Famed fossil isn't a bird after all, analysis says (Archaeopteryx)

One of the world's most famous fossil creatures, widely considered the earliest known bird, is getting a rude present on the 150th birthday of its discovery: A new analysis suggests it isn't a bird at all.

Chinese scientists are proposing a change to the evolutionary family tree that boots Archaeopteryx off the "bird" branch and onto a closely related branch of birdlike dinosaurs.

Archaeopteryx (ahr-kee-AHP'-teh-rihx) was a crow-sized creature that lived about 150 million years ago. It had wings and feathers, but also quite un-birdlike traits like teeth and a bony tail. Discovered in 1861 in Germany, two years after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," it quickly became an icon for evolution and has remained popular since.

The Chinese scientists acknowledge they have only weak evidence to support their proposal, which hinges on including a newly recognized dinosaur.

Other experts say the change could easily be reversed by further discoveries. And while it might shake scientific understanding within the bird lineage, they said, it doesn't make much difference for some other evolutionary questions.

Archaeopteryx dwells in a section of the family tree that's been reshuffled repeatedly over the past 15 or 20 years and still remains murky. It contains the small, two-legged dinosaurs that took the first steps toward flight. Fossil discoveries have blurred the distinction between dinosaurlike birds and birdlike dinosaurs, with traits such as feathers and wishbones no longer seen as reliable guides.

"Birds have been so embedded within this group of small dinosaurs ... it's very difficult to tell who is who," said Lawrence Witmer of Ohio University, who studies early bird evolution but didn't participate in the new study.

The proposed reclassification of Archaeopteryx wouldn't change the idea that birds arose from this part of the tree, he said, but it could make scientists reevaluate what they think about evolution within the bird lineage itself.

"Much of what we've known about the early evolution of birds has in a sense been filtered through Archaeopteryx," Witmer said. "Archaeopteryx has been the touchstone... (Now) the centerpiece for many of those hypotheses may or may not be part of that lineage."

The new analysis is presented in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and colleagues. They compared 384 specific anatomical traits of 89 species to figure out how the animals were related. The result was a tree that grouped Archaeopteryx with deinonychosaurs, two-legged meat-eaters that are evolutionary cousins to birds.

But that result appeared only when the analysis included a previously unknown dinosaur that's similar to Archaeopteryx, which the researchers dubbed Xiaotingia zhengi. It was about the size of a chicken when it lived some 160 million years ago in the Liaoning province of China, home to many feathered dinosaurs and early birds.

Julia Clarke of the University of Texas at Austin, who did not participate in the study, said the reclassification appeared to be justified by the current data. But she emphasized the study dealt with a poorly understood section of the evolutionary tree, and that more fossil discoveries could very well shift Archaeopteryx back to the "bird" branch.

Anyway, moving it "a couple of branches" isn't a huge change, and whether it's considered a bird or not is mostly a semantic issue that doesn't greatly affect larger questions about the origin of flight, she said.

Luis Chiappe, an expert in early bird evolution at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County who wasn't part of the new study, said he doesn't think the evidence is very solid.

"I feel this needs to be reassessed by other people, and I'm sure it will be," he said.

TN4Liberty: "Confrontational? Condescending? Better words?
I would think that only a social misfit wouldn’t see that in your words.
One must assume you were either deliberately insulting or socially tone deaf to explain your remarks."

Please quote an example of where I called anyone a "social misfit", "tone deaf" or any other insulting, confrontational or condescending terms.
Then explain why, precisely, you consider the quoted remark "socially tone deaf".

TN4Liberty: "the feather from scale conversion is just one of many theories, all speculative, and all with holes in them.
None are apparently universally accepted."

So I'll ask you the same question I asked ARepublicanForAllReasons: did you never have a good science teacher?
Did no one ever explain to you the differences between scientific facts, hypotheses and theories, or what a "scientific law" has to have?

Do you not immediately recognize an unconfirmed hypothesis versus a confirmed theory?

There are no confirmed theories that I know of regarding the early development of feathers.

TN4Liberty: "Ah, you did provide links. Wikipedia. I’ll get right on that."

