RE: Greg Paul is right (again); or "Archie's not a birdy"

[Jaime Headden <qi_leong@hotmail.com>]

  I must agree with this. 

  I cannot think there is a functional reason to render "Neornithes" as a clade 
not in some part related to the crown. If "Aves" only becomes the stem of the 
crown, it will have some applicability to the clade it was named for 
(Linnaeus), but it should not at least supplant another useful name whose 
purpose is inversely restricted. While I said we could use "Aves" for the 
crown, this would have been at the expense of the name "Neornithes," while it 
would have also allowed the _least_ ambiguous usage possible for the name. I am 
more than not thinking that "Aves" may strongly indicate a clade that includes 
*Archaeopteryx lithographica*. In this case, it would then also include 
dromaeosaurs and troodontids, sensu Xu et al., 2011. While I place a lot of 
doubt on the latter's robusticty, the clade names should be most useful as 
current: "Avialae" and "Aves" both anchored on *Archaeopteryx*, both 
inclusively, but with different other specifiers.

  *Archaeopteryx lithographica* is a "bird" in virtually every conceptual sense 
(the major dissenter being Paul), and there is no reason the clade name that 
best reflects this should not include it.

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)


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> Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 13:24:59 +0200
> From: david.marjanovic@gmx.at
> To: dinosaur@usc.edu
> Subject: Re: Greg Paul is right (again); or "Archie's not a birdy"
>
> > I like Gauthier and deQueiroz's (2001) proposal that Neornithes
> > become a more inclusive clade than the crown, such as a node-based
> > clade that contains _Hesperornis_ and modern birds.
>
> This goes so blatantly against all historical usage since at least the
> early 20th century that the PhyloCode won't even allow it.