On 9/15/21 12:16 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Sunday, September 12, 2021 at 10:05:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 9/10/2021 9:57 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> Carcharodontosauria (shark-toothed saurians) were the last of the
>>> allosaurids, found in Laurasia up to the end of the Turonian
>>> (early Late Cretaceous) but surviving in Gondwana to the end of the Cretaceous.
>>> In a role reversal from what I've been accustomed to, the largest of these allosaurids
>>> were considerably larger than the largest tyrannosauroids of the time.
>>>
>>> The "new" find is actually a rediscovery:
>>>
>>> "The chunk of jawbone was found in Uzbekistan's Kyzylkum Desert in the 1980s, and researchers rediscovered it in 2019 in an Uzbekistan museum collection."
>>> https://www.microsoftnewskids.com/en-us/kids/animals/gigantic-shark-toothed-dinosaur-discovered-in-uzbekistan/ar-AAOhazl?ocid=entnewsntp
>>>
>>> The chunk is a partial maxilla, but from comparison with other
>>> carcharodontosaurs, the following is hypothesized [*ibid*]:
>>>
>>> "The 26-foot-long (8 meters) beast weighed 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), making it longer than an African elephant and heavier than a bison. Researchers named it *Ulughbegsaurus* *uzbekistanensis*, after Ulugh Beg, a 15th-century astronomer, mathematician and sultan from what is now Uzbekistan.
>
>
>> The reason dinosaurs were larger and yet lighter than even mammals today
>> is because of their respiratory systems.
>
> I'd like to see anyone support that claim with a citation to a peer reviewed research article.

Good luck with that.

>> Birds inherited their famous
>> respiratory systems from somewhere, you know.
>
> Yes, but do you have any evidence besides an unreferenced claim
> at the beginning of a Wikipedia article saying that coelurosaurs
> had hollow bones?
>
> Coelurosaurs are a clade that is included in a larger clade with carnosaurs,
> and this clade in turn was just a part of Theropoda. What makes you think
> the giant sauropods, or the ornithiscians had hollow bones?

Well, giant sauropods had extensively pneumatized cervical vertebrae. So
that's something.

>> Pound for pound in a
>> confrontation between a dinosaur and a mammal of equivalent size and
>> weight the dinosaur would hands down.
>
> This may be true of cassowaries today, but I wonder how a cassowary would fare
> in a confrontation with a leopard, or some other carnivore of no greater size than itself.
>
> Over in Africa, there must have been many confrontations of ostriches with
> mammals of various kinds, and ostriches can hold their own with their famous kicks,
> but whether they can "win hands down" is a different question.
>
> [I often use a simile mixing fiction and fact in talk.origins, when speaking
> of people with their heads buried in the sand while kicking furiously
> from time to time at those they have killfiled.]
>
>> I know you have an irrational
>> fondness for Fedducia's bullshit,
>
> You "know" all kinds of falsehoods, and this is one of them.
>
> However, I am sure Harshman will be delighted to hear you denigrate Feduccia
> like that. I have him to thank for my knowing about Feduccia in the first place.
> The occasion was a thread where Harshman panned a paper of Feduccia
> without even bothering to show that what Feduccia was proposing was wrong.

Left as an exercise for the student?

> IIRC John's main ire was focused on the journal *Auk* for daring to publish anything
> by Feduccia. By the time I found that thread, it was about 50 posts deep,
> because he had quite a number of adoring fans, most of whom said nothing
> scientific that would have even addressed the points Feduccia was making.
> IOW, they acted just like you are acting now.

No, your memory has for once failed you. It's not publishing anything by
Feduccia that's the problem, it was publishing that particular crap
article by Feduccia. And I must assume that I pointed out at least some
of its crap features.

If you want specifics, the one I remember best is that in the middle of
the article he went from claiming that dromaeosaurs couldn't possibly be
related to birds to claiming that they couldn't possibly be dinosaurs.

> The only critic of this mutual backslapping was Ray Martinez,
> but he had no reason to be fond of Feduccia, but he had his own creationist
> bilge to propound.
>
> When I came on the scene, I wanted to know what the big fuss was all
> about, and Harshman's replies were too weak to be decisive,
> and that is the way things have been ever since.

Your memory is colored by your personal needs to be intellectually
superior to other people.

>> but even you must admit that the
>> scientific consensus that birds are dinosaurs is and was correct.
>
> It certainly was NOT when Harshman's role model Henry Gee, then editor
> of _Nature_, pontificated, "Birds are dinosaurs. The debate is over."