Why use more complex stuff with folks who don't know even the basics?

TN4Liberty: "I said you must be to not understand how your comments would be offensive."

You have not quoted a single comment of mine that you consider "offensive".
Therefore, I conclude logically that your protests are all a big charade, intended to cloud over the fact that you have no other evolution related responses to make.

TN4Liberty: "I didn’t ask you to comment on my first post, yet you felt the need to get involved and start insulting me."

Now I have to ask: did no one ever explain to you the difference between Free Republic and, oh, say, a private email?
When you send your own little private email to someone, then other people don't get involved.
When you post on Free Republic you are, in effect, asking other people to post their responses -- especially those who disagree.

Get it?

TN4Liberty: "Please stop replying to me now."

There is a very simple way for you to get the last word here.
All you have to do is agree with me. ;-)

TN4Liberty: "Seeing your comments to others on the thread, it’s clear that the problem is you, not me."

The "problem" here is that many people, such as yourself, enjoy posting their anti-evolution and anti-science remarks without any regard for accuracy or even honesty.

Whenever they or you do that, I like to attempt correcting the record.

Yardstick: "This is like asking someone to explain why, precisely, a joke is funny."

That's supposed to be a joke, right? ;-)

I'm certain, if you look, you can see just below the FR Reply box where it says:

NO profanity, NO personal attacks, NO racism or violence in posts.

Free Republic regularly bans posters for violating those policies, and so it is a matter of utmost concern that people understand just what, exactly, is acceptable or not.
For example, just when does an insult become a "personal attack"?

The answer is: nobody knows for certain, but the best policy is to stay well away from anything, including insults, which might be so interpreted.
Then you don't have to worry about it.

But I'll have to say -- Free Republic is normally a pretty rough & tumble world.
Most posters here are not overly sensitized to others' delicate feelings, and don't care at all about about being blunt and to the point.

And in over seven years of posting here, this is the first time I was accused of being "insulting" without any obvious reason for it.

So I take it as a bogus charge -- just a smoke screen to hide the fact the poster (TN4Liberty) had no serious response on matters of Evolution.

Rather than quote each sentence or paragraph, I will simply answer your comments in the same order they were posted.

Re feathers vs hair. You wrote a lot but still didn't explain why mammals have hair, rather than feathers. The default answer for most defenders of Darwinian evolution is that "they are optimal for survival". Yet what experiment has been done to demonstrate that mammals would not fare just as well or better with some sort of feathers? The answer of course is none. So your reply is just a reiteration of Darwinian dogma.

Re what I have "encountered": I had good science teachers in public school. 8th grade science, HS biology and chemistry, where I was introduced to the scientific method of confirming or disproving theories based on analysis of observed facts. I also have earned a BA in Philosophy, where I studied scientific methods, and learned both deductive and inductive logic. (Plus experimental Psychology, laboratory Chemistry, Biology and Astronomy.) I understand that any scientific theory is never 100% proved, nor can it be.

I did not say I was in doubt of evolutionary facts that are supported by strong evidence. What I said was that there are some things that evolutionary theory implies must be true (such as one species evolving into another) that science cannot explain at the present time. IOW, there is no mechanistic model which demonstrates the fact of one species giving rise to another, much less any model which demonstrates with any precision just how this could have occured. There are only extinct intermediary species, which scientists assume to be confirmation of what they already believe, namely, a small number of species giving rise to a greater number and variety of different species no longer able to interbreed. But note please, this has never been observed to occur, nor does the paleontological evidence prove, even within the accepted statistical certainty associated with inductive reasoning, that this must have occured!

You talk down to me as if I were largely unacquainted with science and carried bagload of unquestionable religious dogma. I assure you that I am neither a scientific novice nor a religious dogmatist. In fact, I was a strong evolutionary dogmatist before I came to question whether life could have originated and/or evolved without intelligent guidance.

-- ARFAR

Of course they can.
You just don't like the explanations, because they don't fit your religious ideas.

