Large Permian Synapsid with Hypothesized Semi-Aquatic Lifestyle

[Peter Nyikos]

Permian Synapsid Had Hippopotamus-Like Semi-Aquatic Lifestyle
Aug 4, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro

*Lalieudorhynchus* *gandi* lived in what is now France during the Guadalupian epoch of the Permian period, some 264 million years ago.

The ancient animal belonged to Caseidae, a group of primitive synapsids (mammals and their close relatives) that existed from the Carboniferous to the Permian period.

“The Caseidae were among the first large herbivorous amniotes that have evolved on the supercontinent Pangea,” Dr. Ralf Werneburg from the Museum of Natural History in the Castle Bertholdsburg Schleusingen and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

“These early synapsids are known from the Pennsylvanian of the United States, then in the Permian of the paleo-equatorial belt, from the United States to Siberia.”

“While the first caseids were small to moderate in size, later forms acquired a very peculiar body shape, with enormous, barrel-shaped trunks, comparatively tiny triangular skulls with large nares and leaf-like teeth, and massive limbs ending in short digits and powerful unguals.”

...

Despite its large size, the specimen shows an interesting mix of immature and mature features.

“A mix of both juvenile and adult features was already observed on other large caseid specimens,” the paleontologists wrote.

“Juveniles grew rapidly and adults much more slowly. Delaying skeletal maturity would have enabled caseids to attain very large sizes by having an extended period of growth.”

“The coexistence of immature and mature features may have been the result of a compromise between evolutionary constraints in the largest caseids, such as the necessity to grow sustainably and to support a heavy weight.”

The team’s analysis suggests that Lalieudorhynchus gandi had a semi-aquatic lifestyle.

“Our anatomical and histological observations suggest that this caseid may have spent time underwater,” the researchers explained.

“Yet our sedimentological analysis, together with the associated flora, suggests it may have browsed outside water.”

“The mixture of mature and immature ontogenetical characters is consistent with a possible semi-aquatic lifestyle.”

https://www.sci.news/paleontology/lalieudorhynchus-gandi-11065.html

Despite talk about the specimen's large size, no actual measurements are given in this article. However, after a few minutes' search of the original scientific paper, I found two slightly different estimates on page 13:

"The holotypic skeleton is composed of about 50 well-preserved but disarticulated bones (Fig. 6):
nearly 10 vertebrae and 15 ribs posterior to the cervical region (Figs. 7-10),
the large (hc. 50 cm) and complete right scapulocoracoid (Fig. 11), the
dorsal branch of the left ilium (Fig. 12),
both femora (Fig. 13)
and bones of the pes (Figs. 14-16). The total body length of
*Lalieudorhynchus gandi* gen. nov. et sp. nov. is estimated at
3,75 meters (Fig. 6)."

Figure 6, part of caption:
"Based on proportional comparisons with *Cotylorhynchus romeri* (e.g. OMNH 01673),
*Lalieudorhynchus* differs in having a longer and slender femur, smaller sacral vertebrae,
and smaller phalanges. Scale bar 1m; reconstructed total length of *Lalieudorhynchus* *gandi* about 3.60 m"


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[erik simpson]

Interesting beast. It even has a Wikipedia page already. I ran into a couple of funny links looking it up,
the first from David Peters: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/hippo-like-caseasaur-from-france-still-not-a-synapsid/

D. Peters is quite a character (who also has a Wikipedia page), "Reception to Peters' ideas by academic paleontologists has been universally negative.",
so his comments probably aren't to be taken too seriously.

On a more serious note, congratulations! More stuff like this and less of bickering is most welcome.

[Glenn]

Seriously?

[erik simpson]

Absolutely.

[Peter Nyikos]

Any paleontological comments? I had one, and tried to post it in "Leave a Reply". Here it is:

"What's all this about Eunotosaurus having a temporal fenestra? Even you don't show one, and this genus has been held by some to be close to turtle ancestry, at a time when turtles were held to be primitively anapsid. [What's your view on this, by the way?]

"Interestingly enough, Romer's picture of Eunotosaurus (after Watson) is a ventral view while yours is dorsal. When Romer wrote his 1945 edition, he lamented that `the roof of the skull is unknown; we cannot settle the problem of the presence or absence of a temporal opening.'

"Can we settle it now?"


However, when I tried to post, I got a page saying simply, "Sorry, this comment could not be posted."
I'll try to contact Peters about it; I've run into this glitch before and he helped me to work around it.

In the meantime, do you have any comments of your own about this?

> D. Peters is quite a character (who also has a Wikipedia page), "Reception to Peters' ideas by academic paleontologists has been universally negative.",
> so his comments probably aren't to be taken too seriously.

Wikipedia comments like this aren't to be taken seriously in isolation.
Despite herculean efforts to correct it, Wikipedia still smears ID as a "pseudoscience"
by failing to distinguish between the methodology (which is scrupulously
scientific in the hands of leading ID theorists like Behe) and personal beliefs.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS This failure to separate statements from personal beliefs permeates talk.origins,
and one person keeps trying to import it into s.b.p. And it isn't Glenn, not this month anyway.

