Alan Feduccia famous quotes

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.
-- Alan Feduccia

#Bird #Evolution #Flight

Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that.
-- Alan Feduccia

#Bird #Earth #Dinosaurs

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

#Bird #Body #Fossils

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

#Class #Bird #Dinosaurs

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.

Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

In ourselves we harbor the intuition of another evolution, of other possibilities of life.

all the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution ...

History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul

Nothing can prevent us from another day and night, and the myth of perpetual flight.

Before a long-haul flight, buy yourself a cheap, big, comfortable pillow. It makes a huge difference.

I do not think that a flight across the Atlantic will be made in our time, and in our time I include the youngest readers.