Dino-Bird Link Doubts Cast

Galvasean

A new study has cast a doubt as to whether birds did indeed evolve from dinosaurs.
Take it with a very large pinch of salt. A lot of the soundbites are misleading at best and willfully ignorant at worst.
I await seeing a proper scientific rebuttal, but for now I'll have a stab at it myself.

One of their first points:

Warm-blooded birds need about 20 times more oxygen than cold-blooded reptiles

The vast majority of palaeontologists concur that theropod dinosaurs were warm blooded so this is a moot point.

'For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from,' Ruben said. 'That's a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories.

This is a very old and outdated way of thinking. An over-simplification to misrepresent another theory if I ever saw one. Recent discoveries have shown feathered dinosaurs and possible dinosaurian bird ancestors to have appeared much earlier in the fossil record than previously taught.

'A velociraptor did not just sprout feathers at some point and fly off into the sunset,' Ruben said

No one ever said they did. Once again a drastic over-simplification created in order to make a competing theory look outlandish.

it is possible, they said, that birds and dinosaurs may have shared a common ancestor, such as the small, reptilian 'thecodonts,' which may then have evolved on separate evolutionary paths into birds, crocodiles and dinosaurs The lung structure and physiology of crocodiles, in fact, is much more similar to dinosaurs than it is to birds

The bolded part of the text (bolded by myself) has little if anything to do with the preceeding text. If anything, it ads weight to the dino-bird theory.

It just seems pretty clear now that birds were evolving all along on their own and did not descend directly from the theropod dinosaurs, which lived many millions of years later

These alledged birds that preceed the theropod dinosaurs have not been found in the fossil record. As such they are hypothetical and therefore hold little if any scientific weight. One such possible bird, Protoavis, has been largely discredited as being a 'chimera' - made up of the remains of more than one creature and therefore being of little or no scientific value.

In summary:
Until they start dealing in and recognising hard facts and stop childishly trying to misrepresent opposing theories they shouldn't expect to be taken seriously. They can whine about 'museum politics' and/or conspiracies all they like, but unless they play fair why should orthodox science even entertain them?

The full article is here:
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=09061048-discovery-raises-new-doubts-about-dinosaur-bird-links