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Living dinosaurs
abc.net.au ^
| 9/30/2002
Posted on 10/01/2002 8:32:43 AM PDT by SteveH
News in Science
News in Science 30/9/2002 Living dinosaurs
[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s687677.htm]
If we are to believe the message of a new exhibit demonstrating the evolutionary transition from dinosaurs to birds, dinosaurs are not extinct.
Four life-sized reconstructions of ferocious-looking, smart-thinking, flesh-eating feathered dinosaurs – representing 125 million-year-old missing links between dinosaurs and birds – have landed at the Australian Museum in Sydney as part of the Chinese Dinosaurs exhibition.
"The birds we see flying around our backyards are actually living dinosaurs, descendants of prehistoric beasts we all once presumed became extinct 65 million years ago," said museum director, Professor Mike Archer.
"But feathers were evolving as dinosaur attributes long before they became valuable as flight structures," he said.
"Indeed fossils uncovered in the Liaoning Province of China have provided a whole sequence of missing links in the dinosaur to bird story."
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Model of Sinornithosaurus smillenii (pronounced 'sine-or-nith-oh-saw-rus mill-en-ee-eye) made by Alan Groves working with palaeontologists Drs Walter Boles and Sue Hand.
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One of the earlier links is Sinosauropteryx prima. The creature is covered with what looks to be a fine fuzz but are really small barbs – a link between scales and feathers.
"It's a metre-long, meat-eating, ground-dwelling predator, closely related to the dinosaur in Jurassic Park II which ate the little girl on the beach," said Professor Archer.
He speculated these very early feathers were probably for insulation since this group was almost certainly warm blooded.
The Sinornithosaurus millenii (top picture) embodies a later link.
"This is a very vicious little predator about a metre long. But here the feathers are much larger – although they're not fully formed or capable of flight," said Professor Archer.
An interesting characteristic of the creature was its capacity to lift its arms over its head in a flapping motion. Professor Archer said scientists assumed its array of feathers had a purpose – to frighten predators, help capture prey, attract mates or threaten male competitors.
The next stage – the development of feathers for flight – is seen in creatures like the Archseopteryx, a smaller animal than Sinornithosaurus millenii with longer and assymetrical feathers.
While there has been some debate as to whether dinosaurs (unlike other groups of reptiles) are the ancestors of birds, Professor Archer believes since 1996 there has been no strong argument against the hypothesis.
"I don't know anyone who is still holding out on this one," he said. "Other than the creationists of course who don't want anything to be ancestral to birds."
Chinese Dinosaurs is open until February next year. The dino-bird exhibit is sponsored by The Australian Skeptics.
Anna Salleh - ABC Science Online
More Info?
British Natural History Museum Dino-Birds Exhibition
Missing link from fur to feathers – News in Science 27/4/2001
Dinosaur fossil with proto-feathers – News in Science 8/3/2001
Dinosaur-bird theory defended – News in Science 24/11/2000
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© ABC 2002 | privacy
TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: birds; crevolist; dinosaurs; evolution; paleontology
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To: <1/1,000,000th%
Maybe he means that a bunch of us have for the most part stopped replying to gore. That's only human, as gore is born new, eager to repeat the same exchange you had with him yesterday, on every thread. Thus, he might appear to be accumulating a tally of unanswered spew.
All that said, it's hard to see how anyone who has been paying attention for long would fail to see the nonsense factor in g3k's posts.
To: VadeRetro
Geologic column---dating??
From the evolution textbook...
Why does it look like it does(grand canyon)?
"The reason that it looks the way does is due to the sequence in which the events that help to create it happened. We already know that there was once a very tall chain of mountains in the area that occupied the Grand Canyon. These mountains were, over many millions of years, eventually eroded away to form a level plain. Fluctuations in climate then caused the oceans to move in over successive periods and each time a new rock layer was deposited. The rock layers were deposited one on top of the other and sometimes there were long periods in between in which some of the upper layers were eroded away, sometimes completely."
"We already know that there was once a very tall chain of mountains in the area that occupied the Grand Canyon. These mountains were, over many millions of years, eventually eroded away to form a level plain.
That is called science..."we already know"!
Campfire stories! Junk!!
Evolution...tall tales/legends---big lies(no comprehension)!
But the effect is permanent---zombie brains---religion/ideology---BIAS!
Govt school religion---'science'!
Bias means off the wall/page---outta reality...desire for something not true!
Evo cargo-go cult---ufo's!
To: f.Christian
Tina Turner and Dwight D. Eisenhower!I think Tina might be too young, but Ike was always faithful to Mamie.
To: <1/1,000,000th%
At one pt. the whole of the Earth was hot cooling from the surface in successive layers from below---outward!
from below---outward!
To: f.Christian
"One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the occurrence of diversified, multi-cellular marine invertebrates in Lower Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater age." This is not a true statement. We covered this with Nebullis a couple of weeks ago. Now get serious or I'll switch to the Armenian Orthodox Bible, or I'll start using Einstein's shorthand notation and mess everything up.