I don't like the explanations because they are not explanations, just statements of dogma. All Darwin or any subsequent biologist has proved is that most forms of life are exquisitely adapted to their environment, and that it is very likely that changes within species have occured to explain the fine adaptation. Species-to-species evolution has not been observed (quite unsurprisingly), but more pertinently no theoretical models exist for how most of the changes happened.

For example, it is supposed, due to anatomical similarities, that elephants are cousins to the extinct woolly mammoth. Now I'm just asking how the woolly mammoth lost its wool, grew bigger and flappier ears for better ventilation, modified its tusks and changed its diet from grass to mostly tree limbs, in addition to a myriad of other changes. If you don't know, then you don't know. I never learned it in my biology classes. Are there some super-secret biology departments where these evolutionary changes have plausable models but are kept from being imparted to the general public. Of course not.

We cannot observe the Earth and Sun being formed, but astronomy has plausable models which are quite easily unstood by intelligent laymen, about how they did form. This is not true of speciation. We just hear the same old line that change occured at random in incremental steps until an entirely separate species, well-adapted to its environment, came to be. And you call that an adequate scientific explanation?

Ah, but TIME! Given enough time all the right mutations will come together and culminate in new species. Yes, possibly so, but IMO some intelligence either inherent in Nature or guiding Nature from a non-material realm is more plausible. Of course, I could be wrong and within a few years, using super-computers, the precise mechanisms of speciation may all be explained. Heck, science may even explain how carbon chains floating in a warm ocean can form themselves into extremely complex, self-duplicating DNA molecules, complete with protective cell membranes, RNA and mitochondria and all the other accoutrements necessary for the simplest life. Well, there are simple viruses which lack DNA and invade host DNA, but that presupposes that the more complex life form existed before the virus could arise, doesn't it?

(Note: The Panspermia theory suffers from the same problem, BTW. If life on Earth came from other stars or galaxies, how did the first life emerge? It just pushes the ultimate question further back. If you can guide me to books with real answers for these problems, please do so. But if you even mention Stephen Jay Gould, I will probably never reply to you again.

-- ARFAR

ARFAR: "You wrote a lot but still didn't explain why mammals have hair, rather than feathers.
The default answer for most defenders of Darwinian evolution is that "they are optimal for survival".
Yet what experiment has been done to demonstrate that mammals would not fare just as well or better with some sort of feathers?
The answer of course is none.
So your reply is just a reiteration of Darwinian dogma."

And, did they teach you that kind of reasoning in philosophy class?
I say, you have a right to demand a full refund of every penny you paid those b*st*rds to teach you to "reason" this way.

Come on, pal -- even a grade-schooler cannot fail to see the flaws in your logic here.
Indeed, your reasoning is so sloppy, I doubt everything else you claim about a supposed degree in Philosophy, etc.

Look at what you wrote!
You began by saying: "The default answer for most defenders of Darwinian evolution is..."
But just three sentences later, "default answer" has magically transubstantiated into "your reply is just a reiteration of Darwinian dogma".

Using "logic" like that, why not just transubstantiate the national debt into your personal income?! ;-)

And why, in your Philosophy classes, did they not teach you to pay close, close, close attention to the arguments actually made, instead of those which would have been made if you had been making them?

Enough. You asked a seemingly reasonable question regarding hair on mammals versus feathers on birds.
The simple answer, which I gave, is that mammals first appeared roughly 65 million years before the first birds.
Mammals have hair and hair works well for them, so hair came before feathers.
The question then is not: why don't mammals have feathers? (answer: because they don't need them), but rather rather, why don't birds have hair? -- answer: because hair doesn't work for birds.

Really, it's not that complicated, especially once you understand the sequence of events.

ARFAR: "I understand that any scientific theory is never 100% proved, nor can it be."

If you understand the elements of uncertainty inherent in the scientific enterprise, then none of this debate should faze you.

AFAR: "What I said was that there are some things that evolutionary theory implies must be true (such as one species evolving into another) that science cannot explain at the present time.
IOW, there is no mechanistic model which demonstrates the fact of one species giving rise to another, much less any model which demonstrates with any precision just how this could have occured."

