John Alan Feduccia (born April 25, 1943Library of Congress entry) is a paleornithologist specializing in the origins and phylogeny of birds. He is S. K. Heninger Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina. Feduccia's authored works include three major books, The Age of Birds,Feduccia (1980) The Origin and Evolution of Birds, and Riddle of the Feathered Dragons.
Feduccia opposes the scientific consensus that birds originated from and are deeply nested within Theropoda, and are therefore living theropod dinosaurs. He 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.
Education
Feduccia graduated with a B.S. from Louisiana State University, taking ornithological expeditions to Honduras, El Salvador and Peru. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. (1969) from the University of Michigan.
Academic career and research
Early work on bird evolution Feduccia's research has focused on ornithology, evolutionary biology, vertebrate history and morphogenesis, and the tempo and mode of the Cenozoic vertebrate radiation. His early work in the 1970s focused on clarification of the evolutionary history of modern birds (Neornithes), focusing, in particular, on the identification of conserved morphological characters that might elucidate phylogeny more readily than strongly functionally correlated characters. Using this approach, in a series of publications, Feduccia analyzed the morphology of the bony stapes, the ear ossicle of birds, to help elucidate the interrelationships of passeriform birds. This approach was extended to the analysis of non-passeriform birds as well, including owls and the shoebill. Other studies in the 1970s focused on the analysis of the Cenozoic avian radiation, with a particular focus on the origin and relationships of waterfowl (Anseriformes). Based on his analysis of the osteology of the Paleocene and Eocene duck Presbyornis, represented in large quantities from Eocene deposits from outcrops of the Green River Formation in Utah and Wyoming, Feduccia concluded that Presbyornis represents a shorebird-duck mosaic and that waterfowl evolved from shorebirds (Charadriiformes).Feduccia (1999) This is contrary to the more widely held view, based on molecular and morphological data, that waterfowl are most closely related to chickens, turkeys, and related fowl (Galliformes),Cracraft, J. 1988. "The major clades of birds". Pages 339–361 in The Phylogeny and Classification of the Tetrapods, Volume I: Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds (ed. M. J. Benton). Clarendon Press: Oxford.Mindell, D. P., M. D. Sorenson, C. J. Huddleston, H. C. Miranda Jr., A. Knight, S. J. Sawchuk, and T. Yuri. 1997. Phylogenetic relationships among and within select avian orders based on mitochondrial DNA, pp. 213–247 in Avian Molecular Evolution and Systematics (ed. D. P. Mindell). Academic Press: San Diego.Cracraft, J. and J. Clarke. 2001. The basal clades of modern birds, pp. 143–156 in New Perspectives on the Origin and Early Evolution of Birds: Proceedings of the International Symposium in Honor of John H. Ostrom (eds. J. Gauthier and L. F. Gall). Yale University Press: New Haven but Feduccia argues that similarities between anseriform and galliform birds are attributable to homoplasy. Partly based on his analysis of the osteology of Presbyornis, Feduccia also 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. Feduccia summarized his position in the second edition of his book The Origin and Evolution of Birds: "The study of Presbyornis planted the idea that shorebirds are the basic ancestral stock for both flamingolike birds and the anseriformes, ducks and their allies...".Feduccia (1999), p. 210
Tempo and Mode in the origin and evolution of modern birds (Neornithes)
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. According to this hypothesis, modern orders of birds initially radiated principally from a lineage of "transitional shorebirds", perhaps represented by the shorebird form-family Graculavidae, from the Cretaceous-early Paleogene, that managed to survive the Cretaceous extinction event, perhaps through eking out a living along marginal shoreline environments. This radiation is hypothesized to have been very rapid, as many orders of modern birds have fossil representatives from the early Cenozoic but not before. This hypothesis argues that support for this scenario is shown by the existence of a similar evolutionary pattern in Cenozoic mammals and that, as a general model of evolutionary change, a Tertiary "big-bang" for modern birds would be consistent with Simpson's concept of rapid adaptive radiation following a major extinction event.
Furthermore, 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. This reiterates an early theme from his research in the 1970s, in which Feduccia had repeatedly emphasized the importance of homoplasy in evolution, and its ability to confound the interpretation of phylogeny. This has also been a theme in his study of flightlessness in birds, a phenomenon the pervasiveness of which has been stressed in his work, and the mechanisms by which flight is lost, including heterochrony and differential development. Feduccia has argued against the monophyly of the Ratitae,Feduccia, A. (1985). The morphological evidence for ratite monophyly: fact or fiction? Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Ornithological Congress, 184–190. a conclusion consistent with recent molecular studies.
Opposition to theropod origin hypothesis for the origin of birds
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. 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. In a 1979 paper, Feduccia and Tordoff argued, against the position taken by John Ostrom, that Archaeopteryx was capable of powered flight, as indicated by the asymmetrical vanes of its primary feathers, a feature found only in flying birds. In a paper coauthored with Storrs Olson in the same year, Feduccia noted that the robust furcula of Archaeopteryx could have served as a site of attachment for a well-developed M. pectoralis major, the principal depressor of the avian wing, responsible for powering the downstroke during avian flight. Olson and Feduccia concluded that this provided further evidence for the flight capability of Archaeopteryx. These initial excursions into the subject, and the argument that Archaeopteryx was clearly a bird, albeit primitive, were expanded upon in Feduccia's 1980 book, The Age of Birds. 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.Feduccia (1980), p. 37 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. He thus, essentially, agreed with the model for the origin of birds proposed by Gerhard Heilmann in his influential 1926 book The Origin of Birds.Tudge, Colin. The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live. Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition. September 7, 2010. Page 58. Feduccia also 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. He 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.
Feduccia's skepticism about the origin of birds from theropods and a "ground-up" origin of avian flight, which in the absence of any evidence for small, arboreal theropods seemed a concomitant requirement of that hypothesis, increased following publication of The Age of Birds, culminating in a series of publications in the latter half of the 1980s and the early 1990s expanding upon arguments presented in The Age of Birds. In his 1985 contribution to the Eichstatt Archaeopteryx Conference, a major international meeting on the interpretation and significance of Archaeopteryx, as well as on the origin and early evolution of birds and avian flight, held in Eichstatt, Germany, Feduccia criticized hypotheses for the evolution of feathers in non-aerodynamic contexts in endothermic small theropod dinosaurs. He 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.Feduccia, A. 1985. On why the dinosaur lacked feathers, pp. 75–79 in The Beginnings of Birds: Proceedings of the International Archaeopteryx Conference Eichstatt 1984 (M. K. Hecht, J. H. Ostrom, G. Viohl, and P. Wellnhofer, eds.). Freunde des Jura-Museums Eichstatt: Eichstatt. In a 1993 paper, Feduccia analyzed claw curvature arcs in the manual and pedal claws of Archaeopteryx and other birds, and found that Archaeopteryx clustered with other arboreal birds, suggesting that it was an arboreal animal rather than a terrestrial cursor or a bird which spent any considerable time on the ground, as is argued by some other workers.Elzanowski, A. 2002. Archaeopterygidae (Upper Jurassic of Germany), pp. 129–159 in Mesozoic Birds: Above the Heads of Dinosaurs (L. M. Chiappe and L. M. Witmer, eds.). University of California Press In 1994, 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.