Chances are, if you have an informed opinion about the person named in the thread title, you already know most of the details of the debate. Here is a recent article that lays out some of Feduccia’s argument against the currently popular hypothesis regarding dinosaur/bird evolution.
For a long time, I’ve known about Feduccia’s opposition to the Birds Are Dinosaurs (BAD) hypothesis, but I’ve been resisting because, as Feduccia hints, it would be neat to be able to study dinosaurs in the backyard bird feeder. Until recently I’ve been on the bandwagon that says that maniraptors were secondarily flightless birds, more or less as Greg Paul hypothesizes.
For all of that, however, I am very much outside of the circle of scientists who truly know what the hell they are talking about when it comes to dinosaur and bird evolution. I’m hoping that some of the resident experts will weigh in with their arguments for or against Feduccia here…
I’m not in a position to support much at the moment regarding my opinion on the matter (all my books are at home), but the quoted bit, I think, is pretty much out the window, based on the recent find of Buitreraptor gonzalezorum. The “big deal” here is that Archaeopteryx dates to about 150 million years ago. Up until Buitreraptor, maniraptor fossils had only been found that dated to about 145 million years ago, at the oldest. Thus, Paul’s position was at least tenable based on the timeline: Archie predated “raptors”, and there were several similarities between them, so it was conceivable that “raptors” evolved from an Archie-like ancestor.
However, now the origins of maniraptors have been pushed back further than Archie’s, meaning the ancestor-descendant relationship as commonly advertised is given a significant boost: birds likely evolved from maniraptors, rather than the other way around.
And, by the way, I’m not saying the above to counter you (since you do say “until recently…”, implying that you probably already knew about this find), but rather to explain to others what the “deal” is. Until recently, I thought it was an interesting idea, but wasn’t really sure I bought into it. Now, I’m pretty sure I don’t.
But then, I’m not really sure about much these days…