Paul on Citipati

[Jaime Headden <qi_leong@hotmail.com>]

  Greg Paul has recently published a beautiful new Field Guild-style book 
through Princeton's press, titled (amazingly) _The Princeton Field Guide to 
Dinosaurs_. It's large, cheap, has been mentioned before on this list, and 
boasts lots and lots of beautiful art.

  Unfortunately, I nor a few others cannot sing it full of praises. Paul has 
lumped a number of taxa in the book, and the list is here at Mickey's blog: 
http://theropoddatabase.blogspot.com/2010/08/gsps-new-taxon-combinations-from-his.html

  It seems anachronistic after a publication in which Paul split off several 
iguanodont-grade ornithopods [1], especially since the justifications for some 
of these are based on apparent "regional" or size-based variation, when in fact 
he ignores various systematic works to achieve the synonymy (e.g., 
*Lourinhanosaurus antunesi* as *Allosaurus antunesi*). In a more personal case, 
virtually all oviraptorids were lumped together (with the exception of [at the 
time unpublished] *Banji long* and *Oviraptor philoceratops*) ... into 
*Citipati*. I describe my take in more detail here: 
http://qilong.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/what-is-citipati-gracilis/

[1] Paul, G. S. 2008. A revised taxonomy of the iguanodont dinosaur genera and 
species. _Cretaceous Research_ 29(2):192-216.

Cheers,

  Jaime A. Headden
  The Bite Stuff (site v2)
  http://qilong.wordpress.com/

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)


"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a
different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race
has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or
his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion 
Backs)