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The Dinosauria: Baraminological And Multivariate Patterns, Neal A. Doran, Matthew Mclain, Natalie Young, Adam Sanderson

Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism

The Dinosauria pose both interesting and challenging questions for creationist systematists. One question is whether new dinosaur discoveries are closing morphospatial gaps between dinosaurian groups, revealing continuous morphological fossil series, such as between coelurosaurians and avialans. Questions such as these underscore the importance of systematics for resolving correct group memberships, including tools for visualizing morphospatial relationships. Baraminic distance correlation (BDC), three-dimensional multidimensional scaling (MDS), and a new method to baraminic studies – principal component analysis (PCA) – were applied to 18 character matrices from 2004. The data included saurischian and ornithischian dinosaur groups including (1) “basal” Saurischia, (2) Ceratosauria (including …