Re: Dilophosaurus

[Mike Keesey <keesey@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 1:33 AM, Tim Williams <tijawi@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah, but we already have Avemetatarsalia and Avetheropoda.  I'm not
> enamored of either of them, but they seem to have stuck.

Avemetatarsalia may be called "Pan-Aves" under the PhyloCode. (And at
the very least, the informal alternative "pan-Aves" will be
available.)

We also have Avifilopluma, Aviplumosa, Avipinna, Aviremigia, and, most
famously, Avialae.

> Avepoda is
> particularly noisome, because it's a hybrid of Latin and Greek - so
> it's linguistically inaccurate in *two* languages.

The easy fix would be "Avipedes".

>> 2. If we were just around making words that "look" good, then we'd hardly 
>> bother with language, would we? We'd just make up pretty words and say they 
>> mean stuff.
>
> I thought that's what language was.    ;-)

Fair point!

> (Avepoda was originally
> proposed as a replacement name for Theropoda.

No, Avepoda is apomorphy-based, so it's a clade within Theropoda,
which is branch-based. (Of course, the known content may be identical,
but that could easily change.)

> And I much prefer Predentata to Ornithischia.)

Again, Predentata has been converted to an apomorphy-based clade
within (branch-based) Ornithischia.

-- 
T. Michael Keesey
http://tmkeesey.net/