Flying primates?

Ok, let's get the obvious out of the way:

So, did Pettigrew ever get these to fly out of his butt?

that's the important question. If he did, then of course they are primates, and the world must be coming to an end any day now.

on a more serious note:

Has anybody read the primary reference on the genetic studies that Pettigrew did that supposedly threw a monkey wrench (*ahem*) into the monophyletic arrangement of Chiropterans?

Any specific comments on that?

Pity it's not true, I find the idea of being a secondarily flightless bat quite amusing...

Aaaahaaa - so that is where all the dreams of flying come from! Our ancient evolutionary history!

Snarky humor aside, that is a great post. Obviously, there is much more work to be done in mammalian systematics.

Waitaminnit. You mean that those flying monkeys my boys played in The Wizard of Oz were REAL craetures???

Yeah it's fascinating but maybe not worth the heated debate at the moment. *Supposedly* in the next ten years or so the sequencing technology will exist to get a fairly well assembled shotgun sequenced genome for a few thousand dollars. If I were into phylogenetics, I think I would be tempted to just wait it out rather than drive myself nuts measuring bat hoo-has and finger bones.

I seem to remember that there may have been molecular convergence producing a C-G sequence bias and that a functional explanation (metabolic temperature?) had been proposed. I'll look for the references and try to refresh my memory on this homoplasy issue.

And Miko, whole genome sequences will be helpful but they are no magic bullet. There will still be great difficulties to overcome in systematics and I predict that there will still be a place for morphological work.

[quote]I seem to remember that there may have been molecular convergence producing a C-G sequence bias and that a functional explanation (metabolic temperature?) had been proposed. I'll look for the references and try to refresh my memory on this homoplasy issue.[/quote]

my memory is even more vague, thanks for looking into it. let us know if you dig something up.

I do remember some discussion about something hincky in the Pettigrew genetics work, but I can't remember the specifics any more, and no longer have access to a copy of the original paper.

So if we were secondarily flightless bats, would that make vampirism atavistic?

This is actually cool.

I'm not always impressed that crazy wingnuts (sorry) seem to hail from my fair island's shores, but the good thing about this is that its a good example of contraversy of science that could actually be analysed in a classroom.

It also seems a little (just a little) open for further investigation.

It's better than Aquatic Ape Theory, isn't it (hey, maybe it was an aquatic manta-ray-ish winged ape...)