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To: AndrewC
There is no confusion on my part.

But you happily lost gomaaa in your usual dance of the ambiguously-worded objections.

I am pointing out the just-so nature of what you post as evidence.

To distract from what I am actually saying. Archaeopteryx (150 mya, "bird" bin) and Sinornithosaurus (135 mya, "dinosaur" bin) are more like each other than either is like any modern bird, more like each other than either is like many dinosaurs, and far more like each other than any reptile is like any modern bird. Quite possibly neither is on any modern creature's line of descent. Nevertheless, their similarities indicate that neither lies far from some pre-Archaeopteryx true historical divergence.

You may never find the exact divergence point in the fossil record. You're getting close when things get hard to tell apart which aren't hard to tell apart now. You're past it when there's only one kind of thing around, period.

Purely for the lurkers:

Taxonomy, Transitional Forms, and the Fossil Record.

985 posted on 03/19/2003 10:25:46 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
... far more like each other than any reptile is like any modern bird.

... far more like each other than any modern reptile is like any modern bird.

988 posted on 03/19/2003 10:41:30 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
But you happily lost gomaaa in your usual dance of the ambiguously-worded objections.

I was perfectly clear. The Sino fossil is dated in the Barremian. Archie is dated in the Tithonian. Tithonian is older than Barremian. The cladogram shows Sino as older than Archie. It is the chart and your justification of it that is ambiguous. The chart is a construct. The fossils are fact. More---

The new dates reported here, in conjunction with the results of ref. 26, indicate that the 'feathered' dinosaurs of Liaoning, although primitive in appearance, are not Late Jurassic or even earliest Cretaceous in age. Compared with the geologic timescale of ref. 25, the dates indicate a correlation with the middle Barremian (mid-Early Cretaceous), at least 20 Myr younger than Archaeopteryx from the Late Jurassic (Tithonian) Solnhofen Limestone of Europe. Given the similarities already noted with the Solnhofen and Liaoning fossils, it would appear that aspects of the terrestrial fauna were part of a long-lived chronofauna, persisting across the Jurassic–Cretaceous boundary. However, the ages of many of these sites worldwide are poorly known and, in light of the new dates for the lower Yixian fauna reported here, their ages may need re-examination. A final outcome of the new dates is that Archaefructus, although remarkably well preserved, cannot be considered as early as originally thought5. Depending on the accuracy in dating of other fossil sites worldwide, Archaefructus appears to be comparable in age with early angiosperm evidence from the Barremian of China, Europe, Russia and eastern North America30.

Note: In the citation lies a point I made quite a while ago. Your persistent ignoring of the data prevents you from seeing it.

989 posted on 03/19/2003 10:59:52 AM PST by AndrewC (Jello™ is suing Darwininians for patent infringement.)
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To: VadeRetro
You're getting close when things get hard to tell apart which aren't hard to tell apart now.

Yes, but eventually you'll reach a point where everything is so hard to tell apart that it'll be easy to prove there aren't any transitional fossils. ;^)

994 posted on 03/19/2003 12:11:01 PM PST by js1138
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