(This is a really old post I've taken forever to get around to answering, but better late than never. I've been a little distracted the past month or two.)
Indeed. It was a rereading of the _Heresies_ around the time Jurassic Park came out that solidified my childhood love of dinosaurs and made it viable as a real life direction. I don't know how anyone ever became a dinosaur palaeontologist back in the days when all the books were boring and negative and portrayed dinosaurs as big, dumb lizards with useless spikes and crests all over the place. I'm sure that's part of why very few people have ever studied dinosaurs full-time. Bakker made it real for me, showed me the fundamental excitement in learning about one of the greatest groups of organisms that ever lived on this planet. Even if some of his particular ideas turn out to be wrong (and a good chunk of them by now have become standard 'facts', although you'll never hear most of the popular TV shows and books and articles mention that it was Bakker who usually said it first and best), that still stands.
Unfrotunately, I have no software that allows me to run cladistic analyses. I am restricted to looking at those of others, or making unproved hypotheses of my own, and then just doing a sort of 'gestalt' impression as to which way of looking at things makes more sense.
<snip brief discussion of alleged characters uniting the Phytodinosauria>
No, he didn't. Sean P Carroll did.
If I'm not mistaken, Sean R Carroll is a biologist at UW Madison. I am *not* him. Nor am I Sean B Carroll, the physicist at UC Berkeley. (I may have the middle initialss and the institutions switched around.) I am also, incidentally, not the Sean Carroll who was one of the NYC police officers who was shockingly allowed to get off on charges of police brutality in I think it was the Diallo case.
I am Sean Preston Carroll, a 20-year-old (as of the end of this month) polymath genius born on Long Island, briefly educated in New Orleans, and currently living in Florida, who is interested in all forms of science but is specifically a specialist in nonavian theropod dinosaurs (as much as a teenaged know-it-all with little or no access to real specimens can be a 'specialist'
. I am not to be confused with any of those other Sean Carrolls, and hopefully I will someday be more famous than all of them put together and then *they* will be mistaken for *me*.
A mere detail of terminology. *g* You're right, that was silly, obviously it's a 'predentary' because it comes in front of the dentary. 'Predental' is probably something they do before they put you under in the orthodontist's office.
Judging from some responses I've seen here, this is not a totally confirmed or universally agreed fact. I would be very interested in finding out more about it, such as what evolutionary pressures might have driven these birds to evolve predentary bones, and whether they are truly homologous or just analogous to the ones in ornithischians.
Unfortunately, yes.
Another rather unfortunate name, in my opinion, since as near as I can tell most or all birds outside the Neornithes have teeth, so, like 'ornithischia', 'odontornithes' is a bit misleading as far as the uniqueness of the character it describes.
Also, are you sure Martin suggested they formed 'a monophyletic clade', or just a proper Linnaean grade? It hasn't been my impression that Martin is particularly fond of the cladistic method, despite his protestations that he has 'nothing against cladists or cladistics per se'. It's possible he uses phylogenetic analysis once in a while too, but considering how strongly his rejection of the theropod origin of birds is tied to his rejection of the evidence gathered by cladistic analysis, that would be somewhat disingenuous for him. Unless I missed a big moment and he has finally given up his opposition to the bird-dinosaur hypothesis. (In a way, I hope not, because he always seemed a *little* more rational about it than Feduccia, and science always needs the outsiders and rebels who ask the embarrassing questions and help sharpen up mainstream opinions lest they completely forget they might still be wrong.)
Verrry interrestingk, with apologies to Arte Johnson. I haven't read DOTA but every page of my copy of PDW is well-worn, and I know for a fact that in '88 he explicitly stated 'Bakker has abandoned the Saurischia, and so have I' and 'One of the other major dinosaur groups [besides theropods, 'paleodinosaurs', and 'herreravians'] is the Phytodinosauria, just coined by Bakker'. If he has changed this position I would be very interested in hearing his reasons for doing so. Perhaps I will need to email him and ask directly!
Well, as I said, I'm just a punk kid with no access to specimens and no cladistic-analysis software, so the limit of my evidence is basically what has been presented in sources like Bakker 1986 and Paul 1988. But, for what it's worth, probably the most convincing single piece of evidence for me is the double sternum, which seems to me like an obvious high-weight derived characteristic.
Also, there is the simple fact that it has always seemed unnatural and contrived to me that theropods and sauropodomorphs were lumped together, even back when I was young and thought, 'That's what the books say, therefore it MUST be right.' I mean, yeah, there's the hip, but that's simply a plesiomorphic character, as far as I can see. Everything else about the body that seems important at first glance