[*Hemidactylus*]

With ID you cannot shine a turd and shouldn’t be pushing it on sci.
hierarchy groups.

[Peter Nyikos]

You are illustrating your genius for missing the point, and adding "garbage out" to "garbage in."
And your hypocrisy about posting on-topic.


Peter Nyikos

*********** QUOTE OF THE WEEK *********

If you don't own up to your own elemental truth, falsehood will ultimately end up owning you.

-- https://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/12-things-people-regret-the-most-before-they-die.html

[Peter Nyikos]

But temporarily, as we found out in early 2018, right here in s.b.p.


Peter Nyikos

[*Hemidactylus*]

I brought up caniforms vs feliforms in context of Arctoidea. But you seem
caught up in other battles…with *people* so didn’t yet respond.

ID and Behe OTOH could not be more off topic here. I didn’t introduce them.

[John Harshman]

This paper reports a juvenile Eunotosaurus with temporal fenestrae that
are closed in adults: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14900

Molecular data clearly show turtles to be diapsids, and in fact
archosauromorphs.

> However, when I tried to post, I got a page saying simply, "Sorry, this comment could not be posted."
> I'll try to contact Peters about it; I've run into this glitch before and he helped me to work around it.

Please don't contact Peters. He's a well-known net loon whose
methodology is essentially pareidolia on a grand scale. He claims to
see, purely from photos, bones that nobody else can see even when
holding the actual specimen. So whatever he shows about Eunotosaurus
can't be taken seriously.

Erik should not have introduced him into sci.bio.paleontology.

> In the meantime, do you have any comments of your own about this?
>
>
>> D. Peters is quite a character (who also has a Wikipedia page), "Reception to Peters' ideas by academic paleontologists has been universally negative.",
>> so his comments probably aren't to be taken too seriously.
>
> Wikipedia comments like this aren't to be taken seriously in isolation.
> Despite herculean efforts to correct it, Wikipedia still smears ID as a "pseudoscience"
> by failing to distinguish between the methodology (which is scrupulously
> scientific in the hands of leading ID theorists like Behe) and personal beliefs.

Try to minimize irrelevant comments.

[Sight Reader]

I’ve always wondered about the gait of guys like these caseids. They’ve got this big, body-builder barrel chest with stumpy little forelimbs that doesn’t appear to reach very far. Did they have yaw their entire chest back and forth to walk, somewhat like a waddling lizard? Would they need a flexible and powerful muscles in their spine to thrash around such a large mass? I can’t imagine their stride length being particularly impressive, especially with those teeny little back legs. Maybe getting back into the water might have offered these guys more mobility.

Are there tracks that give us some information about the speed of creatures like this? Are there any living animals with a gait similar to synapsids such as these?

[Peter Nyikos]

Superficial enough to be put on the back burner. But I will respond tomorrow if you
don't whine about it here.

Meanwhile, you haven't let out a peep about the topic of the OP.
Later today I will get deeper into it -- something even Erik hasn't done yet.

>But you seem
> caught up in other battles…with *people* so didn’t yet respond.

Don't flatter yourself.

>
> ID and Behe OTOH could not be more off topic here. I didn’t introduce them.

Still missing the point. Here is a clue: I was using it as the best justification
I have for the statement,

"Wikipedia comments like this aren't to be taken seriously in isolation."

[See above for the context.]

Unlike most people, including some active on this thread,
I don't indulge in such derogatory across-the-board claims
(especially not about something as important as Wikipedia!)
without explaining why I make them.


Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

The article you cite next settles it, but not the way you claim:

> This paper reports a juvenile Eunotosaurus with temporal fenestrae that
> are closed in adults: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14900

Thanks for the reference. It is very informative, but...

What it actually shows in Figure 3 is a skull of a juvenile with a UTF (upper temporal fenestra)
but no sign of a LTF (L for lower). Figure 2 shows a skull of a mature specimen
with a huge notch that is labeled LTF. One can also see the notch in Carroll's 1988 classic
_Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution_, page 207, Figure 10-22 (c).
This "fenestra" is NOT closed in adults.

There is no indication of the juvenile having such a notch, and we are even told,
"A lower temporal arcade is not present, leaving the cheek open ventrally.
It would seem that the notch only forms later in life. It is apparently called
an LTF on account of a hypothesized evolutionary event in which the
lower bar of the LTF has disappeared [Figure 4, *Claudiosaurus*].
However, the bones involved (jugal and quadrijugal) do not disappear,
but partially migrate to form most of the upper boundary of the LTF,
taking over most of the role of the squamosal and postorbital
in the primitive diapsid condition.


That said, this an impressively detailed article, and it's too bad most of the
people here are paywalled. [I've gotten past the paywall
thanks to membership of my university.] It gives fascinating
details about the closure or otherwise obliteration of postcranial fenestrae.

> Molecular data clearly show turtles to be diapsids, and in fact
> archosauromorphs.

I am far more impressed by the morphological data
provided by fossils, anatomically analyzed with the
help of developmental information, which this article provides.

