Examining and interpreting recent spectacular fossil discoveries in China, paleontologists have arrived at a prevailing view: there is now incontrovertible evidence that birds represent the last living dinosaur. But is this conclusion beyond dispute? In this book, evolutionary biologist Alan Feduccia provides the most comprehensive discussion yet of the avian and associated evidence found in China, then exposes the massive, unfounded speculation that has accompanied these discoveries and been published in the pages of prestigious scientific journals.
Advocates of the current orthodoxy on bird origins have ignored contrary data, misinterpreted fossils, and used faulty reasoning, the author argues. He considers why and how the debate has become so polemical and makes a plea to refocus the discussion by “breaking away from methodological straitjackets and viewing the world of origins anew.” Drawing on a lifetime of study, he offers his own current understanding of the origin of birds and avian flight.
Examining and interpreting recent spectacular fossil discoveries in China, paleontologists have arrived at a prevailing view: there is now incontrovertible evidence that birds represent the last living dinosaur. But is this conclusion beyond dispute? In this book, evolutionary biologist Alan Feduccia provides the most comprehensive discussion yet of the avian and associated evidence found in China, then exposes the massive, unfounded speculation that has accompanied these discoveries and been published in the pages of prestigious scientific journals.
Advocates of the current orthodoxy on bird origins have ignored contrary data, misinterpreted fossils, and used faulty reasoning, the author argues. He considers why and how the debate has become so polemical and makes a plea to refocus the discussion by “breaking away from methodological straitjackets and viewing the world of origins anew.” Drawing on a lifetime of study, he offers his own current understanding of the origin of birds and avian flight.
Riddle of the Feathered Dragons: Hidden Birds of China
Riddle of the Feathered Dragons: Hidden Birds of China
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Examining and interpreting recent spectacular fossil discoveries in China, paleontologists have arrived at a prevailing view: there is now incontrovertible evidence that birds represent the last living dinosaur. But is this conclusion beyond dispute? In this book, evolutionary biologist Alan Feduccia provides the most comprehensive discussion yet of the avian and associated evidence found in China, then exposes the massive, unfounded speculation that has accompanied these discoveries and been published in the pages of prestigious scientific journals.
Advocates of the current orthodoxy on bird origins have ignored contrary data, misinterpreted fossils, and used faulty reasoning, the author argues. He considers why and how the debate has become so polemical and makes a plea to refocus the discussion by “breaking away from methodological straitjackets and viewing the world of origins anew.” Drawing on a lifetime of study, he offers his own current understanding of the origin of birds and avian flight.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300165692 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
RIDDLE OF THE FEATHERED DRAGONS
Hidden Birds of ChinaBy Alan Feduccia
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Alan FeducciaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-16435-0
Chapter One
ROMANCING THE DINOSAURSBlame to Go Around
Dinosaurs are God's gift to television and the newspapers, just as science fiction is the lifeblood of the supermarket tabloids.
Keith Thomson, "Dinosaurs, the Media and Andy Warhol," 2002
"Romancing" refers to an ardent emotional attachment, and nowhere in paleontology does the term apply more aptly than to dinosaurs, which have long been an intense focus of almost every child's fascination. But enchantment with the terrible lizards reached a crescendo with the 1993 Michael Crichton blockbuster movie Jurassic Park, featuring an amusement park of cloned dinosaurs, and the view that birds are living dinosaurs ascended from theory to an unchallengeable orthodoxy. Propelled to the forefront over two decades earlier by John Ostrom's discovery of the famous raptor Deinonychus (considered "a bizarre killing machine"), in the late 1960s, the entire world of dinosaur paleontology would never be the same. By the mid-1980s Jacques Gauthier, now, like the late Ostrom, also of Yale University, would set the hypothesis that birds are derived from theropod dinosaurs in a formal algorithmic, phylogenetic (cladistic) context. Gauthier's analysis is widely considered to be definitive and is still cited as the seminal paper in support of a theropod origin of birds.
