RE: Jack Horner's Dino Chicken?
June 15, 2015 at 8:39 pm
(This post was last modified: June 15, 2015 at 8:41 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(June 15, 2015 at 4:14 pm)abaris Wrote: How's the general scientifc consensus right now about that claim? I'm following the debate for about a decade now, but with more interest than understanding, since I'm a idiot when it comes to biology.
I find it fascinating that they may have turned into birds and never actually died out.
The birds descended from dinosaur theory has been around for 140 years, and gained increasing ground amongst paleontologist starting with Ostrom from 1970s. It's has been the dominate and the de facto orthodox theory of bird origin at least since the early 1990s.
The main thing is not the we now think birds evolved differently from how we did 20 years ago. The main thing is we now use a different system of classification than we might have 20-30 years ago. 20 or 30 years ago we have already recognized that birds descended from dinosaurs. But the theory of how to label different animals prevalent at the time relied on grouping animals by somewhat artificial selection of shared derived traits. So birds obviously had substantially different sets of derived trait from most dinosaurs, so probable lineage not withstanding, birds were considered a different type of animal from dinosaurs. Pervailing classification theory now rely on shared primitive traits. So the descendant of any creature is always considered to belong to the same clad as the creature itself. In this classification system, if birds descended from dinosaurs, then birds are dinosaurs by default.