You claimed above to have studied not only Philosophy, but also Biology, but then immediately demonstrate they didn't teach you much of that either.
Really, I think you could retire now on the money those people owe you for delivering a defective product! ;-)

I'm telling you, your problem here is a religion-based hang-up over the definition of the word "species".
And the answer is: in nature there is "no such a thang" as a "species".
And while we're at it, let's get rid of all the genera, families & phylums too. Out! They don't exist in nature.

All these biological classifications are just man-made constructs intended to help us understand what-in-the-world is going on in nature?
They were never intended to drive religiously devout people crazy, or drive mis-educated "philosophers" to false conclusions.

In nature one "species" doesn't "change into" another "species".
What happens is that breeding populations of a single type sometimes get separated from each other -- by water, mountains, deserts, etc., and now each sub-grouping is only breeding amongst itself.
Now Evolution facts (=confirmed observations) say that every generation First descends with modifications and Second is selected naturally for survival.

Over time -- millions of generations -- these small modifications can add up to the point where the various sub-populations, if reunited, could no longer interbreed.
Then scientists would arbitrarily call them separate "species".
But in nature, all they are is different populations which can or cannot interbreed.

And there are many intermediate examples of this, including horses and donkeys, brown bears and polar bears, etc.

ARFAR: "There are only extinct intermediary species, which scientists assume to be confirmation of what they already believe, namely, a small number of species giving rise to a greater number and variety of different species no longer able to interbreed.
But note please, this has never been observed to occur, nor does the paleontological evidence prove, even within the accepted statistical certainty associated with inductive reasoning, that this must have occured!"

I just cited two examples above, and there are many others.
Possibly the most notable examples are our distant cousins, the Neanderthals, which fossils suggested were not our ancestors, but now DNA is saying maybe there was some hanky-panky going on in back of the old cave.
So, were Neanderthals a separate species or not?
Answer: the word "species" is an arbitrary classification -- a scientific construct -- which can be less than helpful in some circumstances.

ARFAR: "You talk down to me as if I were largely unacquainted with science and carried bagload of unquestionable religious dogma.
I assure you that I am neither a scientific novice nor a religious dogmatist.
In fact, I was a strong evolutionary dogmatist before I came to question whether life could have originated and/or evolved without intelligent guidance."

I doubt all that.
Most Christian denominations teach (and I believe) something called "theistic evolutionism", which simply means that God designed, created and manages the Evolution process in order to produce what we see today, especially mankind.
And that is in no way a challenge to the theory of Evolution, it simply says that what science calls "random chance" is in fact intended by the Creator, from the beginning.

But "Intelligent Design" is something entirely different.
ID suggests -- or hints, or allows people to believe -- without in any way demonstrating, that some being is out there (where?) routinely manipulating DNA to produce new kinds of creatures.

And the problem, of course, is that nothing the IDers claim can be demonstrated scientifically.
That's why the notion of Intelligent Design is just somebody's idea of religion dressed up in scientific drag.

ARFAR: "I don't like the explanations because they are not explanations, just statements of dogma."

"Dogma"? Is that a word they taught you in Philosophy class, or was it Biology?
Do you even know what the word means?

Dogma has nothing to do with science, it's a term describing religious ideas, sometimes contrasted to the public preachings of kergyma, "dogmata" were the often secret doctrines of some religious group.

Science has no "dogma".
What science has are first, confirmed observations = facts,
second, unconfirmed explanations of facts = hypotheses,
third, confirmed explanations = theories.
Yes, we could add a fourth, laws, but these are simply mathematical expressions and normally restricted to precise circumstances.

So with Evolution, the scientific facts include 1) Descent with modifications and 2) natural selection
The confirmed theory of Evolution simply projects these facts backwards in time and concludes that all, or nearly all, life descended from common ancestors.
Unconfirmed hypotheses relating to Evolution include abiogenesis, panspermia and remotely possibly even Intelligent Design, though how this could ever be expressed in real scientific terms I can't even guess.

ARFAR: "Species-to-species evolution has not been observed (quite unsurprisingly), but more pertinently no theoretical models exist for how most of the changes happened."