In 1996, I published The Origin and Evolution of Birds, which questioned much of the currently accepted view of avian origins, supporting instead a common ancestry of birds and dinosaurs from early archosaurs (or more derived dinosauromorphs) and flight origin from the trees-down (arboreal), as opposed to the dinosaurian, ground-up (cursorial) genesis. The book received high praise from such notables as Ernst Mayr and garnered the 1996 Award for Excellence in the Biological Sciences from the American Association of University Publishers. A number of paleontologists were unwilling to consider alternatives to their orthodoxy, however, and in a review of the book that ran in the now-defunct journal Lingua Franca in that fall, Gauthier asserted, "We basically try and ignore [Feduccia]. For dinosaur specialists, it's a done deal," and "The bird people trust him, and so he's poisoning his own discipline." Many dinosaur paleontologists revolted at criticisms of their arguments and were dismissive of any evidence that would undermine not only the image of dinosaurs as highly intelligent endotherms (hot-blooded creatures), many with feathers for an insulatory pelt, but also avian flight having evolved from the ground up from highly derived, earthbound theropod dinosaurs. Two principal advocates of a theropod origin of birds and its corollaries, Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History and Luis Chiappe, then of the same institution, wrote an immoderate review published in Nature entitled "Flight from Reason." This review was sufficiently polemical that paleontologist Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania commented, "Such a sulfurous heading poisons the well of scientific discourse and seems unworthy of an otherwise respected and responsible journal." Unfortunately, Norell and Chiappe's strident review is illustrative of a growing trend in the scientific and popular literature on the origin of birds.
Two years later, in 1998, an editor of the preeminent science journal Nature, Henry Gee, triumphantly announced, "Birds are dinosaurs: the debate is over." Many paleontologists have supported this science by consensus, and their mantra is aptly summarized by Richard Prum, also of Yale University: "It is time to abandon debate on the theropod origin of birds." Not only is the origin of birds a subject upon which no further debate is permissible, an unchallengeable orthodoxy, but, as paleontologist Christopher Brochu proclaimed in 2001, the origin of birds from theropod dinosaurs is "no longer the subject of scholarly dispute." Brochu's position is clear: if the origin of birds from theropod dinosaurs is no longer the subject of scholarly dispute, then those who dispute it are not scholars; it is unscientific to dispute the origin of birds from theropod dinosaurs. Prum agrees, stating that "current critics of the theropod origin of birds are not doing science."
Examination of the literature fueling the consensus view of the origin of birds directly from already highly derived theropod dinosaurs reveals considerable deficiencies. Birds may well be living theropod dinosaurs, but the popularized consensus view in favor of a theropod origin of birds derives in large measure from the uncritical editing of poorly argued and documented manuscripts combined with media sensationalism. The rest stems from an almost canonical adherence to the results of the current methodology of the field of systematics, which deals with the reconstruction of life's history. Known as cladistics or phylogenetic systematics, in paleontology this field is based entirely on the computer analysis and coding of large numbers of skeletal features to seek most-parsimonious trees of life. Once consensus on the theropod origin of birds was reached and codified by cladistic analyses, the field took on a verificationist approach, attempting to prove preconceived ideas about avian origins, flight and feather genesis, and endothermy in dinosaurs.
For cladistics, the only characters of interest are apomorphic, or "derived," character states that, when matched between two taxa as synapomorphies, tell of common descent. While theoretically sound, such an approach depends on the characters being homologous (similar because of descent from a common ancestor), but the catch is that animals possess a morphology that is adaptive to their way of life and their environment. Thus, animals that do similar things tend to look similar, and many characters represent a homoplasy, a character shared by a cause other than common ancestry, such as convergence or parallelism, a very common occurrence in vertebrate history, where animals come to look alike because of adaptations for a particular lifestyle. A primary concern of this methodology, especially in paleontology, is that the only test of validity is another competing cladistic analysis, and in the case of living birds, for example, the vast majority of phylogenies produced by cladistics have been refuted by molecular comparisons. As Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan has aptly noted, "The problem is that we expect too much of morphology in asking it to tell us the genealogy of organisms as well as what they look like." Most recently, Ronald Jenner has emphasized that great care must be taken in analyzing comparative morphology to minimize subjectivity and bias. Rather than being viewed as ultimate solutions to problems of phylogeny, phylogenetic hypotheses should be treated as an exploratory method. Such methods are useful for comparing and evaluating hypotheses, but they must be handled with extreme caution. With this in mind, this book takes another critical look at the problem of bird origins.
The Chinese Gold Rush
In recent years, the news from paleontology has been dominated by discoveries from the Chinese gold rush for the beautifully preserved fossils of the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota in the northeastern Liaoning Province, some 300 kilometers (180 mi.) northeast of Beijing. Historically, the farmers of Songzhangzi had largely ignored the rocky outcrops around their village, but in the late twentieth century they struck fossil gold when they realized that people would pay large sums of money for fossil skeletons. Impoverished locals began excavating the fossils, and their peaceful, rural life turned topsy-turvy. Soon "the hillsides were honeycombed with grave-sized shafts and the fabulous specimens began to emerge," often with paleontologists working alongside local farmers. As could be expected, fossils were sold to the highest bidder, often for a fraction of what they would eventually bring through illicit trade, and Chinese fossils ended up for sale everywhere, especially in Europe and North America. With hordes of foreign scientists clamoring to study the fossils, and a mini-economic boom for local farmers who could earn up to $1,200 (two years' income) for bird skeletons, fossils ended up all over the world. Chinese dinosaur paleontologist Xing Xu reported in 2000 that there were "assembly line factories" where workers pieced together fossils for the black market, and chimaeric fossils were often forged to increase their value. The problem continues today. "The fake fossil problem has become very, very serious," with more than 80 percent of marine reptile specimens on display in Chinese museums estimated to have been "altered or artificially combined to varying degrees." In 2011 many local museums were reported to have collections chock-full of fakes.
One of these fossils, named Archaeoraptor and hailed as a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, is the most infamous example of this unfortunate situation. Unveiled at a National Geographic press conference in October 1999, the fossil was featured the next month in National Geographic magazine in an article by art editor Christopher Sloan in which he discussed newly discovered feathered dinosaurs from China and the origin of birds, including speculation on feathers in T. rex: "Tyrannosaurus rex may have had them ... at an early stage. Hatchlings would have shed their downy feathers as they grew." In addition to making unfounded, wild speculations on the fossils, Sloan, unfamiliar with the rules of biological nomenclature, called the forged fossil "Archaeoraptor liaoningensis" and stated that it would later be formally named as such. The response was immediate. Writing in the museum's newsletter, Backbone, Storrs L. Olson of the National Museum of Natural History denounced the publication of a scientific name in a popular magazine without peer review. On 1 November 1999, Olson wrote an open letter to Peter Raven, then chairman of the Committee on Research and Exploration for National Geographic, stating: "This is the worst nightmare of many zoologists—that their chance to name a new organism will be inadvertently scooped by some witless journalist."
The demise of Archaeoraptor was rapid. That December, Xing Xu, dinosaur expert at Beijing's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), notified National Geographic of a counterslab of a small, supposed theropod known as a dromaeosaur that contained Archaeoraptor's tail. The issue was finally resolved in August 2002 by the careful analysis of Stephen Czerkas of the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, Utah, who had initially bought and studied the specimen, and Xing Xu; and by Zhonghe Zhou from the IVPP and colleagues, who in November 2002 published a note in Nature entitled "Archaeoraptor's Better Half." In the end, science corrected itself; the tail and hind limbs of the "Archaeoraptor" composite were in fact those of a small, birdlike dromaeosaur named Microraptor zhaoianus, and the foreparts were those of a fish-eating bird, Yanornis martini (= Archeovolans repatriatus), named for paleontologist Larry D. Martin of the University of Kansas. Indeed, Czerkas has gone on to make major contributions to the study of bird origins. Unfortunately, in the meantime, largely because of sensational coverage in the popular press, Creationists had seized on the story in an attempt to discredit paleontology and evolution.
In his open letter to Peter Raven, Storrs Olson asserted that National Geographic had "reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism," and "The idea of feathered dinosaurs ... is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith." Although the scandal was resolved through the self-corrective process of science, it is worth noting that it would not have occurred had a more critical attitude toward dinosaurs and the origin of birds prevailed in the scientific and popular literature. In illustrating the degeneration of scientific discourse with respect to this issue, Olson's letter clearly illustrated that the highly respected magazine National Geographic and a major scientific journal, Nature, were incapable or unwilling to consider critically the question of the origin of birds.
Unveiling in Florida
Shortly before returning the Archaeoraptor fossil to China in May 2000, Czerkas, an artist and paleontologist of impeccable integrity, presented an analysis of the specimen in a presentation entitled "A New Toothed Bird from China" at a special meeting held on 7 April at Fort Lauderdale's Graves Museum of Archaeology and Natural History, now defunct. The meeting, as science writer Constance Holden described it, "was one of the most unusual coming-out parties Florida had ever seen. By day, some of North America's top dinosaur experts debated fine points of the evolution of birds and dinosaurs. After dark, they mingled with the cream of Fort Lauderdale society, supping, dancing, and drinking cocktails around a live alligator, assorted skeletons, and a dinosaur carved in ice."
The posh conference was held in honor of a small, newly unveiled, birdlike dromaeosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Montana, Bambiraptor feinbergi. The generic name of the specimen refers to its diminutive size, while its specific epithet honors the museum supporter Michael Feinberg of Hollywood, Florida, who purchased it from the discoverers, the Linster family, for an undisclosed sum, and supported its reconstruction by David Burnham at the University of Kansas, who would later write his doctoral dissertation on the newly discovered fossil and other aspects of its paleobiology. Little Bambiraptor was hailed as the most birdlike dinosaur discovered to date, although it postdates the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, by 80 million years.
Bambi was to be the crown jewel of the newly created Florida Institute of Paleontology at the Graves Museum. The symposium, which I attended, drew some 150 scientists, a medley of dealers, collectors, and graduate students, who presented papers on aspects of paleontology, mostly related to the presumed relationship of birds and dinosaurs. As at any conference, the quality of presentations varied; excellent papers were given by archosaur anatomist Lawrence (Larry) Witmer of Ohio University, developmental biologist Roger Sawyer of the University of South Carolina, and others. Among the more speculative presentations was a paper by William Garstka on the DNA of Triceratops. He and his team of molecular biologists claimed to have extracted DNA from fossil bones of the Late Cretaceous dinosaur. Shortly after the symposium Constance Holden reported the finding in Science: "They said it couldn't be done. But a team at the University of Alabama just may have succeeded in extracting some DNA from a dinosaur. And guess what it resembles: a turkey. If the work pans out, the scientists say, it will be the 'first direct genetic evidence to indicate that birds represent the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs.'"
At the meeting, a polite gentleman came up to me and introduced himself as Jonathan Wells. I did not know at the time that Wells is a well-known Creationist, having received a PhD in religious studies from Yale and, in 1989, a second doctorate from Berkeley in molecular and cell biology. We had a pleasant discussion, and he asked me about the Triceratops DNA, which I thought was fantastical, as did most of my colleagues at the meeting. During the year that followed, Wells published a Creationist work entitled Icons of Evolution, and in it he recalled the story of the Triceratops DNA:
The DNA Garstka and his colleagues found was 100 percent identical to the DNA of living turkeys. Not 99 percent, not 99.9 percent, but 100 percent. Not even the DNA obtained from other birds is 100 percent identical to turkey DNA (the next closest match in their study was 94.5 percent, with another species of bird). In other words, the DNA that had supposedly been extracted from the Triceratops bone was not just similar to turkey DNA—it was turkey DNA. Garstka said he and his colleagues considered the possibility that someone had been eating a turkey sandwich nearby, but they were unable to confirm that. At first, when Garstka presented his findings I thought it was an April Fool's joke—but it was already April 8. Then I looked around to see whether anyone was laughing—but no one was.
Wells singled out one other presentation for ridicule, that of Kevin Padian, who preached to the audience about what was, and what wasn't, science:
Just before Garstka spoke, Berkeley paleontologist Kevin Padian had blasted critics of the bird-dino theory for being unscientific. Padian explained that, as President of the National Center for Science Education, he spends a lot of time telling people what science is and what it isn't.... Padian called critics of the dino-bird hypothesis unscientific because (he claimed) they offer no empirically testable alternative hypotheses. The evidence the critics cite is based on ... isolated observations, rather than on a method (cladistics) that is "fully accepted by the scientific community." And ... although "science is not a vote," the cladistic method is endorsed by the National Science Foundation, major peer-reviewed scientific journals, and "the majority of experts." Therefore, criticisms of the bird-dino hypothesis "ceased to be science more than a decade ago," and the "controversy is dead."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from RIDDLE OF THE FEATHERED DRAGONS by Alan Feduccia Copyright © 2012 by Alan Feduccia. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................ixINTRODUCTION....................1
1 Romancing the Dinosaurs: Blame to Go Around....................6
2 What Did Evolution's High Priest Say?....................33
3 The Iconic Urvogel Was a Bird....................55
4 Mesozoic Chinese Aviary Takes Form....................93
5 Big Chicks: The Flightless Birds....................190
6 Yale's Raptor: Toward Consilience, not Consensus....................230
APPENDIX 1 A Sliver of Urvogel Bone: Implications for Endothermy....................269
APPENDIX 2 The Persisting Problem of Avian Digital Homology....................275
NOTES....................291
GENERAL REFERENCES....................329
INDEX....................331