To: f.Christian
D. Axelrod, Science 128:7-
"One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the occurrence
of diversified, multi-cellular marine invertebrates in Lower Cambrian rocks on all
the continents and their absence in rocks of greater age."
"their absence in rocks of 'greater' age."
The 'greater' age in layers exists if you think the layers formed from the top!
I don't know how old your reference is but Ediacaran fauna are Precambrian in age are are found in multiple locations around the world...
To: <1/1,000,000th%
I'm convinced...cooling layers from the bottom!
No evolution---NONE
To: PatrickHenry
Gods, I'd love to join in the fun you guys are having, but I generally keep my name shielded. I'm known to a few freepers, but considering the whackos who often inhabit these threads, I think it's best to remain ingognito. A perfectly valid choice - posters are, and should be, free to post as much or as little personal information about themselves as they feel comfortable with. Vade chooses to post his information here. I choose not to, but it's a simple fact that I've got tracks all over the internet - if someone is even moderately persistent, my name will pop out eventually.
But that's where I'll leave it, since the blue goo is clearly too much of a coward to take me up on my offer to trade names in public. It's a standing offer - Papa Smurf doesn't scare me, nor am I worried about a spineless jellyfish like that knowing my name - keyboard warriors are a dime a dozen on the net, and this one's boringly ordinary....
To: VadeRetro
All that said, it's hard to see how anyone who has been paying attention for long would fail to see the nonsense factor in g3k's posts.If you factor in the level of science instruction in public school its not much of a stretch. I was talking to a C++ programmer I work with who said that science was something he knew a lot about, and that Compact Discs were written and read magnetically. Yikes!
To: <1/1,000,000th%
You write....Although the ID'ers have recognized some of their limitations, they have yet to put forward anything based on observations that might be called a theory.
I say....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/749062/posts
I meant to reply to your last objection on that thread, but got overwhelemd with work and had to let it go. Basically your objections had to do with how SOME Creationists interpret things and you were trying to superimpose that on this theory rather than evaluating the model on its own merits.
If I did that I could poo-poo evolution really easily. I would just take the most crack-pot ideas advocated by its fringe adherents and say 'Since this does not make sense and they claim the same worldview, I don't have to consider the model on its merits.' - dirty pool.
130
posted on
10/01/2002 8:07:32 PM PDT
by
Ahban
To: Axenolith
Sedimentary levels in specific-smaller areas can form...miles deep---
but overall the lower sub surface crust and plates formed from the bottom!
To: <1/1,000,000th%
Although the ID'ers have recognized some of their limitations, they have yet to put forward anything based on observations that might be called a theory. Nonsense, ID has eaten the evolutionist's lunch in the last 20 years and will never look back. Let's look at a few important landmarks.
1. The origin of the universe- the atheists are running. The only explanation given to disprove the obvious design of the Universe has been Steven Hawking's ridiculous 'infinite universe' theory.
2. Abiogenesis - so totally disproven that no one can even formulate a materialist explanation for how life arose.
3. Human development - developmental scientists ordinarily call the developmental process whereby a single cell turns into 100 trillion cells of the exactly correct kind in the exactly correct place a program.
So your statement is totally incorrect, the opposite is true - evolution and materialistic explanations have been shown to be ludicrous.
To: <1/1,000,000th%
I was talking to a C++ programmer I work with who said that science was something he knew a lot about, and that Compact Discs were written and read magnetically. Well, now you know which programmer's code should get a little extra scrutiny when things start breaking ;)
To: Ahban
If I did that I could poo-poo evolution really easily. I would just take the most crack-pot ideas advocated by its fringe adherents and say 'Since this does not make sense and they claim the same worldview, I don't have to consider the model on its merits.' - dirty pool.I've spent a couple weeks at several ID'er web pages and most of the content is "evolution is wrong". There were some that even accepted many of the observations of evolution. But what's the competing theory? I've been asking on these threads for months.
I'll ask again, can someone give me short statement of what ID theory is?
To: general_re
overall the lower sub surface crust and plates formed from the bottom!
Rather quickly too---ruling out the mutation/morph theory!
To: general_re
But he's a really good coder.
To: <1/1,000,000th%
This is not a true statement. It is a true statement. The only pre-cambrian multi-cellular animal is a worm. This does not explain the over 40 multicellular phyla that arose all of a sudden in the Cambrian.
To: gore3000
So your statement is totally incorrect, the opposite is true - evolution and materialistic explanations have been shown to be ludicrous.Again its "evolution is wrong".
What is your theory? I've spent hours going through these ID web sites. I'm not asking that it be fully developed or formal, just what is it?
To: VadeRetro
stopped replying to gore. Because you lose every time you try to refute my postings. You and your evo Taliban thugs though, seem to have plenty of time to smear, slime and try to assassinate my character. Such is the discourse of those who try to cover up the truth.
To: gore3000
Buzz off, you cowardly anonymous troll! I want you out of my reply queue!
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