Posts: 14063
Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 12:55 pm
I don't see why the unique lungs and hips couldn't have evolved in birds - obviously at some point birds diverged from other animals and consequently developed unique features, so why is the split necessarily earlier with this discovery?
"For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from," Ruben said.
That sounds an awful lot like the "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys" argument.
If you Google John Ruben, you find a lot of stuff on his quest to prove that birds didn't evolve from dinosaurs since at least 2000... I wouldn't take this story at face value.