5000

Today’s post is number 5000.
It’s been a good run of slightly more than 14 years of daily posts.

Number 1 was posted July 12, 2011.

The PterosaurHeresiesWordpress.com website
you are currently reading is the journalistic mouthpiece for a long-running, ever growing and self-healing experiment in phenomic = trait-based phylogenetic analysis focusing on extinct chordates to extant humans, birds and fish online at ReptileEvolution.com.

At the center of this experiment is the cladogram called the large reptile tree (LRT). It minimizes taxon exclusion by including a wide gamut of 2339 taxa.

Many discoveries were made.
None out of dirt and stone.

Most out of novel hypotheses of interrelationships (use ‘novel hypothesis‘ in the keyword box above to sample the list.

A few out of overlooked reconstructions, like the first flightless pterosaur (Fig 1).

Many taxa tested.
All told over 2700 in the large reptile tree (LRT, 2339 tax), the large pterosaur tree (LPT, 264 taxa) and the therapsid skull tree (TST, 77 taxa) the central experiment at ReptileEvolution.com. There was also a short detour from chordates into the small ‘mollusc tree (SMT, 22 taxa).

About a magnitude fewer characters
(= 238 multistate characters) were needed to test included taxa.

The main thesis of this experiment
is the hypothesis that more taxa minimizes taxon exclusion, the number one problem in paleontology.

Cherry-picking taxon lists continues in published works. This too often comes to missed opportunities and promotion of invalid hypotheses.

Discoveries of note still not tested by Academia:
Silvanerpeton (Fig 2) is the last common ancestor of the clade Reptilia = Amniota.

Reptilia immediately split into Archosauromorpha and Lepidosauromorpha.

Phylogenetic miniaturization appears at the genesis of several clades.

Pterosauria were derived from miniaturized tanystropheids (Peters 2000) and these were derived from lepidosaurs close to Huehuecuetzpalli (Peters 2007).

Dinosauria + Crocodylomorph only = Archosauria.

Diapsid skull architecture developed at least twice by convergence.

Australopithecus was a chimp, bipedal by convergence with the line of human ancestors originating with Hylobates, the extant gibbon.

Hardshell turtles and softshell turtles had a separate parallel ancestry derived from small, horned pareiasaurs.

Traditional ‘whales’ had two separate ancestries. Odontocetes arose from tenrecs. Mysticetes arose from hippos and desmostylians.

Placentals arose three to four times (Wortman 1902) from separate marsupial ancestors.

Mesosaurs and thalattosaurs are proximal outgroups to the ichthyosaurs.

Vancleavea is a thalattosaur close to Helveticosaurus.

Proterosuchids gave rise to proterochampsids and choristoderes, which lose the antorbital fenestra during phylogenetic miniaturization.

Bony fish had at least two separate ancestries from 1. conodonts and 2. placoderms + spiny sharks.

Jaws = gnathostomes appeared at least twice by convergence.

A good last common ancestor for all chordates is the marine nematode, Enoplus, which also serves as good last common ancestor for echinoderms (Peters 1991).

Lancelets make good ancestors for cephalopods like Nautilus.

Trilobites with a telson gave rise to all arthropods.

Genomic studies are fine in extant taxa, but too often recover vague and untenable trees in deep time studies.

So-called ‘bat wing birds‘ were shown to be misinterpreted by bone breaks.

There has been push-back
You can read about how certain academics reacted to ReptileEvolution.com and the LRT here and here. Granted mistakes were made along the way. Make that millions of mistakes were made along the way based on an equal number of corrections. Mistakes are part of the scientific method. Discrediting fellow workers is not.

The Chris Bennett curse, “You will not be published. And if you are published you will not be cited” has been widely adopted in academic circles. Being cited was never the goal here. Suggesting valid taxon lists based on subsets of the LRT was always the hope.

Seems push-back is common and traditional in paleontology
According to the Hartford Courant (2000), “In 1973, Ostrom broke from the scientific mainstream by reviving a Victorian-era hypothesis (see above) that his colleagues considered far-fetched: Birds, he said, evolved from dinosaurs. And he spent the rest of his career trying to prove it.” With the announcement of the first dinosaurs with feathers from China, Ostrom (then age 73) was in no mood to celebrate. He is quoted as saying, ““I’ve been saying the same damn thing since 1973, `I said, `Look at Archaeopteryx!’” Ostrom was the first scientist to collect physical evidence for the theory. Ostrom provoked a debate that raged for decades. “At first they said, `Oh John, you’re crazy,”’ Ostrom said in 1999.”

This quote by Ostrom reveals all. Disparagement is universal.

Everyone gets into paleontology to discover something.
No one in paleontology likes it when discoveries are announced by others. Does everyone agree on the origin of turtles? reptiles? pterosaurs? bats? whales? Anything?

No. So don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

To those who wonder why I don’t publish in a traditional sense anymore…
(publications to date linked here) it comes down to the less-than-helpful rejections by referees:

“He didn’t look at the specimens twice.”
“He didn’t look at the the specimen long enough.”
“He created a just-so scenario.” 

There was a time when independent researchers could make traditional contributions, even if they falsified published works by professors by providing overlooked taxa that resolved questions. I am proof of that.

Those days are over, but at least I got in when the window was still open.

Now everything gets published on the Internet.

Paleontology remains the most accessible science.
Children have discovered important fossils. Amateurs have filled phylogenetic vacuums. Everything is online now. Computers permit examination of fossils using µCT scans and DGS color overlays.

Academics don’t like it when outsiders make contributions.
Outsiders never paid tuition. Never attended classes. Never bought textbooks. Never had to create grant proposals. Never had to join in on a professor’s pet project. Never had to teach a class of freshman.

And yet got published in several of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals.
I can see why academics consider that ‘not fair.’
I can see why academics need to sideline independent researchers.

Thank you for your readership.
It has been a fascinating (and often frustrating) 14 years learning about and reporting things I’ve always wondered about. So many things fell into my lap  (like the traveling Russian Dinosaur Exposition of the early 1990s.)

So many vacuums needed to be filled by the simple addition of taxa.
So many misconceptions needed to be rectified by the simple addition of taxa.

I could not have done whatever I have done
without the discoveries and descriptions of others. As it turned out, they had to focus on their individual discoveries and descriptions.

I’m the guy who volunteered to attempt to tie it all together in a single hypothesis of interrelationships. That hypothesis now needs to be tested by others using a similar taxon list and their own character lists.

References
Peters D 1991. From the beginning – The story of human evolution (Wm Morrow).
Peters D 2000b. A Redescription of Four Prolacertiform Genera and Implications for Pterosaur Phylogenesis. Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia 106 (3): 293–336.
Peters D 2007. The origin and radiation of the Pterosauria. In D. Hone ed. Flugsaurier. The Wellnhofer pterosaur meeting, 2007, Munich, Germany. p. 27.
Wortman JL 1901-1903. Studies of Eocene Mammalia in the Marsh Collection, Peabody Museum. Am. Jour. Sci. 11:333–348.

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2025/07/28/5000/