A Look at Feathered Dinosaur Baraminology Pt 3

In the previous two articles of this series, we have examined the first two iterations of first dataset used in McLain et al’s attempt to feather dinosaurs. As we have seen so far, the dataset seems to be laden with issues, likely due to including too many taxa from disparate kinds and being fragmentary due to the nature of fossils. I’m starting to come to the conclusion that this dataset (and the paper) is absolutely worthless, but more on that in a later article. For now, lets get into what McLain et al did in their third diagram.

A Look at Feathered Dinosaur Baraminology Pt 2

In part one, we looked at the first dataset used in McLain et al’s attempt to argue that dinosaurs had … More

A Look at Feathered Dinosaur Baraminology Pt 1

I’ve been poking around in the McLain et al 2018 paper for a while now, particularly after having Dr. McLain … More

Wolves and Thylacines

A very interesting paper has come out in Communications Biology and been reported on in a Phys.org article regarding the similarity between wolves and thylacines (better known as Tasmanian tigers). In the new paper, the authors looked at skull similarities between wolves and thylacine pups. The pups were remarkably similar, despite being essentially unrelated evolutionarily. Let’s have a look at this article, then get into some of the implications for fossil phylogenetics.