Re: [dinosaur] Chinlechelys (Triassic turtle) morphology and pareiasaur origin of turtles (free pdf)

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

I have rather more to say about this paper (good, bad, and ugly...) than would 
fit here, but there's one thing that qualifies as a failure of peer review: the 
astonishing lack of awareness of any molecular analyses of amniote phylogeny 
published after 2012 (apart from a study from 2013 that used the 
presence/absence of genes as characters).
Â
>From a morphological point of view, I'm not any happier with it than the 
>authors or the reviewers, but it is a fact that the sister-group relationship 
>of turtles and archosaurs to the exclusion of the lepidosaurs has been 
>consistently and robustly supported in the phylogenetic analyses of molecular 
>data since then. For example, it's one of the strongest nodes in the tree of 
>100 species of gnathostomes by Irisarri et al. (2017). It's not going away on 
>its own. I'm not saying there can't possibly be anything wrong with all these 
>molecular analyses (for example, the lepidosaurs in general and the squamates 
>in particular often have a suspiciously long branch, and squamate phylogeny is 
>itself a similar case), but, being unaware of the very issue, the authors make 
>no attempt to come up with a hypothesis for what might be going on there.
Â
And why is the presence of sutural surfaces on an interclavicle supposed to 
tell us anything about cleithra, which aren't supposed to contact the 
interclavicle...?

Gesendet:ÂFreitag, 02. April 2021 um 17:59 Uhr
Von:Â"Ben Creisler" <bcreisler@gmail.com>

Free pdf:

Chinlechelyidae fam. nov.

Asher J. Lichtig and Spencer G. Lucas (2021)
Chinlechelys from the Upper Triassic of New Mexico, USA, and the origin of 
turtles.
Palaeontologia Electronica 24(1):a13.