It should be unnecessary to say that Henry Gee is not my role model. But
in that case he was right.

> He did this on the basis of two new finds in China, one of which was *Sinosauropteryx*,
> a fligtless coelurosaur covered with hairlike fibers on much of its body; and
> *Caudipteryx*, a creature with true feathers who many to this day
> [including quite a number who do believe birds to be dinosaurs]
> believe to be a secondarily flightless bird.

No, there are only a very few people who believe that. And we would have
to argue over the meaning of "bird" to discuss that. The real question
is about the tree topology, and that has indeed been well settled.

> There is at least one fairly
> thorough cladistic analysis that has it in a clade whose sister taxon is *Confuciusornis*,
> with *Archaeopteryx* several clades removed.

Could you cite that one? You aren't referring to Maryanska, are you?

> In short, neither of the two creatures that made Henry Gee so sure
> were of much use as evidence for birds being dinosaurs.

In short, you have not bothered to look at the evidence. That evidence
was at least good enough for Feduccia to change his mind about whether
birds were coelurosaurs. Of course he settled that by then going on to
claim that coelurosaurs weren't dinosaurs.

> But biologists are slaves of external funding, and the implicit message Henry's editorial
> came out loud and clear. Any paper that dared to dispute the hypothesis that birds are dinosaurs
> would be held to astronomically high standards by _Nature_,
> while any paper that supported the hypothesis would be welcomed with open arms,
> at least as far as being reviewed by people who firmly believed in the hypothesis.
> These reviewers would naturally get a very good first impression of the submission.

That, dare I say it, is paranoid.

> Fast forward to the present, and Harshman has always been long on rhetoric and
> short on hard data and reasoning. Just yesterday his "evidence" for birds being
> dinosaurs was a close paraphrase of Henry Gee's *ipse dixit*.

I don't recall presenting any evidence. Your memory is exceeding
convenient for you.

>>> "What caught scientists by surprise was that the dinosaur was much larger — twice the length and more than five times heavier — than its ecosystem's previously known apex predator: a tyrannosaur, the researchers found."
>>>
>>> That should probably be "tyrannosauroid," but as you can see from the url,
>>> this article was chosen [from "Live Science"] with kids in mind as a hefty part
>>> of the audience; there is a suitable picture at the top of the article to go with that.
>>>
>>> The research paper on which it is based is free access:
>>> https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210923
>>>
>>> I relied on it for my opening paragraph, but this being late Friday here,
>>> I am quoting from the popularization from here on.
>>>
>>> "The two dinosaur groups were fairly similar, but carcharodontosaurs were generally more slender and lightly-built than the heavyset tyrannosaurs, said study co-researcher Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor of paleobiology at the University of Calgary. Even so, carcharodontosaurs were usually larger than tyrannosaur dinosaurs, reaching weights greater than 13,200 pounds (6,000 kg)."
>
>
> You really aren't interested in details like this, Oxyaena, unless you get to report on them, are you?
>
>
>>> Here too, "tyrannosauroid" is more precise, while "tyrannosaurid" is
>>> the most precise term in the next sentence:
>>>
>>> "Then, around 90 million to 80 million years ago, the carcharodontosaurs disappeared and the tyrannosaurs grew in size, taking over as apex predators in Asia and North America."
>>>
>>> "The new finding is the first carcharodontosaur dinosaur discovered in Central Asia, the researchers noted. Paleontologists already knew that the tyrannosaur *Timurlengia* lived at the same time and place, but at 13 feet (4 m) in length and about 375 pounds (170 kg) in weight, *Timurlengia* was several times smaller than *U. uzbekistanensis*, suggesting that *U. uzbekistanensis* was the apex predator in that ecosystem, gobbling up horned dinosaurs, long-necked sauropods and ostrich-like dinosaurs in the neighborhood, the team said."
>
> You may be younger than me, Oxyaena, but you don't seem to be young at heart the way I am.
> You thought that the following was criticism, didn't you?
>
>>>
>>> Methinks that the part from "gobbling up..." on was inspired by
>>> "The Land Before Time" cartoon series. My daughters each saw
>>> the first two at a tender age, and were very fond of them.
>
> Well, it wasn't. It always makes me glad to see children waxing enthusiastic about
> prehistoric animals. Sadly, I didn't see much sign of such children when I was growing up.
> I still remember when I was avidly reading _The First Mammals_ by Scheele, in the library
> only a year or two after it was published, and a classmate of mine of above average
> intelligence berated me for reading such a book, and recommended that I switch to reading
> books on Greek mythology instead.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos
>