Posted on 02/01/2011 11:58:12 AM PST by SeekAndFind
For fossil hunters, it represents one of those breakthrough moments.
A pterosaur has been found in China beautifully preserved with an egg.
The egg indicates this ancient flying reptile was a female, and that realisation has allowed researchers to sex these creatures for the first time.
Writing in Science magazine, the palaeontologists make some broad statements about differences in pterosaurs, including the observation that only males sported a head-crest.
David Unwin, a palaeobiologist in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, was part of the research team.
He told the BBC the discovery was astonishing: "If somebody had said to me a few years back that we would find this kind of association, I would just have laughed and said, 'yeah, maybe in a million years', because these sorts of things are incredibly rare."
Pterosaurs, also sometimes referred to as pterodactyls, dominated the skies in the Mesozoic Era, 220-65 million years ago. Although reptiles like the dinosaurs were plodding on the ground below them, they were not actually dinosaurs themselves - a common misconception.
This particular specimen has been dated to about 160 million years ago.
It was found by Junchang Lü and colleagues and excavated from sedimentary rocks in the famous fossil-hunting grounds of Liaoning Province in China. Liaoning has yielded many of the great finds in recent years, including a series of feathered dinos that have transformed thinking on bird evolution.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Prove it.
Will they have Mogen David in heaven,
Dear Lord... We’d all like to know,
Will they have Mogen David in heaven,
Sweet Jesus...If they don’t,
Who the hell wants to go...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5dtpw7zEm0
Actually contiental drift handily explains why you see marine fossils on mountains.
You need to read more than those who make up garbage to try to justify a religiously insprired belief that is at odds with the evidence. They still do not have a system of physics that explains everything with a consistent mathematics to back it up, and a record of prediction and reproducibility that your so called “scientists” do not have.
I really hate the golbal warming jackasses who have perverted science to support totalitarian political goals and thereby turning people off real science.
Snatch an egg for supper, get fossilized before you get a chance to eat it, and then when you finally get dug up, everyone assumes you are a girl!
There is much evolution simply can not explain but you must 1st review all the counter evidence before you reach such a conclusion.
For instance, how about an explanation for polystrate fossils?
i.e. a tree trunk fossil spanning myriad layers of strata purported to represent several million years.
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