Olson's review of Mesozoic Birds

["Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com>]

How I love writing reviews of horrid ABSRDist book reviews...

Following on the heels of Steadman's suprisingly decent review of the
excellent work "Mesozoic Birds: Above the Heads of Dinosaurs", Olson gives
us his predictably terrible opinion (though admittedly not nearly as
ridiculous as his Ostrom Symposium volume review).

Olson, Storrs. Birds before there were no dinosaurs. Paleobiology 30 (2). p.
169-171.

Olson seems to still be a non-MANIACal ABSRDist, as he keeps alvarezsaurids
and Avimimus as dinosaurs.  He starts off with ABSRD nonsense and complaints
of the evils of cladistics.

"But Caudipteryx is anything but an unambiguous theropod and the theropod
origin can only be sustained if one wishes away the differences in the
homologies of the digits of the hand and totally ignores the fundamental
differences in tooth replacement pattern and ankle structure, as Witmer does
here."
Do they never give up?  It's appalling really.  Why does Olson ignore
Shenzhouraptor's completely theropod tarsus (Zhou and Zhang, 2002)?  Or
Prum's (2003) argument showing Feduccia must make the same kind of genetic
assumptions involved in a homeotic shift to get Archaeopteryx to lose a
phalanx on each manual digit?  Or the numerous rebuttals of the avian
characters of Caudipteryx (Chiappe and Dyke, 2002; Christiansen and Bonde,
2002)?  Or Feduccia (2002) admitting feathered archosaurs had theropod-like
teeth?

"In passing, Witmer (p. 19) makes the important observation that although
there have been repeated tests of the theropod origin of birds, ''to be
fair, it must be pointed out that they rarely include nondinosaurian taxa in
the analysis.'' For precisely this reason, the succeeding chapter by Clark,
Norell, and Makovicky on ''Cladistic approaches to the relationships of
birds to other theropod dinosaurs'' is but another doctrinaire addition to
an as yet unhelpful literature in which cladistic methodology is successful
only because it is never
really put to the test."
Who wants to guess Senter's (2002) analysis
(http://www.cmnh.org/dinoarch/2002Oct/msg00295.html) including all proposed
non-dinosaurian bird relatives wouldn't convince Olson either?

Olson really liked Elzanowski's chapter on archaeopterygids for serving "up
a fresh-baked loaf of
highly original, comprehensive, and intellectually stimulating insights".
Though the chapter is good, I feel most of Elzanowski's "new"
interpretations are invalid, not being homologous with the dinosaurian
structures they resemble so much (such as the dorsal jugal process not being
homologous to theropods', despite the fact Bambiraptor's is near identical).

The impression Olson leaves one with is that he's not a fan of dry
description, cladistics, or those clades not directly bearing on living
birds.  He seems much more interested in paleobiology and the "stem lineage"
(to use an Olshevskyism) of Neornithes.
"Only specialists will be able to appreciate much of the rest of the
contents, which tend heavily toward description and knotty cladistic
analyses."
"The book reflects Chiappe's long interest in the so-called opposite birds
(Enantiornithes) and similar dead-end taxa that branched off somewhere
between Archaeopteryx and modern birds and have no living descendents."
"On a happier note, especially for readers of this journal, the volume
editors appear to have constrained authors to include a section titled
''Paleobiology'' in each of the chapters for which this is appropriate."
"But by this point the reader cannot help but wish to garner a few more
insights into biological questions concerning Mesozoic birds as living
organisms."
I suppose I'm the kind of specialist who this book was made for, one who
delights in dense description and "knotty" cladistic analyses.

"The terminal chapter by Chiappe on ''Basal Bird Phylogeny'' is an
inscrutable justification for the accompanying character matrix, which would
perhaps be an entirely suitable finale if the end product of evolution were
a cladogram."
Oh, but it is Olson.  At least it can be represented that way at the
resolution we have for Mesozoic birds (i.e. no possibility of studying
organisms at the population level).

Olson then leaves us with several questions that could have easily come from
Pickering's keyboard, were they not constructed entirely of words that I
know.
"Just how diverse were Mesozoic birds compared with the Cenozoic radiation?
What trophic levels did Mesozoic birds occupy and which ecomorphs known
today were absent then and why? What limitations were placed on the
evolution of Mesozoic birds by the constraints of their environments, the
choice of nest sites and food afforded by the plants of the day, other
potential food sources, potential competitors, predators, etc.?"
Alas, most of these questions will remain unanswerable for most taxa in the
forseeable future.

Fortunately, Olson saves the most amusing quote for last.
"The most essential characteristic of the Class Aves, one that will never
appear in a cladogram, is that birds survived past the end of the Cretaceous
and dinosaurs, regardless of size, did not. Why? Although such inquiries
would necessarily entail much that is in the realm of speculation, any sort
of a bestguess discussion would have greatly enlivened an otherwise
excessively pedantic tome."
Perhaps because it's an utterly meaningless question, assuming Olson equates
Aves with "birds", as I believe he does (he's certainly no phylogenetic
taxonomist, right?).  I could just as rightfully state "The most essential
characteristic of the clade Theropoda .... or Coelurosauria .... or
Saurischia ... or Eumaniraptora ... or Pygostylia ... is that they survived
past the K-T boundary, while other dinosaurs didn't."  Ugghh.

Olson ends by saying the book will have persisting value for only a few
specialists (and he expected what?), is on a topic whose knowledge will be
complete only very far in the future (unlike what topic?), and will be
subsumed by more interesting books on the topic in the future (which is a
problem why?, and isn't expected why?).  Basically, it seems as if Olson wan
ted a book written for laymen on paleoornithology and the specific origin of
neornithines, while he got a technical volume emphasizing the anatomy and
phylogenetics of the diverse Mesozoic aviary and their ancestors.  I know
I'm happy with the latter.

Mickey Mortimer