Re[2]: Bird-like dinosaur reported found in Patagonia

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     With respect, Erich, you are getting in a fuss over nothing. If birds 
     evolved from dinosaurs, then 'dinosaurs' are paraphyletic. The lineage 
     of dinosaurs that leads to birds constitutes the stem group of birds, 
     in which some dinosaurs are more bird-like than others. When Novas's 
     animal Unenlagia comahuensis is described as the most bird-like 
     dinosaur known, this is an accessible way of saying that it is the 
     most crownward of all known stem-group birds. That's cladistics. OK?
     
     Henry Gee


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Bird-like dinosaur reported found in Patagonia
Author:  paleonet@ucmp1.berkeley.edu at Internet
Date:    21/05/97 19:49


>An Argentinian researcher Tuesday reported finding bones of the most 
>bird-like dinosaur ever discovered, an ostrich-sized, meat-eater that 
>ran around flapping wing-like forearms to keep its balance. The 
>discovery helps explain how the forearms of some dinosaurs evolved 
>into wings that power today's birds, believed by many paleontologists 
>to be direct descendants of dinosaurs, said Fernando Novas who made 
>the find. Novas said the dinosaur is not an ancestor of today's birds 
>but an evolutionary dead-end for this particular species. For the full 
>story, see http://www.merc.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=3037013-14b
>
>posted by Scott Shrader
     
I realize this is a big can-o-worms but here goes:
     
What do you(anyone interested) think of the birds-ARE-dinosaurs concept?
     
The reason I ask is because it strikes me as very "gimmicky" and most often 
is used for it's buzz word value(see below). The general public goes wow 
and scientists get some attention payed to them and all is warm and fuzzy. 
But obviously birds are not dinosaurs. They may be VERY closely related and 
may share a common ancestor but a dinosaur is not a bird.
     
We don't call snakes lizards even though they are very closely related. We 
have not gone backwards and decided to call snakes "lizards" just because 
we have a better idea of their evolutionary heritage. The point is that 
even though birds may have evolved from therapod dinosaurs, the fact is 
that they EVOLVED into BIRDS. BIRDS. BIRDS. BIRDS.
     
By playing on symantics(buzz words) here the Paleontological community is 
practicing BAD SCIENCE. Bad science is an incidious thing. It often comes 
in the form of overly simplified ideas or images. One of my favorites is 
the ubiquitous illustration of the Mesozoic as a long stretched out mural 
with something like a Dimetrodon at one end crawling around the swamp and a 
big'ol T-rex at the other kicking up the dust in a desert setting. 
Somewhere in the jungle between we have some brontos and duckbills and so 
forth. Now you and I know that this is not the image of one point in time 
and space(we are biased in our knowledge of natural history) but the 
average museum visitor or youngster scanning through library books thinks 
that all of these critters lived together at the same time. It's a nice 
mural but it's bad science.
     
The idea of communicating to the lowest common denominator is not exclusive 
to television.
     
With the upcoming release of "Lost World" I shudder at what we are in store 
for next.
     
I hope for some interesting discussion.
     
Erich Rose
     
PS I am an exhibit designer by day which is why I am so intersted in this 
subject. That is to say the problem with bad science, not Birds are dinos, 
and being an amateur geology and paleontology buff may bias me a bit toward 
this particular subject.