Although I pointed out that some of the most vocal critics of cladism are professionals who are based in scientific institutions in the eastern US, there are some effective work done on the west coast which have dealt sever blows to cladistic dogma. One of the most strongly held cladistic dogma is that birds are descendants of a bird-like, advanced theropod. John Ruben and his students up in Oregon State (yes, Oregon is on the West Coast of the United States) have done some terrific research which refuted the claims of warm-blooded (endothermic) dinosaurs. They have also shown that a baby theropod (Scipionyx) had a hepatic piston breathing system, but not the air sacs of birds, dealing a severe blow to the "birds are dinosaurs" dogmatists, since it is impossible to derive the air sac system from the hepatic piston system, given the fact that the intermediate animal would have a life threatening hernia or hole in its diaphragm. Birds, it would appear, could not have evolved from a theropod based on this fact alone.

Nevertheless, the cladists march on, oblivious to the accumulating evidence that their theory of the theropod origin of birds has been refuted. Then in 2000, one of Ruben's students published a startling discovery in the journal Science along with a long list of scientists. The fossil Longisquama was brought to the US from Russia for an exhibition for the first time, after the end of the cold war. With scientific equipment not available to most Russian scientists, Longisquama, a lizard-like creature found originally in Central Asia by an entomologist, was found to have feathers on its back. And the feathers share so many unmistakable anatomical and developmental details with bird feathers that it shocked the cladists, who scrambled to come up with all sorts of weird and scientifically untenable explanations to deny an obviously close relationship between Longisquama and birds. Even those cladists who are not actively doing research on the question of bird origin felt compelled to voice their opposition to the newly discovered evidence that birds are not descended from a two-legged theropod dinosaur, but from a small, 4-legged archosaurian reptile which has not evolved into a dinosaur. This discovery shows that cladistic analysis is flawed because time and again cladists have come up with the same erroneous answer that birds are descendants of an advanced theropod dinosaur when they are obviously not to anyone who is reasonable and rational.

So, don't be misled by the claim that there is some sort of east-west rivalry, with the eastern "establishment" thumping its nose at western scientists. The rivalry is between cladists and the Darwinians, and there are no shortage of either school of scientists on both sides of the Mississippi River.

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