And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that
hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of
heaven.
Genesis 1:20
"The scientific consensus has pretty much declared it a fact of natural history that birds evolved from dinosaurs. One evolutionary professor remains a gadfly, though. He contests the evidence on which the hypothesis is based, and also believes his maverick position is growing.Alan Feduccia, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, wrote an essay.
His position does not deny an evolutionary origin of birds, but places the “feathered dinosaurs” so often portrayed as ancestors of modern birds on a dead-end branch. He claims his position is more in line with 19th century paleontologist Richard Owen and 20th century evolutionist Gavin de Beer. These men viewed flightless birds as degenerate products of variation, not stages toward flight; for instance, de Beer in 1956 “showed conclusively that flightless birds descended from flying ancestors and have never re-evolved flight.”
Similarly, Feduccia holds that the “feathered dinosaurs” attracting so much attention in the media were either pure scaly dinosaurs with whose decayed collagen has been misinterpreted as “proto-feathers,” or were degenerate flightless birds. His own view is that the birds evolved from archosaurs, the predecessors in evolutionary history of the true dinosaurs. He thinks some of the archosaurs lived in trees and developed flight as they jumped (the arboreal hypothesis).
Birds as “living dinosaurs” is now a cornerstone of modern palaeontological thought. But a consensus is always in danger of turning into dogma. Indeed, given the cult-like belief in the field’s orthodoxy, it seems that every fossil pulled from the Chinese deposits is accompanied by hyperbolic pronouncements of it having filled a major evolutionary gap. Yet many of these discoveries lack normal scientific stringency, and we see a transition from normal scientific falsificationism to simply confirming what is already thought to be known.
- Feduccia described his opinion as “a minority one, but growing in popularity”.
- He rejects the “fantastical proposals” about “dinosaurs with protofeathers, dinosaurs with bird wings and modern feathers, four-winged gliding dinosaurs, and tiny supposed theropods from the Jurassic period with avian wings.”
- The birds-from-dinosaurs controversy has a long history, Feduccia explained. Richard Owen in 1875 “set the record straight” when Thomas Huxley first advanced the view that birds evolved from dinosaurs. “Owen predicted that ‘science will accept the view of the Dodo as a degenerate Dove rather than as an advanced Dinothere,’ thus stating the crux of the current controversy.”
- Feduccia believes the “feathered dinosaurs” adorning covers of Nature were flightless birds. He calls them “Mesozoic kiwis.”
Truth is-FLIGHTLESS BIRDS are just birds who simply lost genetic info over the generations. (Opposite of evolution). The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs is idiotic to say the least.