> > However, when I tried to post, I got a page saying simply, "Sorry, this comment could not be posted."
> > I'll try to contact Peters about it; I've run into this glitch before and he helped me to work around it.

> Please don't contact Peters.

<snip undocumented derogatory claims>

> So whatever he shows about Eunotosaurus
> can't be taken seriously.

Apparently he is right about it not being a synapsid.
But his claims about Casea also not being one are not supported
by what he writes in that webpage, any more than your
personal claims about him are supported by you.

>
> Erik should not have introduced him into sci.bio.paleontology.

If it hadn't been for Erik, Eunotosaurus would not have been
mentioned, and you wouldn't have had a chance to do this post.

And note, you haven't said a word about the caseids,
including the one featured in the OP.

I think sci.bio.paleontology is at its best when such serendipity occurs.
Back in 1988 the ancestry of Eunotosaurus to turtles seemed a lost cause.
This 2015 _Nature_ article has very much rehabilitated this hypothesis.

Has this ever been mentioned in s.b.p. before? This is the first I've heard of it.


<snip for focus>

> Try to minimize irrelevant comments.

"Do as I say, not as I do."

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS I thought I had posted this earlier, but somehow it hasn't appeared here,
so it's good that I saved a copy which I am reposting here, with trivial changes.

[erik simpson]

My apologies for introducing the crank David Peters in this group. I thought it was readily
apparent that his notions are mostly nonsense, with occasional (accidental) accuracy. I was
simply amused that he showed up in Google search results.

Turtles have nothing to do with Caseids although they both display some primitive characteristics of
their common amniote ancestor. Modern phylogeny has downplayed in importance of temporal fenestrae
as particularly important characters, particularly with respect to early Sauropsids, to the point that "anapsid" is
deprecated as a wastebasket taxon. None of this is to suggest that there isn't still considerable controversy in
sorting out how various recognized clades are related to each other.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 2:56:34 PM UTC-4, thesigh...@gmail.com wrote:
> I’ve always wondered about the gait of guys like these caseids. They’ve got this big, body-builder barrel chest with stumpy little forelimbs that doesn’t appear to reach very far. Did they have yaw their entire chest back and forth to walk, somewhat like a waddling lizard?

Good question. When I was a kid in California, I saw lots of horned lizards, which have big flat bodies and stumpy legs,
but I can't recall how they waddled.

But as you suggest below, a lot of their walking might have been underwater,
where their anatomy would not have posed this problem. The original article says:

"As swimming abilities might indeed have been restricted in early synapsids, bottomwalking and/or foraging seem probable regarding the lifestyle of large caseids. Broad and flattened, somewhat Desmostyluslike phalanges (Gingerich, 2005) indeed suggest a foraging
lifestyle."

You might be able to access the whole article by clicking on the blue PDF logo on the upper right of:
https://palaeovertebrata.com/Articles/view/392
This just gives the abstract and the references, but by clicking, I got a download of the whole article.

> Would they need a flexible and powerful muscles in their spine to thrash around such a large mass? I can’t imagine their stride length being particularly impressive, especially with those teeny little back legs.

> Maybe getting back into the water might have offered these guys more mobility.

Of course. The article (also the original) has a great illustration depicting them in the water,
which might help you to imagine how they moved. I had a lot of fun magnifying parts of
a larger copy in a separate file further:

https://cdn.sci.news/images/enlarge10/image_11065e-Lalieudorhynchus-gandi.jpg

I especially loved the depiction of a fallen giant horsetail floating at the top.
I mourn the extinction of forests of giant horsetails and giant club mosses every
bit as much as that of the dinosaurs you see in "Jurassic Park" and elsewhere.

By the way, the illustration was drawn by one of the co-authors, Frederik Spindler.

>
> Are there tracks that give us some information about the speed of creatures like this? Are there any living animals with a gait similar to synapsids such as these?

I don't know how much help this is as far as onshore behavior goes,
but you might compare them with hippopotami, which this article (also the original)
compares them to. Hippos also have short legs in proportion to their huge,
barrel-like bodies.

The original goes to some length to explain why it hypothesizes that,
like hippos, they are semiaquatic. It goes on to say:

"Lalieudorhynchus may have spent much time onshore: the terrestrial plant fossils found near its skeleton suggest that it
may indeed browse onshore. It could be speculated whether aquatic and onshore habits followed a certain day-night rhythm,
like in living hippopotamids. On the other hand, aquatic plants show a lower potential for preservation,
causing an unknown taphonomical bias."

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

You don't find molecular data impressive? Why?

>>> However, when I tried to post, I got a page saying simply, "Sorry, this comment could not be posted."
>>> I'll try to contact Peters about it; I've run into this glitch before and he helped me to work around it.
>
>> Please don't contact Peters.
>
> <snip undocumented derogatory claims>

Sigh. Here:
https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/7/23/the-david-peters-problem

>> So whatever he shows about Eunotosaurus
>> can't be taken seriously.
>
> Apparently he is right about it not being a synapsid.
> But his claims about Casea also not being one are not supported
> by what he writes in that webpage, any more than your
> personal claims about him are supported by you.
>
>>
>> Erik should not have introduced him into sci.bio.paleontology.
>
> If it hadn't been for Erik, Eunotosaurus would not have been
> mentioned, and you wouldn't have had a chance to do this post.

