theropod wrote:So much stupid in two little posts.
Sauroppds arose from theropods which also gave rise to birds. The first/earliest dinosaurs were theropods. You jibberish aside, JJ.
I was little anxious about how you might reply to those posts seeing that you seem to have a professional background with dinosaurs. It was a relief to find that you didn’t explain that palaeontologists had thoroughly looked over the possibility that dinosaurs were descended from flying creatures and found contrary evidence which you linked to in the kindergarten area of Wikipedia. Instead, like Thomas Eshuis and Fenrir you just relied on abuse.
What was distinctive in your reply though, was your persistent misunderstanding of what I was saying. I don’t have an issue with the first/earliest dinosaurs being theropods. I’m presenting suggestive evidence that the theropods might have descended from flying creatures. And confidence that if that is true, palaeontologists will find those earlier flying creatures, in the rocks from the first half of the Triassic period. The missing link if you like. (and mainly to be frank, if you don’t like).
theropod wrote:If you aren’t trolling I suggest you stidy this issue a LOT more, but from here on try not to use confirmational bias as your motivator.
My motivator is just the chance of being right. That would be like winning the Lotto. If by “trolling” you mean, being tongue-in-cheek provocation about something of little real interest to me then you are wrong. And I’m not confirming anything, I’m setting out the grounds for a rational prediction.
theropod wrote:Just what idiots do you think your contrived crap will convince? It sure as fuck will not be anyone that has any actual interest in the topic.
Well a prediction doesn’t convince anyone anyway except something like an astronomer’s prediction of an imminent collision with an asteroid. If I don’t win the Lotto at least I’ve already won second prize, by getting you to demonstrate through your arrogant animus, that some self-identifying rationalists are deeply involved in irrational bullying behaviour.
theropod wrote:Basically you are attempting to tell people that you know more about the topic than professionals which have devoted their entire lives, AND the data from actual fossils is wrong because you ( an internet nobody) say so.
Imagine the party that internet nobodies will have if some palaeontologist finds a flying ancestor of the dinosaurs. Anyway, you haven’t presented any data from actual fossils, whether contradictory or not. The set of pics below illustrate that my hunch involves just tweaking mainline thinking.

- Pic 0 from Wikipedia entry on Archosaurs. Adaptations are own work
- FlyingOriginOfDinosaursCladogramToTreeOfLife.jpg (15.71 KiB) Viewed 996 times
Starting with pic 0, which is just an extract from the cladogram citing Nesbitt in the Wikipedia entry “Archosaur”. In pic 1 the line of Ornithodira was just moved, to suggest that the dinosaurs were a branching from a line of flying creatures. Then in Pic 2 the figure was rotated to the left so it became a Tree of Life, with time increasing upwards. In Pic 3 some metadata was added to flesh out the implications of Pic2. A scale was put on the Time axis, to indicate that position along it is quantifiable. That’s relevant because of the contrast with the horizontal axis of phenotype space, which like I mentioned before, is highly abstract.
A green punctuation mark was put where the dinosauromorpha were modelled as branching off. Here, what had in Pic 0 just been a line indicating relatedness, now as a horizontal line indicates rapid (indeed instantaneous) speciation. I should have put a little bit of a slope on it, hey? But still, a good word for this speciation would be “Creative event”. And the fossils so far discovered along that branch could have been much more highly readapted into terrestrial life than today’s New Zealand and Madagascan ratites. But they retained traces of a flying ancestry in their knowing how to construct skeletons with much higher strength-to-weight ratios than did their doltish competitors.
theropod wrote:Welcome to the Robert Byers school of bullshit assertions. Move to the head of the class.
I’m not in Robert Byers’ school, not that I'm invested in anything against him.