandible" form North America in 
> their support is not encouraging either)

Oh, it clearly is a mandible...! :^)

> too [few] cladistic studies with comprehensive sampling exist for reasons 
> unknown

The reason is very simple: a morphological cladistic analysis of any kind of 
decent size is at least a chapter of a PhD thesis.