Thread by @TetZoo

For something like four decades, Dr Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina has been arguing that everyone is wrong about #dinosaurs. His newest book is Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology. Here's a quick thread on its contents... 1/n

The book - RTBAD from hereon - is not an instruction manual for palaeozoophiles (art by @Book_Rat), nor does it include homage or reference to the 1984 movie Romancing the Stone. Rather, it’s composed of 23 essays on the state of dinosaur science as Feduccia sees it today... 2/n

@Book_Rat Early parts of RTBAD express Feduccia's disapproval of the power-hungry, juvenile popularists of our age. Some "have Twitter accounts with large followers [sic], dealing with everything from paleontological discoveries to sports and politics!" I'm among this awful lot ... 3/n

@Book_Rat RTBAD is cartoonishly overloaded with bias and dirty tricks, like whataboutism ("WHAT ABOUT ARCHAEORAPTOR?"), intellectual dishonesty, erroneous repetition, strawmanning and naïve falsification. The most vehement of his arguments = nothing more than personal incredulity... 4/n

@Book_Rat In one of many examples of strawmanning, Feduccia attempts to diminish efforts to use phylogenetic systematics by saying that the recovery of a grebe-loon clade demonstrates how such efforts are doomed to failure. Um, that's not at all logical... 5/n

@Book_Rat He holds a fixed position on the filaments known from dinosaur fossils and tries to make the reader believe that these have been debunked as collagen fibres. But the ‘collagen camp’ that Feduccia promotes is based on mistakes, superficial similarity and assertion... 6/n

@Book_Rat A position encountered throughout RTBAD is that an area of contention has been settled thanks to a new discovery: that science there is finished. His discussion of Cau et al. 2014 on Balaur (I was one of the authors) is an example. But this is tone-deaf and unscientific.... 7/n

@Book_Rat Some of RTBAD is devoted to the idea that maniraptorans are birds, and are not related to other theropods, and thus are not dinosaurs. In order to divorce maniraptorans from other theropods, you must explain away the existence of maniraptoran-like non-maniraptorans... 8/n

@Book_Rat Feduccia says that non-maniraptoran theropods are totally different from maniraptorans as they have “short, stubby hands”, with forelimbs so reduced that evolving maniraptoran-like ones would contradict Dollo’s Law. This is basically pseudoscience, look at the cladogram ... 9/n

@Book_Rat I was perpetually frustrated by the author’s cherry-picking of data points and citations. His use of whataboutism, strawmanning, naïve falsification, repetition and more are obvious throughout and make RTBAD frustrating, biased and intellectually problematic... 10/n

@Book_Rat For decades, Feduccia has promoted the view that he and his colleagues “know birds”, and that those who promote the ‘birds are dinosaurs’ hypothesis do not. Whatever, we can turn it around and say that Feduccia certainly doesn’t “know” non-bird #dinosaurs...

@Book_Rat The points in this thread are SUMMARIES. Please see my review of RTBAD at Tetrapod Zoology where these points are expanded and discussed at length. This is a very weird, very frustrating book, but I admit a guilty pleasure in enjoying the weird... 12/endtetzoo.com/blog/2023/10/2…