[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index][Subject Index][Author Index]
Coelurosaurian Relationships
Hey,
The list has been very active the past few days on the subject of
coelurosaurian relationships and the monophyly of the Enigmosauria. I haven't
seen any discussion of Norell, Clark, and Makovicky's analysis that was
recently published in the Ostrom Symposium volume, though. However, I was
offlist for awhile so I may have missed the discussion.
This is probably one of the most important papers to date regarding
coelurosaurian relationships (at least one of the most important that I've
read). Hopefully all of you who have ordered the Ostrom Symposium book have
received your copy, as this is a must-read.
Basically, the authors find a monophyletic Coelurosauria with the tyrannosaurs
as the closest outgroup. The Ornithomimosauria is the sister group to the
Maniraptora. Furthermore, the Maniraptora contains an Alvarezsauridae
subclade, which is a sister group to a bird-dromaeosaurid clade and a
troodontid-segnosaur-oviraptosaur clade. The study also supports a
monophyletic grouping of segnosaurs and oviraptosaurs, although the clade
wasn't given a name (the paper was originally written back in 1999 or so,
right?). Furthermore, Dromaeosauridae is reconstructed as a possibly
paraphyletic taxon, although the authors acknowledge that missing data may skew
a possible monophyly, and the Bullatosauria is not supported.
With that being said, I am curious about list reactions to this analysis.
Hopefully many of you have had a chance to read and digest this paper by now.
Steve
---
***************************************************************
Steve Brusatte-DINO LAND PALEONTOLOGY
SITE: http://www.geocities.com/stegob
ONLINE CLUB: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/thedinolanddinosaurdigsite
WEBRING: http://www.geocities.com/stegob/dlwr.html
INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE SITE: http://www.geocities.com/stegob/international.html
****************************************************************