Basic reporting

Article meets basic reporting criteria.

Experimental design

Article meets basic standards, but is lacking in certain aspects (see attached).

Validity of the findings

Basic results are valid and reproducible, but issues with experimental design color interpretation of the results (see attached).

Basic reporting

Meets all of the appropriate requirements

Experimental design

Meets all of the appropriate requirements

Validity of the findings

Meets all of the appropriate requirements

Comments for the author

In light of the revision of the MS and the removal of the description of the SMA material, I will restate my original concerns with the MS as they apply to the current MS:

– “I disagree wholeheartedly with the notion that one can split genera based on the results of a phylogenetic analysis that maintains monophyly of the original genus. (see the case of Brontosaurus vs. Apatosaurus for a primary case example). “
I remain unconvinced by the author’s arguments, but there have been exceptional efforts to address this concern in this revision. I consider this concern settled, at least as far as the publication of this paper.
– “Finally, I don’t know that a phylogenetic analysis including juvenile specimens alongside adult specimens is going to give you a particularly trustworthy result. “
As before, I remain unconvinced but feel that the authors have made a satisfactory effort to address it.
I think the revised structure of the paper is a great improvement. I think it also is improved by removing the SMA description, which indeed seemingly is its own paper.
All in all, I think it remains a challenging and interesting paper - for all that I might disagree with the methods, it nonetheless is a useful attempt to approach some interesting and important questions, and I think it will end up highly cited as a result. I can see no further barrier to publication.