RE: Letters in the new Discover issue

[Tim Williams <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com>]

Mary Kirkaldy wrote:

> Check out the letters section of the August Discover Magazine - "Preparing 
> for Takeoff"
> http://www.discover.com/issues/aug-05/departments/rs/
> for a delicious exchange of ideas between Stephen Czerkas and Mark Norell.

By the way, when can we expect Volume 2 of the "Dinosaur Museum Journal" to 
come out?  Volume 1 came out almost exactly four years ago (August 1, 2002 - 
according to Czerkas).  What's the delay for Vol 2?   Exhaustive 
peer-review, perhaps.

Maybe Vol 2 will feature those wind-tunnel and/or biomechanical studies 
which demonstrate that _Microraptor_ (or "Cryptovolans") can fly.  On that 
point, it is silly for anybody to suggest that they "know" that dromaeosaurs 
could fly.  We don't even have a consensus on whether _Archaeopteryx_ was 
capable of powered flight - or if it just glided, or attained some 
intermediate level of aerodynamic locomotion (like "phugoid gliding").

Finally, contrary to what Czerkas asserted, cladistics does NOT claim that 
birds evolved from an obligately ground-dwelling ancestor.  On the matter of 
the ecomorphology of the first birds and their relatives of birds, current 
phylogenies are congruent with either a "trees-down" or "ground-up" origin 
of flight, or something between these two rather arbitrary extremes.

Cheers

Tim