Re: Archeopteryx what is bird or dinosaur?

[Dan Chure <danchure@easilink.com>]

Not to be too cynical here, but in a way the question is meaningless and 
lots of effort can be wasted debating it.  The evolutionary relationship 
is really the most important thing.

For a long time Archaeopteryx was unquestionably a bird, albeit a 
primitive one, given the  presence of feathers and a poor fossil record 
of the transition to birds. However, with a much improved record of 
advanced maniraptoran theropods, bird features (such as feathers) turn 
out to have a wider and  phylogenetically older and wider occurrence.  
Hell, the furcula is now known as far back as coelophysoids. So the 
definitional fuzziness is the price of success of discovering  a better 
fossil record.  Same thing hold true for other groups (such as mammals) 
where a better known fossil record has shown once "purely mammalian"  
features to also be more widely distributed and , in some cases, to have 
arisen in parallel in groups "close to" mammals.

Dan

David Marjanovic wrote:
> > I believe the question being asked here is whether Archaeopteryx was 
> > a bird or a non-avian dinosaur---something I wonder myself, and 
> > paleontologists have apparently yet to confidently determine.
>
> That's a complex interplay of definition and discovery. Given the same 
> phylogenetic position, Archie is or is not a bird depending on the 
> definition of Aves.