Hello Fred,
Many thanks for your regular posts in this subforum; I've personally found them very helpful for staying up to date. Thanks as well for sharing the link to my list.
Regarding your critiques, you're quite right that I don't properly cite the sources for the information I included. As I explained in my blog post introducing the list, it was inspired by the lists of Mesozoic dinosaurs that are commonly compiled in the paleontology community, which, yes, are often little more than lists of names with no sources beyond maybe authorship. (Examples of such lists can be found
here and
here, as well as my own
list of Mesozoic maniraptorans, which is in the same format.) I would never recommend my list for technical use, except perhaps as a starting point. The main purpose of setting it up was for the fun of maintaining such a list, and to provide a source of information for more casual fans of fossil birds who might not feel an immediate need to delve into the scientific literature. I am happy to provide my sources for specific statements if anyone asks though.
If given the choice, I do not practice ranked taxonomy, so I do not consider "families" to be any more significant than other levels of taxonomic organization. However, I did try to make reasonably specific statements about phylogenetic position where possible (e.g.: I mention that
Eurotrochilus is a stem-hummingbird, that
Hakawai is closely related to seedsnipe and the plains-wanderer, that
Psittacopes might be a stem-passerine, etc.). In addition, though I do not explicitly say so, for genera known from more than one species I always listed the type species first.
I do acknowledge that the absence of extant genera with extinct species is one of the biggest flaws of my list. That is something I intend to fix in the future. However, given the amount of time and effort I've already spent compiling the extinct genera and the greater challenge of assessing the current taxonomic status of extinct species assigned to extant genera, I'm going to cut myself some slack for the time being. I hope you understand.
A major motivator for me in compiling the list was the fact that I could not find any up to date list of extinct Cenozoic birds anywhere. Since you already have one of your own, might I encourage you to make your list publicly available? I understand if it is intended only as a personal reference, but I believe it would be a highly valuable resource to the community if it was made accessible (and certainly more useful than mine).
