PBS Nova: Dino-birds

A new PBS Nova special on the origin of birds
now appears on YouTube. That’s Janavis on the promo card, about 85% restored.

Unfortunately this presentation is something of a sad reflection on today’s paleontology. There’s not much news here – and too much myth.

The narrator says,
“It’s still an enduring mystery where birds came from.”

No, that’s a well documented transition, starting way back in 1870 with Huxley and Archaeopteryx. This is paleontology trying to explain itself = painfully slow to test and accept or reject proposed hypotheses.

Yale professor John Ostrom also bemoaned this painful aspect here.

The narrator says,
“The bird fossil record is sparse.”
Not anymore. Now it is well documented.

Unfortunately, Archaeopteryx is, once again, treated as single taxon when we know a dozen specimens – all different – from the Solnhofen limestones.

The narrator says,
“There are four main groups of birds”.

Passerines appears to be one. The other three are not mentioned.

The narrator says,
“Dinosaurs evolved from unnamed reptiles… with sprawling limbs”

No, they evolved from bipedal Triassic crocodilomorphs. Then poposaurs. Then other erect clades, then erect rauisuchians in the LRT. Even the false narrative that includes the proterochampsid, Lagerpeton, is itself a biped.

Ohhhh…. I know… it just hit me: they meant pterosaurs, but they showed an iguana.

See what I mean about paleontology not even sure of where dinosaurs – or birds– came from in 2025? And liking to have it both ways while skipping over well known details?

Several featured academics are delighted to report,
“Birds are dinosaurs”.

This was news in 1870 and again in 1970 and 1990. PBS is late to the game.

Contradicting the PBS narrative,
one expert, Jingmai O’Connor, reported the origin of birds was disputed until a furcula was discovered in a theropod in the 1970s.

This is not the way to determine ancestry. That is called, “Pulling a Larry Martin” -= focusing on one bone or trait.

Study the entire specimen, don’t wait for your favorite trait to appear.

On a similar topic, pterosaur experts are STILL waiting for a specimen with a too-long finger four, not realizing that was the last trait to appear.
(BTW it appears on Sharovipteryx and Longisquama), now both hiding in Moscow.

Late Cretaceous Asterornis appears @ 8:12 in a µCT scan.
According to the narrator, it had the “beak of a chicken and the head of a duck.” In the LRT Asterornis nests as a goose.

Eric Jarvik used DNA to date when modern birds showed up: 90 mya.
The LRT puts that date in the Early Cretaceous, about the same time frame.

Jingmai O’Connor reported that
while dinosaurs were warm-blooded, large hadrosaurs and sauropods became secondarily cold-blooded.

Really? That’s news. Is that consensus? Am I the last to know?

Where did feathers come from?
Microraptor and Eutyrannus are featured here, the latter described as ‘the woolly mammoth of the time.” The Prum hypothesis of feather evolution is animated here.

Archaeopteryx is not mentioned here, but goes without saying.

Why did feathers appear?
Here the producers jumped to Confusciusornis (Fig 3), with its gender dimorphic ornamental tail feathers, skipping over the ‘why’ question of first appearance over the entire body, starting with the sacrum (Fig 2).

Flight
“Archaeopteryx has to project itself from a height then glide.”

No. Flapping came first, likely to show off for mates or scare off predators.

Even Disney’s Fantasia
got it right in 1940. Flapping occurs @12:39 – unfortunately even Disney ignored a very birdy-looking Archaeopteryx, opting instead for a hypothetical Tetrapteryx, perhaps because it looked more primitive.

Wings to cushion landing? Or wing flapping to escape predators?
Third hypothesis, according to PBS: both.

The asteroid hits @:39 minutes into the video.
The narrative says birds like Janavis did not survive the impact because they were too big. Instead, they reported, ground dwellers, like Asterornis, survived. That’s odd because flying enables one to find good feeding, breeding areas.

No one mentioned refugia, where lucky birds happened to be in niches protected from the effects of the impact, like Antarctica or Indonesia or New Zealand, where giant very derived Paleocene penguins were found.

Steve Brusatte reported
that birds diverged in the Early Paleocene, at odds with the 90mya reported by Eric Jarvick earlier (see above).

The LRT indicates the radiation was in the Early Cretaceous. Fossils from the Cretaceous apparently don’t represent this radiation very well. Asterornis is a goose in the LRT and geese are highly derived. So are penguins.

Gastornis makes an appearance @:46 with a controversy.
Was it a terror bird? The LRT nests Gastornis with herbivorous parrots. Carbon 13 testing described on the program confirms the herbivory, but does not otherwise label this big, flightless bird.

Giant penguins appear @:49.
Large brain corvids appear @:51. Then a strange ‘fact’ is reported, “Song birds and parrots evolved from apex predators.” Online here is the PR for the paper describing that hypothesis.

It was a genetic study, not a trait analysis.

Here’s how this gene study was reported in the publicity,
“the family tree of modern birds has confused biologists for centuries and the molecular details of how they arrived at more than 10,000 species is barely known.

“Now that story is coming to light, thanks to an ambitious international collaboration underway for four years that has sequenced, assembled and compared full genomes of 48 bird species. The first findings of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium are being reported nearly simultaneously in 23 papers — eight papers today, Dec. 12, in a special issue of Science and 15 more in Genome Biology, GigaScience and other journals. The full set of papers in Science and other journals can be accessed by clicking this link www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1308.full

Or you can access the LRT, a trait study that includes fossil, online here.

Source: https://pterosaurheresies.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/pbs-nova-dino-birds/