[Stultis]

Your statement that birds 'share a more recent common ancestor with crocodiles than with other reptiles' is itself a deduction, not a fact. You cannot tell the difference.

Yes. It's a deduction or inference from (historically) fossil evidence and comparative anatomy of living organisms. BUT it was one made many decades before ANY molecular sequence data was available. Therefore it separately carries implications wrt to the sequence data and that data can be used to independently test the claim.

[GourmetDan]

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.