Tuesday, November 5, 2019

New "About" Page

Ever since the inception of this blog, the "About" page has largely remained unchanged. Seeing as it was written in an "answers to frequently asked questions that are not in fact frequently asked" format and much of the text pertained to my not-officially-cancelled-but-rarely-updated webcomic, I thought this would be a good time to overhaul into something that will potentially be more useful.

As a result, my "About" page now contains a very, very simplified overview of maniraptor diversity and evolution. In some ways, it can be considered a spiritual successor of my very old "What is a maniraptor?" post, which some readers have requested me to update in the past.

For the new "About" page, I had to cut out some of the material that I had planned (I would have liked to go into more detail regarding neoavian diversity), because it was already getting long for an introductory post. However, I hope that what I managed to fit in will be of some use in helping readers orient themselves regarding the groups and concepts that I regularly discuss on this blog.

Note for theropod taxonomy buffs: for the sake of simplicity and convention, I have not currently adopted the new definition for Dromaeosauridae proposed by Hartman et al. (2019). However, I would certainly be open to using it if it ends up in prevailing usage by theropod paleontologists.

As some "bonus material", here are three phylogenetic diagrams that didn't make it into the final write-up: