An article about weirdo dinosaur-bird skeptics who, like climate change deniers and flat-earthers, seem to like to...
An article about weirdo dinosaur-bird skeptics who, like climate change deniers and flat-earthers, seem to like to think of themselves as some sort of iconoclastic rebel.
Also, look at this beautiful Emily Willoughby painting.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/the-birds-are-not-dinosaurs-movement/
Also, look at this beautiful Emily Willoughby painting.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/the-birds-are-not-dinosaurs-movement/
"Evolutionary hypotheses should be formulated on phylogenies, not vice versa." Exactly, and this is why BAND is pseudoscience, and nearly as pointless as creationism. Until somebody finds something that's more birdlike than a coelurosaur, they're chasing their own tails.
ReplyDeleteI still think that some maniraptorans might be secondarily flightless birds, but the distinction between "flightless bird" and "feathered maniraptoran" is nearly nonexistent anyway.
Maybe there’s a thing where ornithologists (especially older ones?) are too used to old-fashioned views of dinosaurs and can’t change their preconceived notions.
ReplyDeleteCasey G. I think that as ornithologists, they might resent the idea that they're studying a subset of another specialty... which isn't really the case, but I dunno.
ReplyDeleteThis post is interesting:
ReplyDeletehttps://laelaps.wordpress.com/2007/06/04/feduccia-is-at-it-again/
"...objectivity was valued higher than validity, a problem that seems to be a huge problem for journalists dealing with science." It's now a problem for journalism, period.
ReplyDeleteOne of the professors at my college was (and probably still is though so much new evidence has emerged, who knows) one of these folks, and because he was the one teaching the palaeontology class (which focused on dinos) so are a number of students from that University as a result (including my husband, this is something we disagree on).
ReplyDeleteIf memory serves (and to be fair it's been several years and my conversations about this issue with people were brief) said professor was convinced a lot of the fossil evidence was fake though (a little conspiracy-theoryish for my taste. It does occasionally happen, but not as widely as this would imply)... so, maybe any new evidence just won't be seen as such.
That's fascinating.
ReplyDeleteThere were a lot of "Archaeopteryx is a hoax" stories going around for a while there.
ReplyDelete