Originally posted by WPRESTO 
I'm not sure where Olson is now, but he is very much of an outlier, rather akin to those geologists who for years, even decades, denied plate tectonics ("continental drift"). When a new paradigm arises, there are always some stubborn old timers who refuse to accept. Olson is simply wrong in his criticisms. The number of specimens that have been found, and the number of highly regarded paleontologists who have personally inspected them, have long since relegated poor Olson to the uniformed fringe. In plain language, he does not wantbirds to be dinosaurs because that it what he was taught and what he spent almost his entire career thinking. He's really become a sad case. However, I'm sure that neither this comment nor any other I could make will change your mind.
Evidence-based arguments will change my mind.
Olson is Curator Emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Olson, Alan Feduccia, Evgeny Kurochkin, Per Ericson and Zhonghe Zhou are all highly regarded palaeontolgists that have all personally inspected those same specimens and were all struck by the glaring errors made by Chiappe, Padian, and Prum. Olson is not an outlier among bird palaeontologists or ornithologists -- he's only and outlier if you lump him in with dinosaur palaeontologists who ignore the homology of digits from embryologic evidence (the avian hand is digits II, III, and IV as demonstrated in the Ostrich, the theropod hand is I, II, and III), the anatomy of avian and dinosaur pelvic girdles, the morphology of avian and dinosaur teeth. Theropodists know little about birds -- in the book New Perspectives on the Origin and Early Evolution of Birds. Proceedings of the International Symposium in Honor of John H. Ostrom. Jacques Gauthier and Lawrence F. Gall, Eds. 2001. Peabody Museum of Natural History, Gauthier and de Queiroz claim that tinamous were unknown to Merrem in 1813, whereas the genus
Tinamus and the species
T. soui was described in 1783 and three additional species of tinamous were named by Gmelin in 1789. In the same book Arnold says that some gull species lose the external hallux entirely, but all gulls have an external hallux, including the two species of kittiwakes in which it is highly reduced. Hopson’s list of birds sampled in his study places
Pluvialis in the Glareolidae and contains 15 misspelled names of taxa.
Theropodists fail to include non-dinosaurs as outgroups in their cladistics, and ignore cladistics' failure to identify convergent evolution. Cladistics comes up with the absurd phylogeny in which
Hesperornis, loons and grebes are placed into the same clade. The theropod origin of birds also requires flight to have evolved from the ground up, which flies in the face of the laws of physics and the multiple, independent evolution in other animal lineages of flight from the trees down. Evidence-based arguments will change my mind, not the sensationalist marketing of decomposed collagen as proto-feathers, and other fiction based on flawed techniques that Chiappe, Padian and Prum have been spewing, or the abuse of the peer-review process of scientific publication that Henry Gee committed as an editor of
Nature. They are rather akin to those Lamarkians and Creationists who for decades have denied evolution by natural selection, and who history will show how uninformed and fraudulent they are. They are worse in that these Hennig Youth suppress dissent by shouting down opposition and by biasing the peer review process of publication of scientific research by selecting like-minded reviewers, e.g., barring avian palaeontologists or ornithologists from refereeing submitted manuscripts.
Post #6960 by WPRESTO
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