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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

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]



Sinosauropteryx sprima

Model of Sinosauropteryx sprima (pronounced 'sine-oh-saw-op-te-rix pree-ma')made by Alan Groves working with palaeontologists Drs Walter Boles and Sue Hand.
 

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."

Sinornithosaurus smillenii
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.
 
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


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: birds; crevolist; dinosaurs; evolution; paleontology
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To: mass55th
With all due respect, your cat looks like he belongs on a bar stool.
281 posted on 10/02/2002 4:20:32 PM PDT by ladylib
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To: general_re
Natural ... BLOND!!! Until I was five -- maybe SIX!!! Then ... turned brown ... BUMMER!!!
282 posted on 10/02/2002 4:22:18 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: PatrickHenry
I'd commiserate were I not a charming mix of still some brown, lots of natural gray, and lots of natural bald.
283 posted on 10/02/2002 4:23:41 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
Sounds very Republican. (Dems have beards.)
284 posted on 10/02/2002 4:31:12 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: PatrickHenry
(Dems have beards.)

Oh, great! Now I will be banned!

285 posted on 10/02/2002 4:32:26 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
We make exceptions for novelists.
286 posted on 10/02/2002 4:33:22 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: PatrickHenry
Exactly! It would be like banning a McDonald's cashier for wearing a funny uniform.
287 posted on 10/02/2002 4:34:51 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
piltdownpig signed up 2002-09-21. This account has been banned.

They finally figured it out...

288 posted on 10/02/2002 4:56:50 PM PDT by forsnax5
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To: forsnax5
I'll never get over how much PP reminded me of medved. ;)
289 posted on 10/02/2002 4:58:21 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: forsnax5
Too bad. I was just getting to like piltdownpig.
290 posted on 10/02/2002 5:05:39 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: VadeRetro
How long till Ted's next incarnation?
291 posted on 10/02/2002 5:19:24 PM PDT by Junior
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To: Junior
Twenty minutes or so...
292 posted on 10/02/2002 5:37:00 PM PDT by general_re
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To: Junior; general_re
I'd say there's a compulsion operating there. If he doesn't find a new site, he's doomed to become the next Eschoir, bouncing back again and again until he lands in court. But that's just my opinion.
293 posted on 10/02/2002 6:05:42 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
A sort of undead creo...
294 posted on 10/02/2002 6:11:27 PM PDT by Junior
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To: general_re
It won't be difficult to spot him. Look for these indicia:
1. A newly-created identity (within the past 10 days or so).
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.
He's lurking now ...
295 posted on 10/02/2002 6:18:55 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: Junior
Rules to follow if you don't want people to talk about you after you're gone:

1) Stay gone . . .

296 posted on 10/02/2002 6:28:45 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: PatrickHenry
He's lurking now ...
297 posted on 10/02/2002 6:29:46 PM PDT by general_re
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To: general_re
For the older generation . . .
298 posted on 10/02/2002 6:41:44 PM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: Junior
The question about the Cambrian is what were the ancestors of all the diverse phyla of the Cambrian. For 150 years evolutionists have been trying to solve that problem and have not been able to, here are the facts:

THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION

In this paper we test the claims of neo-Darwinism, and another fully naturalistic version of evolutionary theory known as "punctuated equilibrium." We will do so by comparing the empirical expectations of these two theories about the history of life against the data of "the Cambrian explosion"-a term that refers to the geologically sudden appearance of at least twenty-five animal body plans 530 million years ago. We shall show that the Cambrian fossil record contradicts the empirical expectations of both these theories in several significant respects. We will further show that neither neo- Darwinism's selection/mutation mechanism nor punctuated equilibrium's species selection mechanism can explain the pattern of fossil evidence surrounding the "Cambrian explosion." Instead, we suggest that actual (that is, intelligent) design explains the origin of the animal body plans in the Cambrian period better than either of the fully naturalistic mechanisms of evolutionary change currently under consideration within the scientific community. ...

By the close of this event, as many as forty-one separate phyla first made their appearance on earth. Phyla constitute the highest biological categories or taxa in the animal kingdom, with each phylum exhibiting a unique architecture, blueprint or structural body plan. Familiar examples of basic animal body plans are cnidarians (corals and jellyfish), mollusks (squids and shellfish), arthropods (crustaceans, insects, and trilobites), echinoderms (sea star and sea urchins), and the chordates, the phylum to which all vertebrates including humans belong. ...

These studies also showed that Cambrian explosion occurred within an exceedingly narrow window of geologic time, lasting no more than 5 million years. ...

To say that the fauna of the Cambrian period appeared in a geologically sudden manner also implies the absence of clear transitional intermediates connecting the complex Cambrian animals with those simpler living forms found in lower strata. Indeed, in almost all cases, the body plans and structures present in Cambrian period animals have no clear morphological antecedents in earlier strata. Some have argued that perhaps the Ediacaran biota hold some hope in this regard, but as we will show below those hopes now seem remote. Moreover, the origin of the Ediacaran fossils themselves constitute a mystery for precisely the same reason as do the Cambrian fossils, namely, that no clear intermediates exist between the relatively complex Ediacaran animals and the much simpler bacteria and algae that preceded them. ...
From:   Stephen C. Meyer, P. A. Nelson, and Paul Chien, The Cambrian Explosion

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:


299 posted on 10/02/2002 6:50:30 PM PDT by gore3000
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To: gore3000
placemarker
300 posted on 10/02/2002 6:57:14 PM PDT by js1138
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