"Gansus is very close to a modern bird and helps fill in the big gap between clearly non-modern birds and the explosion of early birds that marked the Cretaceous period, the final era of the Dinosaur Age," said Peter Dodson, professor of anatomy at Penns School of Veterinary Medicine and professor in Penns Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. "Gansus is the oldest example of the nearly modern birds that branched off of the trunk of the family tree that began with the famous proto-bird Archaeopteryx."
"helps fill in the big gap"
ok
1) then in laymans terms, is this an example of fossil record of intermediate speciation?
2) is there any indication of what happened to the heads?
"Gansus is something of a lost species, originally described from a fossil leg found in 1983, but since largely ignored by science. The five specimens described by Dodson and his colleagues had many of the anatomical traits of modern birds, including feathers, bone structure and webbed feet, although every specimen lacked a skull."
apparently, these fossils were fragments, and were assembled by the authors...
3) are you satisified with their conclusions?
Yes, a small mink-like creature subsided only upon the heads of these birds, thus it is extremely unlikely we will ever find an intact specimen.
(The above was a joke.)
I haven't read the original paper, so I don't know. What I posted was only a press release. What's your opinion?
Maybe they didn't have heads, and heads evolved later.
Or, to be more pointed, it is clear that they assume there should be skulls, and are therefore surprised not to find them. And skulls are kind of unique bone structures that you couldn't easily confuse for other things.
So, given they must have worked really hard to find the skull bones that they were certain would be there, why don't you see that, for bones that are easily mistaken, they would have "found" the bones to be exactly what they were looking for them to be?
You will find what you are looking for. When you know what the results are you need, there are many examples of otherwise good scientists who manage to FIND those results, whether they are correct or not. Just human nature.
Maybe the early human hunters collected their heads.
Oh wait, there couldn't be humans there, this is before "65 million years ago" when we all KNOW that a cataclysmic event made all those pesky creatures we can't explain disappear.
I loved how they brought that back in with their "we just don't know yet" how these early ducks managed to survive that event to evolve into modern ducks.
Maybe Noahzoa put them on his ark.