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People also used leather as armor, but so far no one has dug up a leather sword.

Substitute "feather" for "leather" and you get an even better example. ( http://dml.cmnh.org/2005May/msg00085.html is the first result that comes up through Google, though I clearly recall seeing it referenced in an ink-on-paper reference book too. That the same discussion was had in the same place a decade previously ... http://dml.cmnh.org/1995Jan/msg00315.html ... shouldn't be surprising. The palaeontologists have a long-standing interest in what properties of scales lead to the evolution of feathers.)

People also used leather as armor, but so far no one has dug up a leather sword.

Substitute "feather" for "leather" and you get an even better example. ( http://dml.cmnh.org/2005May/msg00085.html is the first result that comes up through Google, though I clearly recall seeing it referenced in an ink-on-paper reference book too. That the same discussion was had in the same place a decade previously ... http://dml.cmnh.org/1995Jan/msg00315.html ... shouldn't be surprising. The palaeontologists have a long-standing interest in what properties of scales lead to the evolution of feathers.)

Science is a process of debate and analysis, and there have been a couple of interesting threads among paleontologists regarding interpretation of the Guanlong fossil:

Thread 1
Thread 2

Much as I like the artist's depiction of Guanlong, he did take some creative liberties that obscure the underlying science. Ignoring the art and focusing on the article itself, the major item of interest in the crest. Many Jurassic carnosaurs had crests; why this feature evolved, and why it "went away" later is being debated.

Science is a process of debate and analysis, and there have been a couple of interesting threads among paleontologists regarding interpretation of the Guanlong fossil:

Thread 1
Thread 2

Much as I like the artist's depiction of Guanlong, he did take some creative liberties that obscure the underlying science. Ignoring the art and focusing on the article itself, the major item of interest in the crest. Many Jurassic carnosaurs had crests; why this feature evolved, and why it "went away" later is being debated.

Read the references in the utter bashing of Feduccia:

http://dml.cmnh.org/2003Jan/msg00070.html

How sad that most of the next 300 replies are likely to be attacks on his personal faith.

I find it very ironic to be flamed by anyone who thinks I'm an idiot for not believing in a theory that's never been proven by scientific process.

It's recently become a "religious act" to question science in any capacity, but isn't questioning science the only way we can tell the good science from the bad science?

And there is a lot of great science out there - even in public schools. But there's no longer a way for students to evaluate the credibility of what they're being taught. That seems to be degrading the quality of the subject. Science should be a quest for the truth, with no presuppositions, and appropriate understanding between hypotheses vs. theories vs. laws. When a theory is presented in the classroom as law and it's not held accountable to method, it's degenerated into mere conditioning.

I've spent a considerable amount of time studying topics such as the age of the earth and the theory of evolution, and I could probably argue it quite well if so inclined to engage in a discussion. That's important if you're going to believe anything really - including whatever the mainstreamed secular agenda happens to be.

Just because microevolution is feasable, that doesn't mean I'm going to sweep macroevolution under the rug and not test it - the two are actually worlds apart, just cleverly bundled.

I strongly feel that you should have some factual foundation to support whatever it is, and if you don't, then be man enough to admit you only have a theory put together.

No matter what side of the camp you are on, your beliefs require a certain amount of faith, as neither side is at present proven scientifically.

I don't have all the answers, but I don't think science in its present state does either.

At the end of the day, you can't prove the existence of God factually, and so whatever you believe is still based on faith. But at least the Christians can admit that - I just wish the evolutionists would too.

Take a microscope and set it to 500X. Point the objective at the sun. Do you death rays spewing from the eyepiece? (Answer: no).

A while back I was at an observatory and the guy in charge said never to point a telescope at the sun. To demonstrate, he turned the telescope (10.5" refractor) toward the sun. We could see a beam of bright light coming out the eyepiece. He put a piece of paper in the middle of the light and it ignited into flames almost instantly.

Yes, telescopes and microscopes are not the same thing, but aren't they similar? What caused this? No, I am not a physicist, and don't know about optics and all that beyond what they taught me in college.

Just as a sideline FYI, here's the best I've ever found as to the pronunciation and spelling of Chicxulub.

