Irritator

Irritator is one of the only theropod specimens from Brazil, a country which Joel and I believe to produce some descent gems, but no descent people. The scientists who named the darn dinosaur so named it because of the feeling experienced when they realized that the snout had been artificially lenthened by the person selling it in order to increase its selling value. The paper in which it is described was artificially lengthened to make it seem more readable. But in both cases, its just anoying. In all of the diagrams of irritator, not once is a scale bar used to indicate the actual size of the fossil. Instead, they say that the possible length of a complete skull is 84 cm. Also, their classification or irritator leaves much wanting. First of all, they classified it as a hitherto unknown branch of maniraptora, phylogenetically close to dromaeosaurus and archaeopteryx on the basis of the size of the supratemporal fenestrae. This was after they classified it among the theropods on the basis that it has 11 out of the 40 defining characterists of that group. Another problem that I have with it is that they called it the only nonavian theropod from south america: What about Carnotaurus, Herrerosaurus, Eoraptor, etc?! All of those were found before irritator.
My problem with their placement of irritator in the maniraptora stems from several things. First of all, they base much of their analysis on the size and position of the temporal fenestrae. The infratemportal fenestra is large an direcly beneath the dorsally placed eyes. the supratemporal fenestra is extremely small. They claim that the petite size of the supratemporal fenestra gives it an affinity to the primitive birds like avimimus. This is just a case where a limited data set has totally skewed the cladistic analysis. Instead, this is clearly convergent evolution. Just on the basis that they said that the teeth resemble those of spinosaurus they should have placed it in with the spinosauridae along with coelophysis, dilophosaurus, baryonyx and suchomimus. The spinosaurids seem to have been a major force in gondwanan theropod evolution, especially into the jurassic and cretaceous when they died out for the most part in laurasia. the size of the supratemporal fenestra is probably linked to the fact that the irritator has a very sharply downturned jaw line with the joint way below the tooth row. This was probably a fish eater with a very fast but relatively week bite. The position of the infratemporal fenestra directly below the orbit lends support to the idea that this animal had a very week skull.