Plotopteridae they became extinct. That they became extinct at the same time as the giant penguins of the Southern Hemisphere, which also coincided with the radiation of the seals and dolphins, has led to speculation that the expansion of marine mammals was responsible for the extinction of the Plotopteridae, though this has not been formally tested. Plotopteridae Plotopteridae is the name of an extinct family of flightless seabirds from the order Suliformes. Related to the gannets and boobies, they exhibited remarkable convergent evolution with the penguins, particularly with the now extinct giant penguins. That they lived in the North Pacific, the
Origin of birds was the sister clade to the Deinonychosauria, but that the more advanced bird "Confuciusornis" was within the Dromaeosauridae. This result supports Paul's hypothesis, suggesting that the Deinonychosauria and the Troodontidae are part of Aves, the bird lineage proper, and secondarily flightless. This paper, however, excluded all other birds and thus did not sample their character distributions. The paper was criticized by Corfe and Butler (2006) who found the authors could not support their conclusions statistically. Mayr "et al." agreed that the statistical support was weak, but added that it is also weak for the alternative scenarios. Current cladistic analyses do