SCIENTISTS TO FIND OUT IF BIRDS CAME FROM DINOSAURS
LAWRENCE -- Another match has been set in a long-running academic debate about whether birds descended from dinosaurs.
A group of Chinese has invited a delegation of several Americans to visit China in late March to scrutinize, along with their Chinese colleagues, three recently discovered skeletons of dinosaurs no bigger than turkeys.
At issue, said Larry Dean Martin, curator of paleontology at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, is whether these dinosaurs had feathers.
Leading the delegation will be John Ostrom, a professor emeritus at Yale University, New Haven, Conn., who believes that birds had dinosaur ancestors. Martin does not.
≥My idea,≤ said Martin, ≥is that birds separated off early from the stalk that gave rise to crocodiles and dinosaurs -- well before there was anything you could call a dinosaur.≤
Joining the two scholars in China will be an ally of Ostrom and one neutral party, who is a heavyweight on the subject of feathers. The group leaves for China March 17 and plans to return April 3 . To Ostrom, a black film around the skeleton of these birds suggests they may have had feathers, lending support to the birds-as-dinosaurs theory.
Martin doesnπt agree, but then he, like Ostrom, has seen only photos. Only a few Chinese, and, last fall, a scientist name Phil Currie, paleontologist with the Royal Tyrell Museum in Alberta, have seen the actual specimens.
At that time, Currie told Science and Science News magazines that he thought he saw evidence of feathers.
When Science News called Martin for a comment, he told the magazine that thereπs usually more hard evidence presented to support an alien abduction than had been given to support the idea that these dinosaurs had feathers.
Where others see evidence of feathers, he sees signs only of a frill. Marine iguanas have frills, he said, adding that those unfamiliar with iguanas can picture a frill as a finlike structure that runs from head to tail tip.
Since last fall, Currie has become less certain about the feathers. But the explosion in print that followed his declaration has caused the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences to want to settle the matter once and for all.
So the academy is paying to fly Martin and the others to China to examine the specimens. Also attending will be Ostrom; a supporter of Ostrom named Peter Wellnhofer, curator of paleontology at the State Museum for Paleontology and Historical Geology of Munich, Germany; and Allen Brush, a University of Connecticut, Storrs, biochemist who is an expert on the origin and evolution of feathers.
≥Hopefully, with all the evidence in front of us, we will agree on what we see,≤ Martin said. ≥Itπs the sensible thing to do rather than argue ad nauseam in the newspapers and magazines.≤
But itπs not likely to be the last round of the debate, Martin said.
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Story by Roger Martin, (913) 864-7239
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