Peters wasn't necessary for that purpose, though, was it?

> And note, you haven't said a word about the caseids,
> including the one featured in the OP.
>
> I think sci.bio.paleontology is at its best when such serendipity occurs.
> Back in 1988 the ancestry of Eunotosaurus to turtles seemed a lost cause.
> This 2015 _Nature_ article has very much rehabilitated this hypothesis.
>
> Has this ever been mentioned in s.b.p. before? This is the first I've heard of it.

Has what ever been witnessed? Not clear.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 5:52:35 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/9/22 12:48 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 10:52:46 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 8/9/22 6:42 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>> On Monday, August 8, 2022 at 6:28:45 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:

> >>>> Interesting beast. It even has a Wikipedia page already. I ran into a couple of funny links looking it up,
> >>>> the first from David Peters:
> >>>> https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/hippo-like-caseasaur-from-france-still-not-a-synapsid/
> >>>
> >>> Any paleontological comments? I had one, and tried to post it in "Leave a Reply". Here it is:
> >>>
> >>> "What's all this about Eunotosaurus having a temporal fenestra? Even you don't show one, and this genus has been held by some to be close to turtle ancestry, at a time when turtles were held to be primitively anapsid. [What's your view on this, by the way?]
> >>>
> >>> "Interestingly enough, Romer's picture of Eunotosaurus (after Watson) is a ventral view while yours is dorsal. When Romer wrote his 1945 edition, he lamented that `the roof of the skull is unknown; we cannot settle the problem of the presence or absence of a temporal opening.'
> >>>
> >>> "Can we settle it now?"
> >
> > The article you cite next settles it, but not the way you claim:

<crickets>

It's impressive, all right, for constructing phylogenetic trees,
but it has given varying results. When one actually gets
into the depths of biology and paleontology instead of computer programming of sequences,
one gets real insight into how actual bones evolve over time and
during individual development. And suddenly the secondarily anapsid
status of turtles actually makes real biological sense.

<snip for focus>

> >> Please don't contact Peters.
> >
> > <snip undocumented derogatory claims>


> Sigh. Here:
> https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/7/23/the-david-peters-problem

The author, whose name I can't find anywhere, and who puts in an appeal for crowdfunding
where one might expect his name to appear, spends an awful lot of time beating around
the bush before even starting to produce what might be damning evidence.
But the first example (claim of Jurassic vampire) has the supposedly damning newspaper article
cut off right where it seems about to produce the evidence.

How about telling me where in all that jumbled mess a respected scientist actually gives
information that shows how badly Peters misreads the data?

> >> So whatever he shows about Eunotosaurus
> >> can't be taken seriously.
> >
> > Apparently he is right about it not being a synapsid.
> > But his claims about Casea also not being one are not supported
> > by what he writes in that webpage, any more than your
> > personal claims about him are supported by you.
> >
> >>
> >> Erik should not have introduced him into sci.bio.paleontology.
> >
> > If it hadn't been for Erik, Eunotosaurus would not have been
> > mentioned, and you wouldn't have had a chance to do this post.

> Peters wasn't necessary for that purpose, though, was it?

Like hell he wasn't. If it hadn't been for Peters, I would still
be stuck on 20th century descriptions of Eunotosaurus, showing
doubts about it having chelonian affinities. It would never
have come up if I hadn't been bothered by Peters trying to show
affinities between Eunotosaurus and the caseids, and away from true synapsids.

And you would probably still be absent from this thread, because
what I wrote next still applies:

> > And note, you haven't said a word about the caseids,
> > including the one featured in the OP.

> > I think sci.bio.paleontology is at its best when such serendipity occurs.
> > Back in 1988 the ancestry of Eunotosaurus to turtles seemed a lost cause.
> > This 2015 _Nature_ article has very much rehabilitated this hypothesis.
> >
> > Has this ever been mentioned in s.b.p. before? This is the first I've heard of it.

> Has what ever been witnessed? Not clear.

You've flunked reading comprehension where the preceding three-line paragraph is concerned.

A little arithmetic shows almost 7 years since this
rehabilitation of Eunotosaurus occurred, plenty of time for
a thread on it to appear in s.b.p. but I never saw one that mentioned it.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 4:21:23 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 12:48:44 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 10:52:46 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:

> > > Erik should not have introduced him into sci.bio.paleontology.

> > If it hadn't been for Erik, Eunotosaurus would not have been
> > mentioned, and you wouldn't have had a chance to do this post.
> >
> > And note, you haven't said a word about the caseids,
> > including the one featured in the OP.
> >
> > I think sci.bio.paleontology is at its best when such serendipity occurs.
> > Back in 1988 the ancestry of Eunotosaurus to turtles seemed a lost cause.
> > This 2015 _Nature_ article has very much rehabilitated this hypothesis.
> >
> > Has this ever been mentioned in s.b.p. before? This is the first I've heard of it.

