30 Facts About Alan Feduccia

John Alan Feduccia was born on April 25,1943 and is a paleornithologist specializing in the origins and phylogeny of birds.

Alan Feduccia is S K Heninger Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina.

Alan Feduccia opposes the overwhelming scientific consensus that birds originated from and are deeply nested within Theropoda, and are therefore living theropod dinosaurs.

Alan Feduccia has argued for an alternative theory in which birds share a common stem-ancestor with theropod dinosaurs among more basal archosaurian lineages, with birds originating from small arboreal archosaurs in the Triassic.

Alan Feduccia's research has focused on ornithology, evolutionary biology, vertebrate history and morphogenesis, and the tempo and mode of the Cenozoic vertebrate radiation.

Partly based on his analysis of the osteology of Presbyornis, Alan Feduccia argued that flamingos, the phylogenetic relationships of which remain disputed, with some recent studies suggesting a sister-group relationship with grebes, were actually derived from shorebirds.

Alan Feduccia's early work on flamingos and waterfowl contributed to the development of his hypothesis that there was an explosive Cenozoic adaptive radiation of neornithine birds following the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous.

Furthermore, Alan Feduccia has suggested that this rapid adaptive radiation of modern birds, compressed into such a short period of geologic time, might obscure interordinal relationships and make elucidation of the phylogeny of modern birds particularly difficult, barring the isolation of conserved characters or mosaic fossils demonstrating transitional character states bridging extant orders.

Alan Feduccia has argued against the monophyly of the Ratitae, a conclusion consistent with recent molecular studies.

Alan Feduccia is best known for his criticisms of the hypothesis, accepted by most biologists, that birds originated from and are deeply nested within Theropoda, and are therefore living theropod dinosaurs.

Alan Feduccia's first contribution relative to the origin and early evolution of birds, and their relationship with dinosaurs, was a critical review of the evidence then available for dinosaurian endothermy in 1973.

Olson and Alan Feduccia concluded that this provided further evidence for the flight capability of Archaeopteryx.

Alan Feduccia here criticized the theropod hypothesis for the origin of birds, but his position was largely agnostic, conceding that there was evidence in support of both a theropod ancestry of birds and an ancestry from more basal archosaurs, perhaps similar in overall morphological organization to Euparkeria.

Alan Feduccia nevertheless suggested that on the basis of closer stratigraphic fit, ancestry from basal archosaurs rather than from coelurosaurian theropods might prove a better phylogenetic hypothesis.

Alan Feduccia criticized "ground-up" theories for the origin of avian flight, arguing on biophysical grounds that they were implausible, and noting that in other cases in which flight has developed among vertebrates it has occurred in an arboreal context.

Alan Feduccia argued, instead, for a "trees-down" model for the origin of avian flight due to its lack of the biophysical constraints hindering "ground-up" acquisition of flight and due to the ability to call upon biologically functional stages, represented by living analogues, at each stage in the evolution of flight.

Alan Feduccia argued that these hypotheses failed to account for the elaborate aerodynamic architecture of the feather vane and rachis, and that thermoregulatory functions would have been adequately served by hair, which is a developmentally simpler structure.

In 1994, Alan Feduccia argued that there was a "temporal paradox" due to most bird-like dinosaurs being known from the Cretaceous, while birds are thought to have originated in the Jurassic.

In other publications in the early 1990s, Alan Feduccia expanded on earlier arguments for the evolution of feathers in a primarily aerodynamic rather than thermoregulatory context.

In 1996, Alan Feduccia published the first edition of The Origin and Evolution of Birds, a comprehensive review of his research on both early avian evolution and a synopsis of the history of the Cenozoic radiation of modern birds.

Alan Feduccia argued that many of the proposed homologous similarities between theropods and birds were ambiguous, and that other similarities between birds and theropods could plausibly be explained as homoplasy, particularly those in the hindlimb and pelvis.

Alan Feduccia focused upon the discrepancy between embryological evidence identifying the digits of the avian manus as the second, third, and fourth of the primitively pentadactyl archosaur manus, and paleontological evidence indicating that theropod dinosaurs primitively reduced their fourth and fifth manual digits, eventually retaining only the first, second, and third.

From 2002, Alan Feduccia has argued that the discovery of spectacular new fossils from the Cretaceous of China, like Microraptor, and other taxa with unambiguous feathers, like the oviraptorosaur Caudipteryx, suggest that there might have been an extensive, and hitherto unrecognized radiation of cryptic avian lineages, some of which rapidly lost flight and secondarily adopted a cursorial lifestyle.

Alan Feduccia has expanded upon this argument in subsequent papers and in his book Riddle of the Feathered Dragons.

Alan Feduccia has further developed his alternative hypothesis for the origin of birds through study of the bizarre Jurassic taxon Scansoriopteryx, which he argues is a primitive bird whose morphology reflects an ancestry among basal, nondinosaurian archosaurs.

Alan Feduccia has been criticized for failing to use cladistics in his studies of the origin and the evolution of birds.

Alan Feduccia particularly singled out Feduccia's adoption of the view that some theropod taxa are actually birds that have been mistaken for theropods through convergence associated with flight loss and secondary adoption of cursoriality.

Several of the arguments about whether similarities between birds and theropods are homologous that have been advanced by Alan Feduccia have been particularly contentious.

Alan Feduccia served as Chair of the Department of Biology at Chapel Hill from 1997 to 2002, and prior to that was Chair of the Division of Natural Sciences.

Alan Feduccia is an elected Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.