Riddle of the Feathered Dragons. Hidden Birds of China / Загадка пернатых драконов. Тайные птицы Китая

“Romancing” refers to an ardent emotional attachment, and nowhere in paleontology does the term apply more aptly than to dinosaurs, which have long been an intense focus of almost every child’s fascination. But enchantment with the terrible lizards reached a crescendo with the 1993 Michael Crichton blockbuster movie Jurassic Park, featuring an amusement park of cloned dinosaurs, and the view that birds are living dinosaurs ascended from theory to an unchallengeable orthodoxy.Propelled to the forefront over two decades earlier by John Ostrom’s discovery of the famous raptor Deinonychus (considered “a bizarre killing machine”), in the late 1960s, the entire world of inosaur paleontology would never be the same. By the mid-1980s Jacques Gauthier, now, like the late Ostrom, also of Yale University, would set the hypothesis that birds are derived from theropod dinosaurs in a formal algorithmic, phylogenetic (cladistic) context.1 Gauthier’s analysis is widely considered to be defi nitive and is still cited as the seminal paper in support of a theropod origin of birds.