Boy howdy, does this topic frustrate me.

It's a classic example of how science gets treated in the media (and how
scientists and their accountants mis-use the media). Birds as dinosuars
is an hypothesis. Birds as crocodiles is an hypothesis. Scientists test
hypotheses through experiment and in the case of paleontology experiment
is in the form of accumulated fossil evidence coupled with comparative
biology filtered through a model. The media has a tendency to report
hypotheses and subsequent theories as fact.

A few scientists, convinced of their own righteousness, will often state
their pet theories to the press as if they werre some kind of received word.
The half dozen or so paleontologists most likely to turn up on TV tend
toward this extreme. Back in the early 1980's when Thomas Huxley's dinosaur
to bird kinship was being seriously revisited using computerr models and
cladistics, there was a lot of hand wringing and claims about bucking
convention. Robert Bakker refers to himself as "infant terrible" in
_Dinosaur Heresies_.

Birds may have arisen from a narrow group of organisms within the vast
group of animals identified as dinosaurs. This evidence is sketchy as
best and requires lots of qualifiers in large part because birds stretch
back into the Juassic. Yet, most of the clad work has been done in comparison
to cretaceous dinosaurs. A bit of a problem if one believes in linear
time.

Some useful reading:

Bakker, Robert. 1986. _The Dinosuar Heresies_. Morrow.

Feduccia, Alan. 1980. _The Age of Birds_ Harvard Pres

Feduccia, Alan. 1996. _The Origin and Evolution of Birds_. Yale Press.

--
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* Mike Patterson, Astoria, OR * What revolutionaries do best
* mpatters at orednet.org * is eat their own young
http://www.pacifier.com/~mpatters