That is simply not true.
Evolution of species can be seen any day, in a zoo for example, which has multiple species of, say, zebras, horses and donkeys -- some of which can interbreed successfully, others only partially (i.e., mules) and still others not at all.
It can also be seen in the fossil records for each of these species going backwards in time to their apparent common ancestors.
And the precise -- atom by atom -- records of evolution can be seen in comparisons of the various species' DNA.

As for the "mechanism" which you keep saying doesn't exist, I've explained it now several times.
So what, exactly, is you problem with it?

ARFAR: "For example, it is supposed, due to anatomical similarities, that elephants are cousins to the extinct woolly mammoth.
Now I'm just asking how the woolly mammoth lost its wool, grew bigger and flappier ears for better ventilation, modified its tusks and changed its diet from grass to mostly tree limbs, in addition to a myriad of other changes.
If you don't know, then you don't know.
I never learned it in my biology classes. "

I keep telling you, you have a good case for educational mal-practice, and you should demand your money back, with damages too!
Make them pay for mis-educating you. ;-)

African elephants, Indian elephants, mammoths and mastodons all evolved from common ancestors over several million years.
Here is a chart over-simplifying how that happened:

So the exact mechanism for how woolly mammoths became woolly should be pretty obvious.
It begins with separations of breeding populations, when one group migrates out of Africa into colder and colder climates further and further north.
Now the further north they migrate, the fewer "naked" elephants survive, and the more "woollys" live and reproduce.

So I'll ask again, what exactly is your problem with that?

ARFAR: "We just hear the same old line that change occured at random in incremental steps until an entirely separate species, well-adapted to its environment, came to be.
And you call that an adequate scientific explanation?"

No, I don't call your explanation very "scientific".
In scientific-ese, the truth would be expressed somewhat differently.
Too bad they never taught you that.

The actual rate of evolutionary change can be measured whenever DNAs of different species are compared to each other, and with reference to fossil records of potential common ancestors.
Whether DNA mutations always, or even usually, occur "at random" is, I think, debatable.
Some mutations seem more likely to occur than others, for examples, larger or smaller sizes, more or less hair covering, and other adaptations to variations in climate.

As for "incremental steps", some mutations can produce larger effects than others, and so the "increments" might be quite large if they improve survival rates.

ARFAR: "Ah, but TIME! Given enough time all the right mutations will come together and culminate in new species.
Yes, possibly so, but IMO some intelligence either inherent in Nature or guiding Nature from a non-material realm is more plausible.
Of course, I could be wrong and within a few years, using super-computers, the precise mechanisms of speciation may all be explained."

Why are you demanding computer models for everything?
What, are you a super-computer salesman?
Do you make your living convincing scientists they need ever bigger / faster / better computers to model all of the known and unknown Universe?
Why? What does it matter?

The scientific explanation of Evolution is entirely reasonable (as a alleged Philosopher, you should understand the concept of "reasonable").
And all of the confirmed observations (=facts) we have support the theory of evolution.
Furthermore, there is no -- zero, zip, nada -- alternative scientific hypothesis, much less confirmed theory.

So why is that not enough for a reasonable person to accept as most likely the true explanation?

ARFAR: "But if you even mention Stephen Jay Gould, I will probably never reply to you again."

See, that's why I doubt if this is really all about science or philosophy or theology.
Sounds more like a personal problem to me... ;-)

BrandtMichaels: "There is no good reason for you to put law in quotes..."

A scientific "law" is normally a mathematical expression valid under certain specified conditions.
The word "law" makes it sound like some Congress of scientists passed a rule to be enforced by the scientific Chief Executive.
In fact, it is merely a discovered relationship which is found to work whenever conditions are right for it exist.

BrandtMichaels: "Except the need/wishful think of evolution to ignore the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
All systems tending toward disorder - a direct observation of all things under the sun - including the accumulation of mutations breaking down all DNA."