<snip to get to your words, Erik>

> My apologies for introducing the crank David Peters in this group.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume that the huge amount of
earlier text kept you from noticing the little bit of it that I've left in this time.

In a way, it reminds me of Thomas Aquinas's saying that God can bring
good out of evil. Not that there was anything evil about introducing Peters,
far from it. But the good that came out of it was a fine addition to s.b.p.

Thanks for that fine addition go especially to John Harshman, who
linked that great 2015 article in _Nature_. Too bad he seems to have trouble
understanding his role in it and my role in setting the paleontological ball rolling.

>I thought it was readily
> apparent that his notions are mostly nonsense, with occasional (accidental) accuracy. I was
> simply amused that he showed up in Google search results.
>
> Turtles have nothing to do with Caseids although they both display some primitive characteristics of
> their common amniote ancestor.

Methinks Peters was unduly impressed by the way the front of both skulls slopes downward
in a way seldom seen elsewhere. Comparing bones individually, one can easily get fooled
by all the other similarities until one comes to realize that almost all of them are primitive traits.

> Modern phylogeny has downplayed in importance of temporal fenestrae
> as particularly important characters, particularly with respect to early Sauropsids, to the point that "anapsid" is
> deprecated as a wastebasket taxon.

As I explained to Harshman, modern (read: molecular) phylogeny must always
be supplemented by sophisticated comparative anatomy, fossil evidence, and evo-devo.

Rough analogy: Wegener had some great "phylogenetic evidence"
that South America was once joined to Africa, involving huge numbers
of geological "characters". But he was without a mechanism to explain their
great physical separation, and one would be in a similar situation if there were
no "biological mechanism" for the closure of fenestrae despite the "increased fitness"
that led to the diapsid condition in the first place.

> None of this is to suggest that there isn't still considerable controversy in
> sorting out how various recognized clades are related to each other.

Yup. I'll have to remind Harshman that there is a problem in reconciling
the two recent molecular phylogenies of Euarchontoglires, one linked
by Daud in the OP and one linked by Pandora in the third post to
"Re: Man closer kin to naked mole rats than bats".

Earlier, I reminded Harshman that he had never replied to Pandora.
He opined that "maybe there wasn't anything worth responding to there"
[closely paraphrased from memory]
and he said he should perhaps look into it, but doesn't seem to have done so.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Glenn]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darren_Naish

Peters is clearly not a creationist:

"This video plays into Creationist dogma"
https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/a-blind-eye-toward-pterosaur-origins/

One wonders what the big deal is all about.

https://www.nature.com/articles/374315b0

Suppressed?

[Glenn]

On Monday, August 8, 2022 at 3:28:45 PM UTC-7, erik simpson wrote:

Or perhaps you shouldn't take Wiki too seriously. Do you "probably" trust the few people that Wiki cites?

[John Harshman]

No matter how much people try to turn the discussion back to
paleontology, you always manage to turn it away again.

[John Harshman]

On 8/10/22 2:44 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 5:52:35 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 8/9/22 12:48 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 10:52:46 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>>>> On 8/9/22 6:42 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>> On Monday, August 8, 2022 at 6:28:45 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
>
>>>>>> Interesting beast. It even has a Wikipedia page already. I ran into a couple of funny links looking it up,
>>>>>> the first from David Peters:
>>>>>> https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/hippo-like-caseasaur-from-france-still-not-a-synapsid/
>>>>>
>>>>> Any paleontological comments? I had one, and tried to post it in "Leave a Reply". Here it is:
>>>>>
>>>>> "What's all this about Eunotosaurus having a temporal fenestra? Even you don't show one, and this genus has been held by some to be close to turtle ancestry, at a time when turtles were held to be primitively anapsid. [What's your view on this, by the way?]
>>>>>
>>>>> "Interestingly enough, Romer's picture of Eunotosaurus (after Watson) is a ventral view while yours is dorsal. When Romer wrote his 1945 edition, he lamented that `the roof of the skull is unknown; we cannot settle the problem of the presence or absence of a temporal opening.'
>>>>>
>>>>> "Can we settle it now?"
>>>
>>> The article you cite next settles it, but not the way you claim:
>
> <crickets>

OK, what are you talking about? That I used the plural "fenestrae"
rather than the singular? But of course a juvenile has two upper
fenestrae. Perhaps you mistake what I was referring to.

That's certainly a belittling way to talk about it. Less annoyingly, you
could say that one of the great benefits of molecular phylogenies is our
ability to map character change onto it and thus achieve a greater
understanding.

>>>> Please don't contact Peters.
>>>
>>> <snip undocumented derogatory claims>
>
>
>> Sigh. Here:
>> https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/7/23/the-david-peters-problem
>
> The author, whose name I can't find anywhere,

The author is Darren Naish. I can't imagine how you couldn't find it. To
be clear: that's his web site.

> and who puts in an appeal for crowdfunding
> where one might expect his name to appear, spends an awful lot of time beating around
> the bush before even starting to produce what might be damning evidence.
> But the first example (claim of Jurassic vampire) has the supposedly damning newspaper article
> cut off right where it seems about to produce the evidence.
>
> How about telling me where in all that jumbled mess a respected scientist actually gives
> information that shows how badly Peters misreads the data?

