Frances James (ecologist)

Frances Crews James (born September 29, 1930) is an American academic ecologist. She served as a Professor of Biological Sciences at Florida State University. She studied geographic variation in the size and shape of birds, leading to transplant experiments with red-winged blackbirds and to tests of the theoretical assumptions underlying selection models. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was awarded the 1999 Margaret Morse Nice Medal by the Wilson Ornithological Society.

In 2009, with John Pourtless, she published an Ornithological Monograph entitled Cladistics and the Origin of Birds: A Review and Two New Analyses. In their monograph they argue that both the “early-archosaur” and “crocodylomorph” hypotheses are at least as well supported as the BMT (birds are maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs) hypothesis. Also, the Kishino-Hasegawa tests they performed revealed no statistical difference between the hypothesis that birds were a clade nested within the Maniraptora and the hypothesis that core clades of Maniraptora (oviraptorosaurs, troodontids, and dromaeosaurs) were actually flying and flightless radiations within the clade bracketed by Archaeopteryx and modern birds (Aves). James and Pourtless concluded that because Aves might not belong within it, Theropoda as presently constituted might not be monophyletic. They further cautioned that the verificationist approach of the BMT literature may be producing misleading studies on the origin of birds.