(At last!) Reading the actual Science article is anticlimactic, and disappointing compared to expectations arising from the recent "exciting" popular press treatment.

Will anyone in the general science hierarchy strongly object, though?

Here's a third article I have found for TT lately saying in effect that chickens are descendants of tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs. (misleading?) This loose behavior is rather reflective of the group-think too-justification-hungry evolution-touting crowd, IMO. The loose association of T. rex and chickens via some DNA does ***not*** IMO conclusively prove any lineal evolutionary connection.

Migratory cousins hitchhiking (walking and flying, respectively) from neighboring star systems, maybe. :-)

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2008-04-24-trex-chicken-dna_N.htm

Impression: Headline writers are not reliable.

In today's mail, Science, 25 April, 2008, p.499, "Molecular Phylogenetics of Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus rex".

Searching the article, to the author's credit, I find no statement of certainty of lineal connection (evolution) between t. rex and any chickens.

Third paragraph:" Bayesian, likelihood, parsimony, and distance methods were used to generate evolutionary trees(6)."

(break)

"Maximum parsimony analysis also groups T. rex with the chicken and ostrich, although bootstrap support is low (fig. S1, B to D). Neighbor joining groups the T. rex with the birds, but miscalculates the branching order and misplaces alligator, mastodon, and several extant organisms. (fig. S1, B to D)."

4th paragraph: "The slight disagreement between the distance results compared with the Baysean, likelihood, and parsimony results (all three of which are concordant) are predictable given that distance methods perform poorly for taxa with large amounts of missing data (9). "