I would consider Naish a respected scientist. You wouldn't? If you must,
feel free to visit his web site and look at his tree of tetrapod
evolution. You could probably figure out that there's something wrong
with it without needing anyone's help.

No need to attack me when answering requests for clarification. Still,
thanks.

[erik simpson]

Peter's inability to see D. Peters as a crackpot without having to find an appropriate
authority goes a long way to understanding his fervent defense of Glenn's trolling. He is
probably the most obtuse person I've ever been aware of, and my professional lifetime
was filled with science, engineering and academic nerds of all sorts. Even a few mathematicians.

[Glenn]

No comment on this, John? I suppose not, since you'd have to comment on yourself.

Pale ontology for sure.

[Glenn]

On Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 6:49:54 PM UTC-7, John Harshman wrote:

And how did you know that, John?

[Peter Nyikos]

What are you babbling about? I'm doing at least as much as
Erik above, in bringing up one thing relevant to paleontology after another.

Not only are you avoiding all discussion of it or of paleontology in general,
you are showing ZERO curiosity about the two phylogenies I talk about
in the last two paragraphs. I've made it abundantly clear where you
can find them, to no avail.

There is a big surprise in store for you if you were to actually look at them,
but I doubt that you want to see it.


By the way, when was the last time you did an OP to sci.bio.paleontology?
I don't recall you EVER having done one.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 10:15:52 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:

> Peter's inability to see D. Peters as a crackpot without having to find an appropriate
> authority goes a long way to understanding his fervent defense of Glenn's trolling.

I agree that Peters is a crackpot, but only on the basis of an encounter with him
back in 2018. HOWEVER, I saw no sign of the *specific* things Harshman claimed
about him, which are the more derogatory things I snipped and he didn't bother to argue for.

As for your "garbage out," I've never defended trolling by Glenn.
You are seriously misrepresenting what I did on another thread,

"Re: Man closer kin to naked mole rats than bats".

What I did defend were the citations of webpages that turned out to be very
helpful and on-topic, and which you and Harshman misrepresented. Worse yet,
Harshman smeared Glenn with vile accusations about his motivations
for posting them -- accusations that he tried neither to justify
nor to ameliorate (let alone retract). And you aided him in
running away from a challenge to seek justification in talk.origins if
he couldn't produce it himself.

You seem to have enlisted an ally in your support of Harshman's irresponsible behavior.
See how he treated this issue in two successive posts:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/WP7JtxgJIio/m/vhurnx7HBAAJ

Re: Man closer kin to naked mole rats than bats

Aug 10, 2022, 7:18:37 PM

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/WP7JtxgJIio/m/3VYaSePMBAAJ

Re: Man closer kin to naked mole rats than bats

Aug 10, 2022, 9:04:19 PM

> He is probably the most obtuse person I've ever been aware of, and my professional lifetime
> was filled with science, engineering and academic nerds of all sorts.

Are you referring to Peters or to Glenn here?


> Even a few mathematicians.

With me, the roles were reversed. You ran a scam for over a year where you
simulated being obtuse by claiming that I was being "unclear".
I say "simulated," because these claims were almost always followed
by you asking questions that weren't designed to shed light
on anything that might have been unclear in what I had written.

Finally, it became so blatant that I did something drastic for the first time:
I rewrote what I had written to make it more clear.
But when I asked you whether I was being clear now,
you adamantly refused to give me any feedback on it.

That was when I blew the whistle on you, and I've told Glenn how chaos erupted, first with
a clueless tirade by Robert Camp, and then with less foolish but still inept ones by two other t.o. regulars.
You seem to have made an alliance with one of them here (see above) and I wouldn't
be surprised if the other showed up eventually here in s.b.p.


Peter Nyikos

[erik simpson]

On Thursday, August 11, 2022 at 1:37:41 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 10:15:52 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
>

...

> > He is probably the most obtuse person I've ever been aware of, and my professional lifetime
> > was filled with science, engineering and academic nerds of all sorts.
> Are you referring to Peters or to Glenn here?

Neither. I'm referring to you. Your question is very confirmatory.
...

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, August 11, 2022 at 4:44:47 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
> On Thursday, August 11, 2022 at 1:37:41 PM UTC-7, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 10:15:52 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
> >
> ...

[snip restored]

>>>Peter's inability to see D. Peters as a crackpot without having to find an appropriate
>>> authority goes a long way to understanding his fervent defense of Glenn's trolling.

I showed just how completely off-target this asinine GIGO was. Small wonder
you snipped it.

> > > He is probably the most obtuse person I've ever been aware of, and my professional lifetime
> > > was filled with science, engineering and academic nerds of all sorts.

> > Are you referring to Peters or to Glenn here?

> Neither. I'm referring to you. Your question is very confirmatory.

You are showing your true colors for the first time this year.
Up to now you have muted your unreasoning animosity towards me
in all the threads on which you and I have interacted.
But now, with your massive deletia of what I wrote about your
restored GIGO and about your unsavory past history,
you have shown the true depths to which you can descend.

