Re: What the fossil record tells us about trends in pterosaur diversity

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

Michael Habib writes:
 > > BTW: various pterosaur genera of all shapes, sizes and niches
 > > were going extinct left and right long before the advent of
 > > birds.
 > 
 > It seems that way, but again, if the apparent diversity of
 > pterosaurs in each interval is entirely taphonomic, how do we know
 > that's actually true?  It might be that only a very few of those
 > apparent extinctions are real, and we're truncating the last
 > occurance dates for many lineages.

Right!  My favourite (or, rather, most tragic example): it appears
that Diplodocids went extinct at the J/K boundary, in North America at
least.  But since we're missing the rock from the first three ages of
the Cretaceous in North America, who can tell?  Maybe they flourished
for another 17 million years and gave up the ghost at the end of the
Hauterivian.

Oh, man ... this is _such_ a frustrating field.

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' - they have
         'arguments' - and they ALWAYS WIN THEM." -- Klingon Programming
         Mantra