Global Warming -- Inconvenient Truths -- May 18, 2018

Updates

Later, 10:13 p.m. CDT: mid-May -- frost warning in the Bakken.

Original Post 

From iceagenow:

Also from iceagenow:

********************************************

Note for the Granddaughters

New research suggests that the "dinosaur family tree" could be changed. If so, it would "shake dinosaur paleontology to its core." When I saw the "new and revised family tree" I was shocked. LOL. And some folks don't consider the Bakken a "revolution." LOL. And, stunningly, the new research bumps the emergence of dinosaurs back to 247 million years ago, versus the generally accepted 240 to 245 million years ago.

Link here.

There does appear to be a "new term" but it is not: "ornithoscelidans." This term was originally proposed back in the mid-19th century by Thomas Henry Huxley but abandoned. The term was revived in 2017 after a new cladistic analysis by Baron et al. See linked article at the very beginning of this note.

From wiki:

In March 2017, a paper in the journal Nature by Matthew Baron, David Norman, and Paul Barrett, published an analysis in which the theropod dinosaurs — no longer containing the Herrerasauridae — were more closely related to ornithischian dinosaurs than to the Sauropodomorpha, the group to which the sauropod dinosaurs belong.

Previous analyses had rather combined the Theropoda with the Sauropodomorpha into the Saurischia, to the exclusion of the Ornithischia.

These groups had also been formally defined to reflect this. Using these standard definitions, the new results would have had the effect of bringing the Ornithischia within the Saurischia and indeed the Theropoda; and the Sauropodomorpha outside the Dinosauria.

To avoid this, Baron and colleagues redefined all these groups. Proposing that the Ornithischia and Theropoda were sister groups also meant that a new name was needed for the clade combining them.

They named this new clade Ornithoscelida, defining it as "the least inclusive clade that includes Passer domesticus and Triceratops horridus."

This means that this node clade consists of the last common ancestor of the extant theropod Passer and the ornithischian Triceratops; and all its descendants. Huxley's old name Ornithoscelida was chosen because its meaning, "bird legs", well fitted the hindlimb traits of the clade.

Passer, from wiki:  Passer is a genus of sparrows, also known as the true sparrows.

The house sparrow = Passer domesticus.