From which chromosome and gene do scales and feathers come from?
2. Downy feathers modified into "straight" feathers for better heat retention (modern birds still use their body "contour feathers" in this fashion).
From this we are to assume the world was cooling off at a rate slow enough for the feathers to evolve... otherwise these animals "evolving" would have died before evolution could occur. And if this can happen, why can't animals adapt thru evolution today to changing climates?
But wait, doesn't part of evolution theory state that dinosaurs (the species that "evolved" into these birds)were wiped out during a possible asteroid hitting the earth; something that caused mass death of the dinosaurs. If this happened, how did they have enough time to evolve into another species? Or had they already evolved? But that poses a problem. If this did occur, how did these other species survive?
Why are you threatened by people questioning this?
Why are you threatened by people questioning this?
Before I frame this one I want to suggest you look at the timeline of bird evolution (at least 200 mya) and dinosaur extinction (65mya).
From this we are to assume the world was cooling off at a rate slow enough for the feathers to evolve... otherwise these animals "evolving" would have died before evolution could occur.
Nope. We would assume the critters were becoming warm blooded and needed a form of insulation. Small animals lose body heat rapidly, which is why even tiny desert mammals have fur.
But wait, doesn't part of evolution theory state that dinosaurs (the species that "evolved" into these birds) were wiped out during a possible asteroid hitting the earth; something that caused mass death of the dinosaurs. If this happened, how did they have enough time to evolve into another species? Or had they already evolved? But that poses a problem. If this did occur, how did these other species survive?
Birds evidently evolved from therapod dinosaurs (see my mention of archaeopteryx, above). The dinosaurs were evidently on the way out when the asteroid delivered the coup de grace (the number of dinosaur species found in the fossil record had shrunk considerably in the few million years before the impact). Birds had already branched off and been evolving for nearly 100 million years at this point. The birds and mammals of the period were not nearly as heavily stressed by the impact as the dinosaurs, probably because the former were fully warm blooded and typically smaller and this gave them an advantage in competing with any surviving dinosaurs.