Pygostylia

Pygostylia is a group of avialans which includes the Confuciusornithidae and all of the groups more closely related to modern birds.

==Definition== The group Pygostylia was intended to encompass all avialans with a short, stubby tail, as opposed to the longer, unfused tails of more primitive species like Archaeopteryx lithographica. It was named by Sankar Chatterjee in 1997. Luis Chiappe later defined Pygostylia as a node-based clade, "the common ancestor of the Confuciusornithidae and Neornithes plus all its descendants". In 2001, Jacques Gauthier and Kevin de Queiroz recommended that Chatterjee's original apomorphy-based clade concept be used instead of Chiappe's node-based definition, but this recommendation has been inconsistently followed. Luis Chiappe and co-authors continue to use Chiappe's definition, often attributing authorship of the name to Chiappe 2001 or Chiappe 2002 rather than to Chatterjee.