Professor Kevin Padian celebrates the 25th anniversary of the first known feathered dinosaurs

Padian 2023 wrote:
“Our understanding of the origin of birds took a major step forward in 1998, thanks to the reported discovery of a remarkable fossil that unveiled the existence of feathered dinosaurs. Fossil publications that year caused a sensation. t was the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1996, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I was talking to John Ostrom, my former PhD thesis adviser from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. John’s work had shown that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods.”

25 years ago, in 1998,
feathered Sinosauropteryx (Fig 1, Ji and Ji 1998) was presented and described. That’s what all this ‘anniversary’ fuss is about. Sinosauropteryx has little to nothing to do with the origin of birds in the large reptile tree, where it nests as an aberrant theropod with no descendants.

Padian joins others in this rewrite of dinosaur feather history.
Archaeopteryx (Fig 2) and its feathers were described in 1863. As John Ostrom’s student, Padian knew this (see quote above) and should have objected to any celebration of the publication of Early Cretaceous Sinosauropteryx. Sinosauropteryx merely took off the blinders of those who chose to wear blinders back then. Ostrom realized this then and decades later when he spoke about it.

According to the Hartford Courant (2000), 
“In 1973, Ostrom broke from the scientific mainstream by reviving a Victorian-era hypothesis (see above) that his colleagues considered far-fetched: Birds, he said, evolved from dinosaurs. And he spent the rest of his career trying to prove it.” With the announcement of the first dinosaurs with feathers from China, Ostrom (then age 73) was in no mood to celebrate. He is quoted as saying, “I’ve been saying the same damn thing since 1973, `I said, `Look at Archaeopteryx!” Ostrom was the first scientist to collect physical evidence for the theory. Ostrom provoked a debate that raged for decades. “At first they said, `Oh John, you’re crazy,”’ Ostrom said in 1999.”On Ostrom’s death in 2005, age 77, the Los Angeles Times wrote that he had “almost single-handedly convinced the scientific community that birds are descended from dinosaurs.”

Regrettably, this is not a first instance. Or second. Or third.
Paleontology accepts new hypotheses at a snail’s pace, if at all. Not accepting the feathers of Archaeopteryx (Fig 2) as ‘the first known feathered dinosaur’ in favor of the feathers of Sinosauropteryx (Fig 1, in Padian’s 2023 view) is evidence of the sort of attitude you, too, can expect to encounter if you decide to contribute to the science of paleontology.

Proof is not good enough in paleontology.
Get used to it. Be content with your studies and discoveries and soldier on.

References
Ji Q and Ji S-A 1996. On the Discovery of the earliest fossil bird in China (Sinosauropteryx gen. nov.) and the origin of birds. Chinese Geology 233:30-33.
Owen R 1863. On the Archaeopteryx von Meyer, with a description of the fossil remains of a long-tailed species from the lithographic stone of Solnhofen. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London 153: 33-47.
Padian K 2023. 25th anniversary of the first known feathered dinosaurs. Nature (News and Views) 613, 251-252. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04586-4

wiki/Sinosauropteryx
wiki/Archaeopteryx