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Re: ROBUST TIGERS etc
In a message dated 9/28/00 7:50:45 AM EST, darren.naish@port.ac.uk writes:
<< Relevant to
dinosaurs and other fossil taxa is that, if we didn't have (1) the live
animals and (2) the skulls, we would rarely be able to distinguish the
postcrania of these species. One wonders, in fact, whether we would
have realised that these *are* separate species. >>
That right there is the point I'm trying to make. We already know lions and
tigers are different species, so we have an incentive to carefully look for
their skeletal differences (which, as Darren pointed out, do exist). But when
we believe there is only one species, there is no incentive to look for
species differences, and any observed differences are ascribed to individual
variation, sexual dimorphism, or ontogeny within the one species,
particularly when the sample size is very small (as with most dinosaur
species).