While this research is an important data point, it does not prove what they claim. Things that look like ancestors of dinosaurs might not actually BE ancestors of dinosaurs - they may have even existed at the same time!
This is not even a hard scenario to create. Perhaps changing sea levels isolated an island where dinosaurs evolved. Then millions of years later the sea levels dropped again, and dinosaurs immediately spread and out-competed their relatives. Unless we were lucky enough to find that island, evolution would look virtually instantaneous.
While the situation you identify isn't totally impossible it is fairly unlikely.
Invasive/Disruptive species (those able to outcompete native species in similar niches) in the modern world almost always come from larger landmasses. Presumably this arises because they are exposed to more intense evolutionary pressure from the larger amount of competitors/ecological niches present.
It is true that invasive species are always more likely to come from somewhere else. And the bigger the somewhere else, the more of an opportunity it has had to come up with new invasive species. But this says nothing about the relative likelihood of producing an invasive species per square mile.
In fact speciation events are believed to happen more often with small isolated populations. Most of the experiments are failures. But not all!
See the theory of punctuated equilibrium for more.
Remember, in the era dinosaurs the arrangement of Earth's landmass was radically different. Could it be possible where we've sampled the ancestors, they were actually on the island and whose evolution slowed down, and then later we discovered it's 'descendants' from the larger continent?
At the dawn of the Triassic and onwards to the early Cretaceous all the major continents were part of Pangaea. So assuming we arn't relying on just a few fossil beds to paint the picture, its virtually certain we are seeing the large continent species.
This brings to mind the concept of punctuated equilibrium. I only recently came to really understand it when I read Bill Nye's Undeniable (great read, btw). It makes so much sense and lends a much more intuitive feel to articles like this one about species evolving rapidly because of intense ecological pressures.
The speed of evolution is proportional to the population size so it is not surprising given how common dinosaurs were and are (birds) that they have evolved fast.
On this topic the most evolved species are some of the deep ocean bacteria like prochlorococcus [1] with huge populations - these bacteria are like a racing cars.
What gets left out of these time estimates is the error bars. Lets assume the claim that the evolution happened in a few million years is true, then what has happened in the original estimate was 10 million +-8 million years and the new estimate is 3 million +-1.5 million years. The two estimates actually overlap and all we are doing is improving the precision of the estimate. This happens in science all the time.
That sounds as if the scientists are wrong but someone else is right.
Although this is a truism (since science by default does not deal with absolute truth) what makes you think that someone other is right, and how you know that? Doesn't that also make you a scientist, since you discovered new knowledge?
I think the point was just that the more we investigate any given area of science, the more we refine and overturn previously held ideas. I think the GP's wording was a little hostile toward scientists in tone, but I also think that may have been unintentional, based on the second sentence. Science is constantly improving on current ideas, which is great! Let's keep doing it!
This is not even a hard scenario to create. Perhaps changing sea levels isolated an island where dinosaurs evolved. Then millions of years later the sea levels dropped again, and dinosaurs immediately spread and out-competed their relatives. Unless we were lucky enough to find that island, evolution would look virtually instantaneous.