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."
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
© ABC 2002 | privacy
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.
I think Tina might be too young, but Ike was always faithful to Mamie.
from below---outward!
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.
No evolution---NONE
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....
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!
but overall the lower sub surface crust and plates formed from the bottom!
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.
Well, now you know which programmer's code should get a little extra scrutiny when things start breaking ;)
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?
Rather quickly too---ruling out the mutation/morph theory!
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.
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?
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.
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