“Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur.”

Archaeopteryx probably cannot tell us much about the early origins of feathers and flight in true protobirds because Archaeopteryx was, in the modern sense, a bird.

I, and many others, do not find any credible evidence that those structures represent protofeathers.

But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.

Instead of regarding birds as deriving from dinosaurs, Scansoriopteryx reinstates the validity of regarding them as a separate class uniquely avian and non-dinosaurian.

On the contrary, there is a considerable body of evidence that these fossil traces, known as ‘dino-fuzz’, have nothing to do with bird feathers…