Is Chatterjee right? One problem with Protoavis is that the bones were not found in an articulated skeleton, and had to be pieced together. In this situation, there is always the possibility of mixing up bones from different organisms. This has happened often enough in the past to make many paleontologists wary when discussing Protoavis. Dr. Kevin Padian of the UC Museum of Paleontology believes that Protoavis is probably a mixture of two or more different skeletons, and several other paleontologists concur in this interpretation.

Creationists have argued that Archaeopteryx can't be transitional because true birds existed several million years before Archaeopteryx. It is possible that true birds existed before Archaeopteryx. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas claims that he has a specimen he named Protoavis that predates Archeopteryx by 75 million years. This can't be confirmed because Chatterjee refuses to let other paleontologists examine his specimen, and even he has not been able to find evidence for feathers. Finally, even if Protoavis is a "bird" rather than a small dinosaur, then it would simply assume the title of the earliest reptile-bird transition!

During the early 1980s, as Gauthier and Padian grew trees in their computers, Chatterjee was pulling bones out of Texas bluffs. The fossils he found dated back 225 million years, to a time when the area around Lubbock was a lush floodplain crisscrossed by rivers flowing west to a 300-mile-long inland lake. Animals living upstream would occasionally be overwhelmed by flash floods and carried for miles before they were dumped. Today they have become great piles of bones for paleontologists like Chatterjee to pick through.