As I said in other posts, the fossil 'record' is imposed on the evidence by men.
And in itself, the statement that birds 'share a more recent common ancestor with crocodiles than with other reptile' means nothing. What common ancestor? Unidentified. Non-existent. No DNA to sequence. Imaginary.
Well, yeah. ALL such scientific constructs are "imposed" on the facts (constructed to explain and account for relevant facts). What's your complaint here?
BTW, historically, the scientists who "imposed" the fossil record on the facts WERE ALL CREATIONISTS.
All of the major divisions of the fossil record (save the Devonian, which was created to resolve a dispute about the boundary between the Silurian and Carboniferous, more here) were in place years before Darwin set sail on The Beagle, and decades before he published his theory.