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4-Winged Dinosaur Fossil Found
Anonymous Coward writes "Scientists in China say they have found fossilized remains of a dinosaur with four feathered wings that it probably used for gliding, a find they say strengthens the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs. See the story on CNN or BBC with a cool rendering of what it possibly looked like or at NYTimes (yadda)."
There was an excellent documentary on the BBC last summer that showed the elaborate lengths to which the Chinese fraud industry will go to fake a winged fossil.
The fraud detailed in the show fooled even National Geographic, which had spent thousands on research, documentation, and 'verification' by palaentologists.
I bet $20 this one turns out to be a fake.
davejenkins.com |
I feel it coming: Jurassic Park 4: Attack of the microraptors, which will be followed by Jurassic Park 5: The return of the Mircoraptors where they'll be talking, which fortunately can be reproduced by the main figure by blowing on a bomboo horn.
No these people are wrong, look at Dolphins, clearly Dolphins have two "wings" at the front and two at the back on the tail. This is clearly correct and my total lack of knowledge or understanding of the subject should not get in the way of this being accepted as being the correct evolutionary move from dinos to not birds but mammals. We all know that birds evolved from insects as insects are what birds eats which means birds are cannibals. ... the worrying thing is how many people have read to this stage and thought "yeah, what do all those Chinese science guys know, how long have they been doing science? Wha d'yu mean they invented printing 2,000 years before the west... and gunpowder".
Slashdot, never let a lack of education get in the way of an opinion.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Fly over here, you bastards and get your reg-free link
Four winged freaks!
Speaking of microraptors, the bambiraptor is a cutesy-named microraptor.
One terrifying dinosaur... if you're a small cat, or a toy poodle.
Wow maybe that means dragon did walk the earth and we just haven't found the proof of it yet. I wouldn't be too surprised if they found some evidence of such, seems too consistant a fixture in stories to be 100% fiction. Sigh... Dinosaurs would have made great pets imho.
here is a link to the article in German from "Der Spiegel":
The article
The BBC has a story about an earlier chinese fake here or here for text browsers.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
None of the articles gave a name for this thing yet.
So, here we have it...
Slashdot's own Name that New Dinosaur Contest:
1. Glideasaurus
2. GNAB (GNAB's not a bird)
3. Quadrofoil
4. I don't have a name yet you Insensitive Clodasaurus.
5. Fakeoraptor
6. Cowboydactyl Nealasaurus.
BWC
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The UK is the most advanced country in the world, went through the Agricultural, Industrial and Communications revolutions first.
China still leads the world in many fields of science. Their micro-surgeons are acknowledged as the best, they have the most practice thanks to a total lack of safety in the average Chinese workplace. They have some of the finest maths brains on the planet, and there are 1.2 billion of them.
China is a scientific nation, you can't move at most scientific conferences without bumping into a large contingent who are either directly from China or who are researching in Western Unis.
Oh wait, you know are demonstrating how people who know jack shit about a subject and are never going to go to a scientific conference or get published in nature still think their opinions are valid even if based on a total lack of knowledge.
Sorry I nearly missed your wonderful example of irony.
Stem cell research in China one of 32 matches for Beijing university in natures publications. How many people from _your_ alma mater have been published in Nature ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Okay, I'll byte. Once good AC deserves another, and I'm bored...
The key behind 'science' is the ability to test. You come up with a theory, and there will be some way, even if only hypothetically, that the theory can be proven wrong. A theory is not widely considered to be true until it is proven, but more theories can be based on it under the presumption that it is (sorta like read-ahead caching)
The key here is that it's always possible that it's wrong. This is called falsifiability. Something cannot be true unless it's possible to think of a way that is might be false. It sounds like a paradox, but the idea is that the theory will hold against any evidence brought against it, even when that evidence is thought to prove it wrong.
Religion is not falsifiable, unless you can give me a reasonable test that could prove God does not exist (and this prove the "theory" wrong)... which I assume is the root of your argument: That evolution is false because God created everything.
As for evolution being testable, some people are doing a great job of it. So far the theory has held up as expected.
And let's not forget the unintentional proofs, like antibiotic resistant bacteria
Just because your pet cat never give birth to a litter of dogs is not exactly reason to say evolution is bunk. Maybe if you understood the concept and the theory a little better you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
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I can understand the microraptor would've folded his front wings onto its chest or something , like normal birds do when they aren't flying. But if your feet act as wings as well then it cannot be comfortable walking around with those. What if they get muddy or wet ?
There are birdspecies nowadays with feathered legs and the feathers on them look all battered, muddy and broken, definitely unsuitable to fly around with.
While the RIAA claims the dinosaur had four wings it actually had only ONE wing that it could wag around REALLY quickly.
Free as in mason.
Update: 6:30 AM, Scientists determine that the original analysis was erroneous and that it is, in fact, two separate winged dinosaurs on top of each other. This reassessment was prompted when archeological interns in the field discovered a fossilized truck with fossilized skid marks approximately 30 meters away.
Our current view of the fossils, with huge gaps between changes in the populations supports the idea of punctuated equalibrium. This gets the creationists excited, because they think that instant changes must come from a higher being. Thus, there has been tremendous pressure to find these transitonary species.
This pressure may cause scientists to misinterpet fossil records, or even create false fossils. I wouldn't become to excited about this find.
"You sir, have just crossed my happy line..."
National Geographic has some good big pictures / illustrations of it.
What's so amazing about this?
Every time I go to KFC, I get the 4-winged chicken!
Ha ha haha aaaahh.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
The suggestion is that dinosaurs went through a gliding stage before learning to fly with two fore-limbs, says Dr Angela Milner of London's Natural History Museum.
