Posted on 09/22/2006 6:27:23 AM PDT by Tokra
The earliest known ancestor of modern-day birds took to the skies by gliding from trees using primitive feathered wings on their arms and legs, according to new research by a University of Calgary paleontologist. In a paper published in the journal Paleobiology, Department of Biological Sciences PhD student Nick Longrich challenges the idea that birds began flying by taking off from the ground while running and shows that the dinosaur-like bird Archaeopteryx soared using wing-like feathers on all of its limbs.
"The discussions about the origins of avian flight have been dominated by the so-called 'ground up' and 'trees down' hypotheses," Longrich said. "This paper puts forward some of the strongest evidence yet that birds descended from arboreal parachuters and gliders, similar to modern flying squirrels."
The first fossil of the Jurassic-era dinosaur Archaeopteryx lithographica was discovered in Germany in 1861, two years after Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in On The Origin of Species. Since then, eight additional specimens have been unearthed and Archaeopteryx is considered the best evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs since it had both feathers and a bird-like wishbone, along with classic reptilian features of a long bony tail, claws and teeth.
Although scientists immediately noticed feather-like structures on the hind limbs, they were dismissed as insulating body feathers that didn't play a role in the animal's flight. It wasn't until several four-winged dinosaurs in China were described in 2002 that researchers began to re-examine Archaeopteryx's legs.
"The idea of a multi-winged Archaeopteryx has been around for more than a century, but it hasn't received much attention," Longrich said. "I believe one reason for this is that people tend to see what they want or expect to see. Everybody knows that birds don't have four wings, so we overlooked them even when they were right under our noses."
Under the supervision of professor Anthony Russell, Longrich examined Archaeopteryx fossils and determined that the dinosaur's leg feathers have an aerodynamic structure that imply its rear limbs likely acted as lift-generating "winglets" that played a significant role in flight.
Come on, now, you believe the force of gravity was smaller in prehistoric times than now, right? Doesn't this mean that birds wouldn't need these adaptations to fly? You should incorporate bird evolution as corroborating evidence for your neo-Velikovskian hypothesis!
Actually, yes. Off the top of my head, for a couple reasons.
Gravitational lensing (a general relativistic effect) is observed for distant galaxies. If time travelled slower, there would be aberrations in this effect that aren't observed.
If the redshift didn't correlate to motion, it would mean our galaxy is in a unique gravitational potential well. Gravitational field equations would need a corrective term that is not in any other way corroborated.
We don't know what we don't know, but there are definitely ideas we can rule out.
Gravity is a theory. Although we can fairly accurately predict it's effects, because we don't really know the mechanics of how it works, we do not know what we do not know about gravity.
Sheesh, I can't beleive people are still trying to do research with Archaeopteryx. It's a fraud... a faked fossil!
http://www.tccsa.tc/articles/hoax.html
In real life it's a lot worse than that. In real life, assuming you somehow magically evolved the first such feature, then by the time another 5000 generations rolled around and you evolved the next, the first, having been anti-functional the whole time, would have de-evolved or become vestigial.
Consider that flying birds are supposed to have evolved from small velociraptors having none of the needed features.
Consider also the common chicken; chickens are not too big to fly well, ducks and geese which are larger fly perfectly well. Chickens started out as a 1.5 lb jungle fowl and then were BRED into a five or six pound bird, but they still have the 1.5 lb bird's wings, which is why they do not fly any better than they do.
Nonetheless, compared to the velociraptor bird wannabe which started out with no such features and a tiny numeric base, chickens the flight feathers, the wings, the flowthrough hearts and lungs, the light bones, the necessary balance parameters and conformation, and basically all but the very tiniest bit of what it would take to regain the skies.
If the velociraptor's journey to being a flying bird is a thousand miles, the chicken only has an eighth of an inch to cover and evolutionary theory demands that somewhere over the last five or ten thousand years out of all the chickens which have ever gotten loose, some should have regained whatever is lacking for full flight capabilities and retaken the skies. We should see chickens when we look overhead.
But we do not. In real life, if you ever lose the tiniest bit of come complex capability or for whatever reason fail to have it, that's the end of the story. You'll never see it or see it again.
It's like cutting hair. It's relatively easy to cut it off, while getting it back on again is impossible.
http://www.tccsa.tc/articles/hoax.html
You are citing a creationist website as scientific evidence? What a joke!
They don't do science, they do apologetics.
Oh, but it's a bird! Just a bird! Really!
Just a bird with teeth, unfused forelimb claws, lots of tail bones, a flat sternum, and--now we see--flight feathers on its legs.
For a better known and more obvious "four-winger," see Microraptor gui.
....because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: -II Thess.2:1
Interesting, but logically that passage uses the same circular logic as this hypothetical one:
The Purple Spaghetti monster created the earth and all it's inhabitants. There will people who do not accept this truth. For this reason the Purple Spaghetti monster shall cause those people to create alternate theories in order that they have a lie to believe in. - I Contem. 12:2
I think it's interesting that people "rebut" hard physical evidence that a thing happened along a certain specific path with general handwave dismissals and nonsensical mathematical strawmen. More and more, we have the evidence trail. More and more, we go from not knowing which of many proposed scenarios to homing in on details of one. The professional naysayers don't know, don't care and never will know or care.
Before he was banned, we used to have this nutcase named "medved" who would post that "by every precept of Darwinism, the skies should be full of flying feral chickens." People such as myself would point out that the presence of well-adapted fliers already plentiful in the skies would make it hard for a poor flier to gain a foothold, much less to completely take over and drive the eagles and hawks from the sky.
Before he was posting that nonsense here and getting laughed off the threads, he was posting it at the Talk Origins newsgroup to the same effect. A decade of having his nose rubbed in the absolute absurdity of his nonsense has produced no effect. Banning him produced no net effect. If anything, the nutcases are winning on FR.
(With apologies to George Orwell.)
They fail to address the central issue: Did it taste like chicken?
....The chance of all that evolving is zero....
Except of course that it did.
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