Re: The big story at SVP

[Andreas Johansson <andreasj@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Graydon <oak@uniserve.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 03:08:28PM +0200, Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
>> On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Jeff Hecht <jeff@jeffhecht.com>
>> wrote:
>> > The big story from Bristol is a feathered troodon from China older
>> > than Archaeopteryx:
>> >
>> > <http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17855-oldest-feathered-dinosaur-is-earliest-bird.html>
>> >
>> > It's from a paper Xu Xing gave this morning that's listed in the SVP
>> > abstracts. (I'm not there - another New Scientist writer covered the
>> > story).
>>
>> Has Feduccia gone BAD, or are they misrepresenting him in the final
>> paragraph?
>
> He presumably thinks it *is* an early bird, in the no-bird-is-a-
> dinosaur sense, and is being quoted at shorter length than what he said.
> (Note that the descriptive text about his statement only makes sense if
> he thinks the specimen is not a dinosaur.)

Hm? How does "showing just how blurred the distinctions are between
groups in this area of the dinosaur evolutionary tree" make any sense
if the specimen *isn't* a dinosaur?

-- 
Andreas Johansson

Why can't you be a non-conformist just like everybody else?