Alternative origins of birds (humor) (was RE: birds DID NOT evolve from therapods)

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

> From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of
> Michael Skrepnick
>
> Now as I recall Tom Holtz and myself were diskussin jest a short
> spell back
> how UNUSUAL them fethery little fronds on yer basic Pteridophyte style
> plants ( ferns and cycads and such ) resemble cute primitive-like "wings".
> Now I'm a willin ta betchya'll the tee in China, that one fine stormy day,
> millyuns of years back, one Big 'ol bolt'a lightnin shot on down from up
> yonder an "BLAAMMM"...in an example of yer basic "punktuwated
> equal ibryum",
> that poor 'ol cycad got a real shot o' juice that transformed those furly
> little fronds into the makins of a primitive, but suffishantly airborne
> critter that is yer typical ancient form of dragonfly ( where
> d'ya think the
> term "evolushun-AIRY" come frum anyway?).

[snip]

Yes, Michael Skrepnick has thus finally presented his own "arboreal origin
of birds"; not "from the trees down", but simply "from the trees"...

Some of us have joked about a comic symposium for SVP called "Anything But
Dinosaurs: Alternative Hypotheses to Bird Origins".  The goal was to come up
with the most outrageous alternatives to the dinosaurian origin, the weirder
the better.  Mike's would have won by a longshot!!  Other alternatives were
turtles (present in the Late Triassic, and thus older than birds; have
modified cervicals; have toothless beaks; not dinosaurs), frogs (live in
trees; present in the Late Triassic; have synsacra; not dinosaurs), and the
inarticulate brachiopod Lingula (found in lagoonal sediments, like
Archaeopteryx; present in the fossil record much earlier than birds; has
long tail-like pedicle; maybe sprang out of the water and spin
helicopter-like to settle back down; not dinosaur).

The other comic symposium I came up with this year is "You Can't Handle The
Truth: Alternative Ecologies of Famous Fossil Forms".  The two talks
suggested so far is the reality that hadrosaurids were voracious predators,
from which the herbivorous tyrannosaurs had to run in terror; and the fact
that trilobites were NOT really marine bottom feeders but were in fact
flying terrestrial ravenous carnivores.  In fact, it turns out that
vertebrates had colonized the land very early in the Cambrian, but the
piranha-like feeding habits of the trilobites prevented from any of their
skeletons from making it into the fossil record.  Only after the decline of
trilobite diversity in the Frasnian-Fammenian extinctions (Late Devonian)
was the depredations of these forms reduced enough that we start to pick up
a better terrestrial vertebrate fossil record...

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796