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Ah - there you are. Well done on University Challenge in beating the Eden project. I couldn't have bettered the captain's performance, but if you'd manufactured a place for me alongside him on your team you'd have reached the finals. Anyway... Perhaps the most fascinating nugget to fall out on opening "Mesozoic Birds" (presumably the add-on title "Above the Heads of Dinosaurs" is a jibe at what they see as the "Old Guard") is a mention by Zhou & Hou on p165 that Confuciusornis does in fact NOT have uncinate processes. One can only imagine co-editor Luis Chiappe's reaction to this, having co-authored the 1999 monograph on Confuciusornis containing two photos of the rib hooks. Somewhere in the book the editors make a point of stating that Zhou & Hou's material was not the same as that used for the monograph, but this patch doesn't quite heal the wound. Although they might seem a tiny skeletal detail, UPs are the most informative part of any Cretaceous mani. because it is, as far as I can tell, the ONLY reliable character; in the baffling chaos of early avian phylogeny, beset by two separate attractors, one evolving multiple lineages towards enhanced flight ability, and the other converging them towards flightlessness, if we are lucky enough to find some reliable anchor it can help fix our views on other features. UPs provide the edge pieces bordering our 1000-piece jigsaw. (I won't be repeating why today.) Their absence from Conf. will be annoying to the palaeontological establishment for so many reasons. Not only has Storrs Olson blasted away about their absence in the past, but I too have been saying it for years (it was edited out of my review of Paul 2002 - THES 26.4.02 p26). It's a mark of a good theory when it throws doubt on accepted observations and that doubt is then justified, but publicity is required for the scientific process to benefit from this, and it seems I can't leave this to you. Chiappe, Norell, and all their confederates at AMNH; Ji Shu'an & Ji Qiang; Paul; Milner and her associates at NHM, and all the others who have stuck UPs on Confuciusornis down the years despite my advice to the contrary, have to face the fact that it doesn't matter how many real examples you've breathed over, you can't match someone with a few good photos and a working thinking cap on. The couple of supposed images of UPs in the Conf. monograph, while not very convincing are not quite as unbelievable as I at first thought. However Olson was right: it is the statistics of the evidence that is absolutely undeniable. If those two scrappy examples are the best to be found from a taxon orders of magnitude better represented than most Cretaceous dino-birds, the chance the 'UP's were real was absolutely infeasible. Even if the billion to one odds against were actually right, it would not be scientifically responsible to accept them. It's no good saying "they're poorly preserved features, and few ovis and droms preserve them", any realistic statistical model will still send the message through loud and clear, especially when near perfect side-preserved examples like the one at the bottom of page 86 in "DA" don't show them. Mark my words, UPs of a certain form evolved only once and were completely lost in no significant radiations over some 150 million years. If true, that's incredibly useful, and it would be the greatest folly to resist the idea just because you didn't think of it. The few "enants" left that still have them aren't enants. Their invention by flying droms reflects the truly bizarre requirements of their lifestyle; serious thought needs to be given as to what extent non-uncinated fliers could breathe and flap at different frequencies. Other parts of "Mesozoic Birds" are interesting too. For example seeing all the alvarezsaur pieces gathered together showed me that the northern hemisphere types are descended from flightless troodonts, but the S Am. ones aren't, though they might or might not be descended from flying ones via droms. If the S Am. ones are flightless droms as I suspect, both N & S alvzs. are birds, but they're still poly- (at least di-) phyletic. I was interested to see George Olshevsky indexed the book, and that neoflightlessness theories are given some mention eg on p22, though that page and many many others also ship unscientific drivel on an industrial scale - for example when claiming the only evidence comes from simplistic cladism, and that cladograms test anything. Your senior supplier of cladogram programs has told you they will output garbage when used on data with as much inherent parallelism as found with dino-birds, in: Felsenstein, J. 1978. Cases in which parsimony or compatibility methods will be positively misleading. Systematic Zoology 27: 401-410 (Also reprinted as pp. 663-674 in Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, An Anthology, ed. Elliott Sober, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1984), a paper which the SCI shows has been referenced by almost every one in the world except dino-bird palaeontologists. In what other industry could salaries be drawn for so many years on work based on such a flouting of the "GIGO" dictum? Nigel Calder's recent comments on abuses of the academic system could be made for you! JJ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
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