The dinosaur flap

نویسنده

  • Richard F Harris
چکیده

You know a story must have some truly delicious ingredients in order for it to bubble along for well over a century. And this one has just about everything short of sex: dinosaurs and birds are the meat in the story; and the sauce is a scientific disagreement nearly bordering on a blood feud. Thomas Henry Huxley started it all shortly after 1861, when the feathered fossils of Archaeopteryx were unearthed in Bavaria. Those, he asserted, were a transitional form between reptiles and birds. And the debate has been simmering ever since. Are those favored creatures nibbling away at the backyard feeder direct descendants of dinosaurs — or better yet, living dinosaurs themselves? The paleontology establishment is fairly resolute on the matter: absolutely, it says. But a small, vocal band of ornithologists says: absolutely not. Science reporters simply can’t resist returning to this story from one year to the next. And paleontologists kindly offer new opportunities with regularity, as they dig up new fossils that fan the debate. The latest bunch are some feathered dinosaur fossils from China, which were published simultaneously in Nature and National Geographic on 25 June. “Scientists say they have found birds’ ancestor,” read the 6 July headline in US News and World Report. The case is essentially closed, asserts this article, now that feathered dinosaurs are in hand. National Geographic — published by the society that helped fund the research — took much the same tone. The article mentioned that some scientists still doubt that birds descended from dinosaurs, but the skeptics were represented only by one mildly skeptical Chinese researcher — in an article otherwise stuffed full of scientists who supported the headline on the cover: “Dinosaurs Take Wing. The Origin of Birds.” Jennifer Ackerman writes: “These days, most paleontologists are convinced that birds are a subcategory of dinosaurs. ‘The anatomical similarities are overwhelming,’ says Mark Norell, chairman of the department of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.” But other reporters hearkened back to all those stories they’d written over the years on this debate. Recently, the role of doubting Thomas has been played predominantly by two ornithologists: Alan Feduccia at the University of North Carolina, and Larry Martin at the University of Kansas. John Noble Wilford at the New York Times called Feduccia for comment about the latest Chinese fossils. Feduccia dismissed the similarities as nothing more than parallel evolution.

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عنوان ژورنال:
  • Current Biology

دوره 8  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 1998