Your "very confirmatory" is illustrative of why I singled you out long ago
as "the most disingenuously dishonest regular in talk.origins."
Here too. Even Harshman is a distant third there and a distant second here.

Others participating here have earned other unsavory superlatives,
so don't flatter yourself in thinking you are something special.


Just in case some readers are scrolling impaired, I am linking
the post which you have mangled here.

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.bio.paleontology/c/nyo2yOfiI3g/m/h2qE3uoMBQAJ

Peter Nyikos

*********** QUOTE OF THE WEEK *********

If you don't own up to your own elemental truth, falsehood will ultimately end up owning you.

-- https://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/12-things-people-regret-the-most-before-they-die.html

The Quote of the Week was supplemented with the sentence, "Honesty is the clearest path."

[*Hemidactylus*]

Would it be flippant of me to point out you’re not adding to anybody’s
knowledge of paleontology here? Was I most flippant regular of t.o. or most
facetious?

Also you are reverting to typical patterns which in itself isn’t
informative as there’s no surprise to be found. The post is mostly
redundant. It has been done multiple times with minor variations in
content. What could a compression algorithm do with your posts over the
years. I know I’ve gone on too long.

Add some paleontological knowledge please…maybe about caniforms vs.
feliforms without being insulting.

[Glenn]

Beg to dicker. He just recently posted concerning a most relevant subject, titled "TO down again?"

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, August 10, 2022 at 9:49:54 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/10/22 2:44 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 5:52:35 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 8/9/22 12:48 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>> On Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 10:52:46 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >>>> On 8/9/22 6:42 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>>>> On Monday, August 8, 2022 at 6:28:45 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:
> >
> >>>>>> Interesting beast. It even has a Wikipedia page already. I ran into a couple of funny links looking it up,
> >>>>>> the first from David Peters:
> >>>>>> https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/hippo-like-caseasaur-from-france-still-not-a-synapsid/
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Any paleontological comments? I had one, and tried to post it in "Leave a Reply". Here it is:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> "What's all this about Eunotosaurus having a temporal fenestra? Even you don't show one, and this genus has been held by some to be close to turtle ancestry, at a time when turtles were held to be primitively anapsid. [What's your view on this, by the way?]
> >>>>>
> >>>>> "Interestingly enough, Romer's picture of Eunotosaurus (after Watson) is a ventral view while yours is dorsal. When Romer wrote his 1945 edition, he lamented that `the roof of the skull is unknown; we cannot settle the problem of the presence or absence of a temporal opening.'
> >>>>>
> >>>>> "Can we settle it now?"
> >>>
> >>> The article you cite next settles it, but not the way you claim:
> >
> > <crickets>

> OK, what are you talking about? That I used the plural "fenestrae"
> rather than the singular? But of course a juvenile has two upper
> fenestrae.

> Perhaps you mistake what I was referring to.

I've only seen them referred to (occasionally) as pairs of upper fenestrae/openings,
and far more frequently in the singular, with the bilateral symmetry understood.
For instance, in Carroll's matchless _Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution_,
there appears the following description of the fenestral pairs of ichthyosaurs:

"The skull has a large upper temporal opening, but the cheek shows no evidence
of a lateral fenestra, although it is slightly emarginated ventrally." [p. 252, last paragraph]

When did you ever encounter your usage below?

> >>>> This paper reports a juvenile Eunotosaurus with temporal fenestrae that
> >>>> are closed in adults: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14900

In the paper you cite, the singular usage abounds, beginning with:

"The cheek is open with a single, large fenestra."

This is the first of nine usages of the singular in a single paragraph.

Come off it.

> Less annoyingly,

Your choice of words here is illogical, unless you are trying to annoy me.

> you could say that one of the great benefits of molecular phylogenies is our
> ability to map character change onto it and thus achieve a greater
> understanding.

Of what? of direct "ancestral" changes of characters? If so, why are characters
given a treatment that is absolutely forbidden to species in a scientific paper?

Before answering, you may want to reflect on those 1,700 different trees
of as many genes to which you reacted with an attack on Glenn's
motivations for referencing a webpage that accurately talks about them.

> >>>> Please don't contact Peters.
> >>>
> >>> <snip undocumented derogatory claims>
> >
> >
> >> Sigh. Here:
> >> https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/7/23/the-david-peters-problem
> >
> > The author, whose name I can't find anywhere,

> The author is Darren Naish. I can't imagine how you couldn't find it.

It's there, but in credits to two pictures rather than to the article.

> To be clear: that's his web site.
> > and who puts in an appeal for crowdfunding
> > where one might expect his name to appear, spends an awful lot of time beating around
> > the bush before even starting to produce what might be damning evidence.
> > But the first example (claim of Jurassic vampire) has the supposedly damning newspaper article
> > cut off right where it seems about to produce the evidence.
> >
> > How about telling me where in all that jumbled mess a respected scientist actually gives
> > information that shows how badly Peters misreads the data?

As usual, you duck the question:

> I would consider Naish a respected scientist.

So do I. But being a respected scientist is very different from being
able to write a well-organized article.

