Re: What is big, fluffy, and could tear you to shreds? Yutyrannus, the 9 m long feathered tyrannosauroid from China

[Dr Ronald Orenstein <ron.orenstein@rogers.com>]

This may be extremely naive on my part, but:

I recently had a chance to skim through a copy of "Feathered Dragons" in a 
Singapore bookstore. I stress, skim - I was not in a position to buy the book 
and have not given it a careful reading. 

However: I was looking specifically for one thing and failed to find it. 
Feduccia's current thesis requires (it would seem to me) accepting that 
maniraptorids are convergent to dinosaurs. As this is a radical notion, I would 
have expected in such a detailed book some discussion of the anatomical 
features that support this idea, given his insistance that we should 
concentrate on the anatomy of the specimens themselves. 

However, try as I might I could not find any discussion of which maniraptorid 
features are convergent and why, or which anatomical features contradict the 
idea that maniraptorids are in fact true dinosaurs. Did I miss it?  Or has 
Feduccia really put forward this idea with no supporting anatomical evidence?

Ronald Orenstein 
1825 Shady Creek Court
Mississauga, ON
Canada L5L 3W2

On 2012-04-04, at 6:18 PM, K and T Dykes <ktdykes@arcor.de> wrote:

> "So how are the BANDits going to deal with this? Will they call them frauds 
> or collegen fibers, or is Tyrannosauroidea now part of birds?"
> 
> That's easy.   They could ignore them.  It's a tried and tested technique.