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
Oh, great! Now I will be banned!
They finally figured it out...
1. A newly-created identity (within the past 10 days or so).He's lurking now ...
2. Instant camaraderie with two creationists who favor blue fonts.
3. A peculiar affinity for bats.
4. A tendency to favor Lyndon LaRouch-style conspiracy theories.
5. Uncontrollable need to proclaim Darwin dumbest white man who ever lived.
6. A surprising knowledge of the regular players in our threads.
7. And a very short life-expectancy for his new FR incarnation.
1) Stay gone . . .
Of course that will not be enough for you, let's hear what some evolutionists have to say about the Cambrian:
STEPHEN J. GOULD, Harvard, "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists,...we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study." Natural History, V.86."
The fossil record suggests that the major pulse of diversification of phyla occurs before that of classes, classes before that of orders, and orders before families. This is not to say that each higher taxon originated before species (each phylum, class, or order contained at least one species, genus, family, etc. upon appearance), but the higher taxa do not seem to have diverged through an accumulation of lower taxa.
Erwin, D., Valentine, J., and Sepkoski, J. (1988) "A Comparative Study of Diversification Events" Evolution, vol. 41, p. 1183 .
The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life's history -- not the artifact of a poor fossil record.
Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I. (1982) The Myths of Human Evolution Columbia University Press, p. 59
Described recently as "the most important evolutionary event during the entire history of the Metazoa," the Cambrian explosion established virtually all the major animal body forms -- Bauplane or phyla -- that would exist thereafter, including many that were 'weeded out' and became extinct. Compared with the 30 or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explosion may have generated as many as 100. The evolutionary innovation of the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary had clearly been extremely broad: "unprecedented and unsurpassed," as James Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently put it (Lewin, 1988). Lewin then asked the all important question: "Why, in subsequent periods of great evolutionary activity when countless species, genera, and families arose, have there been no new animal body plans produced, no new phyla?"
Lewin, R. (1988) Science, vol. 241, 15 July, p. 291
"This is true of all thirty-two orders of mammals...The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed... This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate...it is true of the classes, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants.
Simpson, G. G. (1944) Tempo and Mode in Evolution
Let's see you and your friends explain the above away. While you are at it, you can perhaps also show us the ancestry of the following:
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