This sort of quote assumes that evolution is going in a single direction -- "from" flightless dinos "to" modern birds. In fact traits commonly appear, and disappear, and reappear, many times. (Take a look at a "terror bird" and convince yourself birds weren't turning back into dinosaurs.)
It sounds like the world had a mess of different uses for feathers, once they developed -- insulatory, locomotion, display, and so on, just like in modern birds, and some we haven't thought of like this four-legged gliding model, if the fossil's real. Dinosaurs didn't develop "toward" flight, they bounced all over that range of feather uses just like birds do today.
Cladistics will air out that sort of thinking real fast. (Decent practical primer/pop science book: "In Search of Deep Time.")
Looking at things in "clades" also helps in practical ways by showing the evolutionary relationships between living animals more clearly. People trying to figure out ways to treat tapeworms had trouble making progress under the assumption that their on parasitism evolved only once, in a common anscestor of all modern tapeworms. Cladistics hashed out the evolutionary history of tapeworms a bit, and we realized the trait had a more patchy history -- parasitism had evolved several separate times -- and that some of the closest modern relations weren't parasitic at all. Those modern relations were easier to work with in the lab than something that required a host.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
How falsifiable is the theory of evolution?
For a good long time, mtDNA was considered an accurate dating method for finding common ancestors. It was even heralded as confirmation from a second dating method that the fossil record dates were accurate. But, then we learnt a little more and found out that mtDNA suggested we had an Out of Africa common mother(not the only woman ancestor, just our common mother) about 100,000 years ago. Which didn't fit our current interpretation of human fossil distribution, but it was in keeping with a less popular interpretation, so things were okay. Then we learnt a little more(Parsons in 1997) and found out that mtDNA mutations where around 20 times faster than we thought, placing our common ancestor around 6000 years old. Clearly wrong, so we essientially stopped claiming mtDNA evidence as support for evolution. And yet dates for mtDNA calibrated off expected evolutionary branches are still accepted as more accurate on evolutionary time scales, in spite of numerous studies confirming that observed mtDNA mutations within species are unexplicably higher than those between them. This anomaly is still being investigated, but evolutionists are confident it is nothing to worry about.
The evolution of whales is still a big issue for evolution. Claims from the fossil record were that whales came from Ambulocetus and this was accepted as a good enough answer. But molecular biology shows us that whales are actually more closely related to the hippopotamus. Now, although hippos share alot of morphological features with whales, they only appear in the fossil record 30 million years after whales. So these common morphological features must be the result of convergence, but evolutionists needn't worry.
Now, as much as evolution fits a lot of the evidence, there is also a good quantity of evidence that does not support evolution(above are merely 2 recent examples). Just how much counter evidence for evolution is required for it to be considered 'falsified'. At the very least there should some admission there are reasons to lack confidence in common descent. Note: By evolution I refer to common descent here, not genetic change over time(which is of course a demonstrable fact).
You need desperately to stop reading Feduccia and believing everything he says as undeniable truth. The guy does piss-poor paleontology (ask any paleontologist and they'll tell you the same thing). He doesn't even publish in peer-reviewed papers...he writes books which are NOT peer reviewed. As far as I'm concerned, HE'S the fraud.
But about the feathered dinosaurs. The whole "scales or connective tissue" argument is long-dead. That argument was used against Sinosauropteryx because the only feathers it had was a small amount of "dinofuzz." Dinofuzz has not been proven to be feathers, but it seems likely that it is indeed protofeathers. Since Sinosauropteryx, however, we've found MANY more feathered dinosaurs, many of which indeed have true feathers. Some of these have been found by paleontologists as opposed to villiagers and are therefore unaltered. Microscopic analysis of the feathers shows a LOT of detail in structures that we find in the feathers found in, say, Confucisornis and other birds found in the Liaoning beds.
The infamous Archaeoraptor debacle was NOT as big a problem as you would think. There were two seperate animals stuck together...a composite specimen made up of a bird and a Microraptor. The guy who found it AT A ROCK AND GEM SHOW(who was NOT, I repeat, NOT a paleontologist but rather a dinosaur fanatic who wanted his name on a paper) took it straight to National Geographic and had all sorts of stuff done with it LONG before the whole thing was even looked at in more detail. This was a result of bad science, not the convincing value of the composites/fakes coming out of China.
No offense or anything, but you, sir, are an ignorant fool. Most paleontologists are NOT trained primarily in geology. Many have specialized in comparative anatomy, developmental biology, and other areas that are more important to understanding the morphology of the animals they study. I've even met a few paleontologists who DO have a good background in aerodynamics or structural engineering so they can understand what the animals they're looking at could and could not do. Don't think all paleontologists are geologists who pick up fossils, name them, and make up unfounded stories as to the animal's behavior.
If not all sentients are human, couldn't it be possible that not all humans are sentient either?
My former post was by no means intended as a troll. Furthermore, I can't see any objective reason it would be considered as such. I can understand people disagreeing with my statements but can anyone explain to my why the above was considered a troll?
A thing that amazes us, here in Europe, is the influence of creationists in the USA. Here in Europe, claiming to be creationnist and doubting every paleontologist discovery is view as mediaval backwardness. Only marginal religious sects, representing 0.1% of the population claim to be creationist. For us, contesting the evolution theory is like contesting the fact that le Earth is round and rotates around the Sun. The evolution debate is closed everywhere, expect in USA. How such a modern country can be so influenced by religious fondamentalist group ? That is the main reason of the growing gap across the Atlantic.