Rhetoric vs. reality: A commentary on “Bird Origins Anew” by A. Feduccia

@inproceedings{Smith2015RhetoricVR,
  title={Rhetoric vs. reality: A commentary on “Bird Origins Anew” by A. Feduccia},
  author={N. Adam Smith and Luis Mar{\'i}a Chiappe and Julia A. Clarke and Scott V. Edwards and Sterling J. Nesbitt and Mark A. Norell and Thomas A. Stidham and Alan H. Turner and Marcel van Tuinen and Jakob Vinther and Xing Xu},
  year={2015}
}
ABSTRACT Birds are maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs. The evidence supporting the systematic position of Avialae as a derived clade within Dinosauria is voluminous and derived from multiple independent lines of evidence. In contrast, a paucity of selectively chosen data weakly support, at best, alternative proposals regarding the origin of birds and feathers. Opponents of the theory that birds are dinosaurs have frequently based their criticisms on unorthodox interpretations of paleontological… 
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15 Citations

FANTASY VS REALITY: A Critique of Smith et al.'s Bird Origins

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Fossils with Feathers and Philosophy of Science

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It is demonstrated that a variation of Imre Lakatos’s model of progressive versus degenerative research programmes provides a novel and productive assessment of the debate, and established that a refurbished Lakatosian account both explains the intractability of the dispute and predicts a likely outcome for the debate about avian origins.

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Research in the late 1900s has established that birds are theropod dinosaurs, with the discovery of feather preservation in non-avian theropods being the last decisive evidence for the dinosaur…

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Coprolites of early archosaurs contain undigested bones, which suggests a short digestion time and higher metabolic rates than in extant crocodiles, and implies reappearance and strong development of a specific stomach functionality that either had been already lost in the theropod dinosaurs or was never present in their lineage.

How Many Dinosaurs Are Birds?

E school child knows that birds are dinosaurs. Numerous magazine articles and popular books on the topic are available. If they report the history of the subject, they say that Thomas Huxley, known…

On the purported presence of fossilized collagen fibres in an ichthyosaur and a theropod dinosaur

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Taking up the legacy of Waterhouse Hawkins and Owen: art and science for a new Italian project to bring back dinosaurs to life

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The new project, which takes up the idea of Waterhouse Hawkins and Owen and their legacy to restore these ancient vertebrates based on solid scientific foundations, represents to date the only way to reanimate these fascinating lost animals.

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A phenology of the evolution of endothermy in birds and mammals

  • B. Lovegrove
  • Environmental Science
    Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
  • 2017
Recent palaeontological data and novel physiological hypotheses now allow a timescaled reconstruction of the evolution of endothermy in birds and mammals. A three‐phase iterative model describing how…

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