If I had a dime for every time people like yourself have thrown out that argument, and every time it's been correctly explained to you, I could fully retire today! ;-)

But ever the optimist, I'll try again: the second "law" of thermodynamics is always valid under the right conditions.
One of those conditions is: for entropy (disorder) to increase, the system must be in isolation.
But the Earth is not isolated, because there is constant input of new energy from the Sun.
And under exactly the right conditions (aka "goldilocks planet" -- not too hot, not too cold), the disorder of organic molecules not only does not increase, but the reverse can happen, as we can see in laboratory experiments and on Earth;.

BrandtMichaels: "The opposing evolutionary wishful thinking is DNA re-writing itself for new organs, abilities, and lifeforms which by the way has never been observed in nature."

I'll say it again: Evolution consists of facts, theory and hypotheses.

The facts (=confirmed observations) included 1) Descent with modification and 2) Natural selection.

The confirmed theory projects these facts backwards in time and concludes that all, or nearly all, life on Earth descends from common ancestors.
Confirmations for this theory come from the fossil record, through DNA analysis and by inputs from nearly every other branch of science.

Various unconfirmed hypotheses relating to evolution include abiogenesis, panspermia and potentially, if it were ever expressed in scientific terms (how?), Intelligent Design.
Of those three hypotheses, only abiogenesis can be tested scientifically, and so that is what some scientists have been reported working on.

"Descent with modifications" can be observed in virtually every generation, albeit normally changes effecting only unexpressed sections of DNA.
But these DNA changes can be counted up to determine approximate times to common ancestors.
Over millions of generations accumulating DNA changes can be significant, and easily account for differences we see amongst closely related species such as zebras, donkeys and horses.

Tens and hundreds of millions of generations, each descending with accumulating modifications, take us all the way back to common orders, classes and phylums.

Billions of generations separate us from simple life and single celled life.

So, small modifications accumulating over billions of life-cycles can add up to a big difference.

BrandtMichaels: "Also consider the fruit fly experiments where ‘intelligent’ re-design was super-imposed and all the mutants returned to their normal programming within a few generations."

Sure but similar, more useful, changes are made every day to agricultural species which are grown around the world.
So any modification, no matter how it happens, if it improves a species chances of survival, then it will be selected for naturally, or in the case of human agriculture, by "intelligent design".

BrandtMichaels: "Well, except that you’ve completely missed the facts on wooly mammoths.
The hair was found to be for cooling purposes.
The artic circle does not contain enough food sources for the 40 or so pounds of vegetation they each would need for daily survival "

Responding:
Woolly Mammoth:

"The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), also called the tundra mammoth, is a species of mammoth.
This animal is known from bones and frozen carcasses from northern North America and northern Eurasia with the best preserved carcasses in Siberia.
They are perhaps the most well known species of mammoth.
"This mammoth species was first recorded in (possibly 150,000 years old) deposits of the second last glaciation in Eurasia.
It was derived from the steppe mammoth (Mammuthus armeniacus).
"It disappeared from most of its range at the end of the Pleistocene (10,000 years ago), with a dwarfed race still living on Wrangel Island until roughly 1700 BC.
"Woolly mammoths are common in the fossil record.
Unlike most other prehistoric animals, their remains are often not literally fossilised - that is, turned into stone - but rather are preserved in their organic state.
This is due in part to the frozen climate of their habitats, and to their massive size.
Woolly mammoths are therefore among the best-understood prehistoric vertebrates known to science in terms of anatomy.
"Woolly mammoths lived in two groups which are speculated to be divergent enough to be characterised as subspecies.
One group stayed in the middle of the high Arctic, while the other group had a much wider range.
The Bering Land Bridge likely played an important role in structuring woolly mammoth populations, acting as an ecological barrier.
Recent stable isotope studies of Siberian and New World mammoths has shown there were also differences in climatic conditions on either side of the Bering Land Bridge, with Siberia being more uniformly colder and drier throughout the Late Pleistocene.
"While woolly mammoths were not noticeably taller than present-day African elephants, they were larger and heavier.
Fully grown mammoth bulls reached heights between 2.8 m (9.2 ft) and 4.0 m (13.1 ft); the dwarf varieties reached between 1.8 m (5.9 ft) and 2.3 m (7.5 ft). They could weigh up to 8 tonnes (8.8 tons).

You were saying?

;=)

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