Truth in Science

It's really kind of amazing that after centuries of studying birds and flight we still didn't understand a basic aspect of bird biology. This discovery probably means that birds evolved on a parallel path alongside dinosaurs, starting that process before most dinosaur species even existed.

The research at Oregon State University has focused on the fixity of the unique avian skeletal structure and musculature to support its lungs and the requirement in birds to take in 20 times more oxygen than cold blooded reptiles. Researcher Devon Quick is quoted in EurekAlert!

This is fundamental to bird physiology. It's really strange that no one realized this before. The position of the thigh bone and muscles in birds is critical to their lung function, which in turn is what gives them enough lung capacity for flight.

For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from. That's a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories. A velociraptor did not just sprout feathers at some point and fly off into the sunset.

Frankly, there's a lot of museum politics involved in this, a lot of careers committed to a particular point of view even if new scientific evidence raises questions. In some museum displays, the birds-descended-from-dinosaurs evolutionary theory has been portrayed as a largely accepted fact, with an asterisk pointing out in small type that "some scientists disagree". But now there are more asterisks all the time. That's part of the process of science.