Here's an amusing debate... :)

SB

Could you elaborate on your BT comment please. I work for BT here in the states & would like more info on how we are in the 'home market'

Slightly OT, but this is a prime example of why BT has the reputation it does in the UK (not generally good, for those of you not in the UK..). BT's just too big. Remember the dinosaur with a brain in it's head and another in it's back (ok, ok, a sacral ganglion) ?? Well BT is like that dinosaur - whenever you call, you never seem to get the same person, different departments control different parts of your order, etc etc. So I'm not surprised that BT America doesn't have visibility of things going on in the UK.

The fossil from Hell... er, Creek, Montana. Big silence on this one ever since, which is possibly significant in itself because definite indications of contamination would have to have been published somewhere.

Preserving something as frail as an organic macrostructure over as much as 1% of that timespan is of course well beyond impossible, so the fact that it appears to have happened should be telling us something important about our leading assumptions.

Nowadays, if the face of so much consistent evidence, you'd have to have some really spectacular counter-evidence to be taken seriously. There are still scientists out there trying to debunk the idea, of course, but mostly they just keep turning up more evidence in favor of the impact.

Unfortunately, the evidence is consistent with a lot of things, including a strong episode of vulcanism, most of what Immanuel Velikovsky's had to say, and the idea of rapid worldwide flooding which so neatly explains many other things (-: a theory so popular on bone-dry Mars, but anathema here on our own soggy globe :-).

What seems to be happening is the same thing, over and over, as when geologist Harlan Bretz fought tooth and nail for four decades before geology accepted his theory for the Spokane badlands. A theory becomes dogma (generally without much real proof) and then all new evidence is seen as conforming to the dogma until finally the explanations become so stretched as to become indefensible, then everyone hurries to been seen as having allowed for the new idea in their old prognostications.

There are a couple of big showstoppers for the meteor-strike-kills-dinosaur idea, including the observation that a lot of dinosaurs did not perish at the end of the Cretaceous, and a lot of creatures which should logically have perished as readily, didn't. Perhaps the most damning is the occasional multiple or conspicuously absent Ir layer, features which are often masked, overlooked or rationalised away during reporting. [pro multi strike] [ con vulcanism] [con flood, many references esp in the linked PDF] [con egg-stinction, but he's wrong, eg non-stealthy birds survived]

Has anyone found strata anywhere that is well-dated and continuous across the 65-million-year age that doesn't show a thin anomalous layer and a radical change of fossils?

I recommend using names, rather than specific ages, or you'll see still more debate about the length of the periods involved, rather than a focus on more ``core'' ideas like seqences of events. And yes, many such have been found; there are less than 200 sites worldwide that do show Ir anomalies, and many of those either show multiple anomalies, or anomalies at depths other than the top of the Cretaceous. Do your own searching. (-:

You give very good examples of how sensory organs could develop in simpler organisms - there's no argument that evolution has a hand in shaping improvements in a particular species. However in the matter of macro-evolution (new species being created from progenitors) I have to debunk your example.

I hate to break this to you, but the Chinese are arguing that dinosaurs and birds are NOT related based on the scientific evidence - and have been since 1999.

But don't take my word for it, take theirs.

To reiterate what others have said, there still is no real evidence of macro scale evolution and that is a hole that needs to be addressed.

The Doctor is Out... (Debunking the misconceptions of the masses)

P.S. - I'd be careful about throwing around phrases like abscence of evidence is not considered conclusive proof because that would mean that lack of proof of a higher being (a.k.a. God) does not preclude its existence. Don't want to feed the religious trolls do we? ;)

Mickey Rowe, an expert on the evolution of colour vision, wrote this post to his dinosaur mailing list and this talk.origins post on the subject. The latter includes this interesting observation:

It should also be noted that many humans carry more than one copy of the middle wavelength-sensitive cone opsin. As this is grist for the evolution of color vision mill, we're literally ripe for the addition of a fourth cone class. (This probably won't happen, though, because people with a fourth cone class will be constantly trying to readjust the color on television sets. As a result of that such people will be highly selected against in bars the world over :-)