Page 211 - The Origin of Birds and Flight

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) 209

Personally, I continue to find it problematic that the most birdlike
maniraptoran theropods are found 25 to 75 million years after the
origin of birds . . . . Ghost lineages are frankly a contrived solution, a
deus ex machina required by the cladistic method. Of course, it is admit-
ted that late Cretaceous maniraptorans are not the actual ancestors of
birds, only “sister taxa.” Are we being asked to believe that a group of
highly derived, rapidly evolving maniraptorans in the Jurassic gave
rise to birds, as manifested by Archaeopteryx, and then this highly
progressive lineage then went into a state of evolutionary stasis and