ISPN

[ottscay]

That doesn't really bother me, but aren't we then asking neontologists (and specifically ornithologists) to abondon "Aves" altogether? And what would we call a "bird"? I realize that bird isn't a phylogenetic term, but pretending like the term "bird" doesn't have to be connected to our cladograms is just shoving the task onto educators and science popularizers.

[tmkeesey]

(I'm totally playing devil's advocate here, just to be clear--I doubt leaving the name undefined would be a satisfactory answer to the problem.)

Not all vernacular terms, even those that are monophyletic in most usages, need to correspond directly to a clade name. Consider "human". Does it correspond to Homo sapiens? To Homo? To Hominina? Is Homo habilis human? What about Paranthropus? Australopithecus? Praeanthropus? It's a vague term, at least in paleontology, even though under all usages it is monophyletic.
_________________
T. Michael Keesey
Director of Technology, Exopolis, Inc.

[ottscay]

"Human", of course, is usually used as more of an ontological statement of the recipients' worth in a moral or ethical sense; the problem historically is usually with people not extending the term far enough (e.g. to other members of H. sapiens) rather than too far, although your points are logically valid.

Personally I'd restrict it to our species, until such time as we can more accurately evaluate the cognitive abilities of extinct hominids (after all, it's hard to abuse the civil rights of extinct organisms...), but physical anthropologist Wolpoff would disagree with my "limited" nomenclatural distribution.

In practice, I think the additional qualatative socio/political aspects attributed to the term "human" makes it non-equivalent to other vernacular terms, such as fish, lizard, or bird (or Aves).
But hey, what do others thing?

[tmkeesey]

"Human" has some other baggage, sure, but it has the exact same problem as "bird". Some other placentalian examples:

Does "chimp" apply to Pan troglodytes? Pan? Basal (hypothetical) members of the Pan lineage, after separating from Hominina?

Does "horse" apply to Equus caballus? Equus? Equinae? Equidae? Is Eohippus a horse? What about Merychippus or Pliohippus?

Does "whale" apply to the crown group? The total group? Some apomorphy-based clade in between? Is Ambulocetus a whale? Pakicetus?

So on and so on.
_________________
T. Michael Keesey
Director of Technology, Exopolis, Inc.

[dinoguy2]

[Nescio]

[Eoraptor]

I've generally assumed total groups were used with mammalian vernacular taxa. So yes Pakicetus is a whale (as long as dolphins and porpoises are types of whales), Eohippus is a horse, and all Pan-Pan taxa are chimpanzees. I'm sure it would fail in some cases though...

[dinoguy2]

[tmkeesey]

[tmkeesey]

[leowsham]

[David Marjanović]

Well, erm.

1) Leaving anything undefined is not really an option under the PhyloCode: if anyone wants to define it and gets it through peer review after "January 1, 200n", it is defined. Though maybe we should have a List of Trashed Names – after all, the ICZN has one (OK, "Rejected Names").

2) Treating "birds" and Aves as somehow separate won't work, because the Latin – and Spanish, and Portuguese – word "aves" means "birds". You will never manage to get the two apart. We might barely manage that trick with "whales", but not with "birds".

3)
"The feathers don't make the bird. The bird makes the feathers."
– Jacques Gauthier, at the first PhyloCode meeting
So there, just to have said it. Actually, Jacques was paraphrasing Linnaeus, who wrote that the characters don't give the genus, the genus gives the characters, and this in spite of the fact that Linnaeus was an essentialist. (Darwin used that quote to good effect.)
Actually, there are a few cases where I think apomorphy-based definitions are both feasible and required by Article 10.1 (Tetrapoda, Testudinata sensu Lee 1995 and Joyce et al. 2004, Diapsida), but in general I can only recommend against them. The main reason is that, in order to tell whether something is part of a taxon the name of which has an apomorphy-based definition, it's not enough if we can establish its phylogenetic position, we also need to know if that particular character state was present. Try that with any kind of "feathers"...

4) Have I mentioned my Plan B yet? I like to forget it again and again. If the crown-groupers get their wish to make Ichthyornis a nonavian dinosaur – and, of course, all our base are belong to them –, I'll simply take my definition, slap the name Ornithes on it, and publish that – just the same in Greek. While somewhat suboptimal, it would have the advantage of providing a more obvious etymological anchor for all existing the names that end in -ornithes, and it would nicely fit the tradition of using former synonyms for nested clades (Eutheria-Placentalia, Metatheria-Marsupialia, Ophidia-Serpentes, Proganosauria-Mesosauridae, Gymnophiona-Apoda, Caudata-Urodela, Salientia-Anura...).
George Olshevsky once said he wanted to have Aves for the crown-group and Ornithes for the total group. I don't know if he ever got that published.

5) Scott, why did you make the snout an exact copy of the PDW dromaeosaurids? I still haven't seen any evidence for the naked snout – contradicted by Eoenantiornis – or the "proto-beak" (probably also contradicted by that little birdie).

[tmkeesey]

[Nescio]

[tmkeesey]

Yes, in fact, there's already a thread for it: Definition of "Tetrapoda"
_________________
T. Michael Keesey
Director of Technology, Exopolis, Inc.