High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Alan Feduccia is a paleornithologist, specializing in the origins and phylogeny of birds. He is now Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina. Feduccia`s principal authored works include two books, The Age of Birds and The Origin and Evolution of Birds, and numerous papers in various ornithological and biological journals. Feduccia is best known for his criticisms of the widely-held view 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.