I came across him many years ago, after which tetzoo was broken apart
and refashioned. It was in a fascinating article, with over 50 comments IIRC,
about trying to imagine protobats. I have talked about it in talk.origins once or twice,
emphasizing that the problem of how bats might have evolved is a more difficult
mystery than the evolution of whales ever was.

Unfortunately, when that particular page was reassembled, the indispensable
illustrations were missing. Fortunately, I managed to find them elsewhere,
but combining references to them and to the webpage is vastly less helpful than
seeing them on the same page.

> You wouldn't? If you must,
> feel free to visit his web site and look at his tree of tetrapod
> evolution. You could probably figure out that there's something wrong
> with it without needing anyone's help.

Which website? that of Peters, or a website where Naish shows it
and comments on it? Your use of "his" and "he" is confusing on account
of Naish being the only name mentioned in this paragraph.

It was not a request, it was an accusation of my not being clear.
One you and Erik have made a thousand or more times, hence drastic
measures were called for.


> Still, thanks.

And thanks for gracefully acknowledging the clarification. See my reply to Erik
a little over three hours ago for his unsavory alternative.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

This seems a silly argument, and I see no point to it. Now that you
understand my usage, there doesn't seem any reason to belabor it.

No. You tend to characterize many things in a slanted way. You should
resist that tendency.

>> Less annoyingly,
>
> Your choice of words here is illogical, unless you are trying to annoy me.

No, I'm trying to say that you're annoying me. Was that really unclear?

>> you could say that one of the great benefits of molecular phylogenies is our
>> ability to map character change onto it and thus achieve a greater
>> understanding.
>
> Of what? of direct "ancestral" changes of characters? If so, why are characters
> given a treatment that is absolutely forbidden to species in a scientific paper?

Because characters are different from species. We can indeed place
characters on a tree, estimating the states at internal nodes. But we
can't place real taxa at internal nodes because there's no way to say
they belong there. If there were such a way, estimating character states
at nodes would be prior to it.

> Before answering, you may want to reflect on those 1,700 different trees
> of as many genes to which you reacted with an attack on Glenn's
> motivations for referencing a webpage that accurately talks about them.

Why would that be relevant?

>>>>>> Please don't contact Peters.
>>>>>
>>>>> <snip undocumented derogatory claims>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Sigh. Here:
>>>> https://tetzoo.com/blog/2020/7/23/the-david-peters-problem
>>>
>>> The author, whose name I can't find anywhere,
>
>> The author is Darren Naish. I can't imagine how you couldn't find it.
>
> It's there, but in credits to two pictures rather than to the article.

Well, that's interesting. The current version of TetZoo doesn't actually
say that it belongs to Darren. Apparently you just have to know that.
Curious.

>> To be clear: that's his web site.
>>> and who puts in an appeal for crowdfunding
>>> where one might expect his name to appear, spends an awful lot of time beating around
>>> the bush before even starting to produce what might be damning evidence.
>>> But the first example (claim of Jurassic vampire) has the supposedly damning newspaper article
>>> cut off right where it seems about to produce the evidence.
>>>
>>> How about telling me where in all that jumbled mess a respected scientist actually gives
>>> information that shows how badly Peters misreads the data?
>
> As usual, you duck the question:

Are you saying that the article doesn't give you the required
information? I haven't read it in a while, but that seems unlikely.

>> I would consider Naish a respected scientist.
>
> So do I. But being a respected scientist is very different from being
> able to write a well-organized article.
>
> I came across him many years ago, after which tetzoo was broken apart
> and refashioned. It was in a fascinating article, with over 50 comments IIRC,
> about trying to imagine protobats. I have talked about it in talk.origins once or twice,
> emphasizing that the problem of how bats might have evolved is a more difficult
> mystery than the evolution of whales ever was.
>
> Unfortunately, when that particular page was reassembled, the indispensable
> illustrations were missing. Fortunately, I managed to find them elsewhere,
> but combining references to them and to the webpage is vastly less helpful than
> seeing them on the same page.
>
>> You wouldn't? If you must,
>> feel free to visit his web site and look at his tree of tetrapod
>> evolution. You could probably figure out that there's something wrong
>> with it without needing anyone's help.
>
> Which website? that of Peters, or a website where Naish shows it
> and comments on it? Your use of "his" and "he" is confusing on account
> of Naish being the only name mentioned in this paragraph.

I refer to Peters's web site.

Consider the possibility that you are sometimes unclear, and don't
consider it an insult. Note that you complained above that I was
unclear, and I responded by clarifying. Period.

>> Still, thanks.
>
> And thanks for gracefully acknowledging the clarification. See my reply to Erik
> a little over three hours ago for his unsavory alternative.

No. Please stop with all the personal attacks, especially those on third
parties. Does any of that help sci.bio.paleontology?

[Glenn]

You have your own answer to that, of course. "He's a well-known net loon"...


John, you're a loon. Now consider the possibility that others are sometimes unclear, and do not consider what they say as being an insult. Period.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Lost hours of posts on pad versus phone. Maybe Giganews having issues…