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Peter Dodson: feathered dino ‘dates’ undermine dino-to-bird evolution

American palaeontologist and believer in dino-to-bird evolution Peter Dodson points out that most of the supposed ‘evidence’ for dino-to-bird evolution is ‘dated’ by evolutionists too late to be relevant to the evolution of birds:

Personally, I continue to find it problematic that the most birdlike maniraptoran theropods are found 25 to 75 million years after the origin of birds. … Ghost lineages are frankly a contrived solution, a deus ex machina required by the cladistic method. Of course, it is admitted that late Cretaceous maniraptorans are not the actual ancestors of birds, only “sister taxa”. Are we being asked to believe that a group of highly derived, rapidly evolving maniraptorans in the Jurassic gave rise to birds, as manifested by Archaeopteryx, and then this highly progressive lineage then went into a state of evolutionary stasis and persisted unchanged in essential characters for millions of years? Or are actual ancestors far more basal in morphology and harder to classify? If the latter, then why insist that the problem is now solved?

Dodson, P., Response by Peter Dodson, American Paleontologist 9(4):13–14, 2001