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Dinosaur Forces Rethink Of Flight's Evolution
gollum123 writes "The BBC reports that a small dinosaur with a long, slender snout and wing-like limbs is forcing a rethink on bird evolution." From the article: "The 90 million-year-old reptile, called Buitreraptor gonzalezorum, belongs to the same sickle-clawed group of dinosaurs as Velociraptor and feathered dinosaurs from China. It may provide tantalising evidence that powered flight evolved twice. One theory suggests the lineage of dinosaurs the new animal belonged to, the dromaeosaurs, originated in the Cretaceous Period (144 to 65 million years ago). But this discovery suggests their lineage can be traced further back in time, to the Jurassic (206 to 144 million years ago), experts say."
Since this comes up in every slashdot story on dinosaurs, no, Jurassic Park is not possible -
Fossilization occurs when carbon atoms are exchanged for silicon. There is a very high energy barrier to this chemical event - so it happens extremely slowly, over millions of years.
Nucleic acids, the building blocks of DNA, spontaneously decay (even in the absence of bacteria or degrading agents). The spontaneous decay of DNA is very slow by most standards - if kept under the proper conditions a DNA molecule can last for millennia. However, this spontaneous decay is a great deal faster than the exchange of carbon and silicon, especially when you consider that the carbon and silicon must exchange over the surface area of the sample (for example a bone several inches thick fossilizes very slowly from the outside in,) while the DNA is decaying continuously in the marrow. So, for a fossil millions of years old, even if you managed to recover something that looked like a nucleic acid base, it would be decayed to the point that the information content is completely gone.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
It may provide tantalising evidence that powered flight evolved twice.
As I recall, powered flight has evolved independantly a number of times.
Insects
Birds
Pterosaurs
Bats
and if I not mistaken, fruit bats evolved flight separately to insect-eating "true" bats. That's at least four if not five times.
I am a Statistician. One false move and you are a Statistic
I don't know if Hummingbird can be categorized as a different model of flight but:
0 5/hummingbird.htm
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2005/Jun
They can hover, fly backwards/forwards, or even upsidedown.
Either that, or evidence that the theory of evolution is falling apart at the seams.
I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. Traits that are similar to each other are known to have evolved many times during biological evolution. Like powered flight.
In mammals and reptiles
Passive flight
a. Gliding
b. Parachuting;
Soaring
Powered flight
Bugs
The first animals to take to the air under control.
Carboniferous
The only flying creatures that evolved flapping flight without sacrificing limbs to form the wings.
Parachuting can evolve in animals with rather low metabolic rates.
It does not require the high metabolic rate of birds and bats, which have powered flight.
Late Permian reptile Coelurosauravus
Bones jointed for folding
No gliding lepidosaur is known from the fossil record after the Triassic, so the living lizard Draco which also uses elongated ribs to support an airfoil, must represent yet another independent evolution of gliding
I'm about 100% sure that the idea that Dinosaurs are reptiles was refuted ages ago. 'Terrible Lizard' being a misnomer and all that jazz. I mean... in an artical about the fact that we need to rethink the classification of various animals, you'd think they could at least get the current status quo right.
That article is horrible, and the posting is also not so good. Here's a link to the press release from the Field Museum in Chicago, where one of the co-authors of the Nature article works:s _sinovenator.htm
o ct13,0,1942769.story?coll=ny-leadhealthnews-headli nes
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/museum_info/press/pres
And here's a link to a non-subscription site that's carrying the Chicago Tribune's article, which a lot of outlets seem to be carrying because it compares the dinosaur to Sesame Street's Big Bird:
http://www.newsday.com/news/health/chi-0510130118
Both articles said that buitreraptor probably could not fly.
One massive problem with the theory of birds evolving from dinosaurs is the date for birds keeps going backward and very early feathered reptiles have been found. The solution seems obvious. Birds, Mammals and dinosaurs evolved at roughly the same time. The mammals of the time were more reptile like but so were the birds. If birds came from dinosaurs birds should have evolved at the end of the Cretaceous not at the begining of the Triassic as the earliest bird accestors seem to show up. The similarities appear to be more from a common ancestor and parallel development.
The world is round.
Historical evidence shows that most people have known the world is round for thousands of years. That everyone thought it was 'flat' until Columbus is a combination of promotion by himself and the Spanish royal family who sponsored him and the Roman Catholic church. In fact the route taken by Columbus was not the most obvious one. Its more like the route that would be taken by someone who *knows* there's a large landmass in the north Atlantic and wants to go under it to go around to the far east. Northern Europeans had been sailing the north Atlantic all the way to Canada for hundreds of years by then.
Flamebait?!? Informative?!? Correcting my definition of "Theory"?!? Wow. I am astonished. OK, I know 99% of you got it, but for that "special" 1%, umm, it's a joke. Laugh. If you can't laugh at Intelligent Falling, you're taking it waaaaaay too seriously.
And if you're actually serious about the flamebait mod, and you're now thinking, "but it is serious, ID as scientific theory is a serious subject," you're wrong. It is not a scientific theory. I'm not saying it isn't true(*) so don't get your panties in a bunch. I'm just saying it is not science. Science is the search for natural explanations to non-intuitive phenomena. Scientific theories make predictions that are disprovable(**). ID is a supernatural explanation to a non-intuitive phenomena which does not make predictions and is not disprovable. As such, ID is philosophy of religion, or mysticism, or faith, or whatever term you feel is appropriate for the study of supernatural explanations to non-intuitive phenomena. Not a better field, not a worse field, not more true, not less true, just a different field of study than science.
So get over it. Laugh. Or are you afraid that the shared behaviour of laughing will betray your common ancestry with the great apes? Yes, ferchrissakes, that's a joke too.
Sorry about the "ferchrissakes" thing - I didn't mean to blaspheme. The editors of that paragraph have been sacked.
* Typically supernatural explanations are inherently not disprovable, and this is the case with ID. Any scientist worth his salt will not say that something is false if it can't be disproven. Listen closely next time, you'll not hear a serious scientist say "ID is not true." The scientists aren't trying to kill God, they're just working in a different field than philosophy of religion.
** For a great example of hardcore science-like research that is not science, check out game theory. It is a fascinating area of economic research, but since it can only be used to analyze and not predict, it is not science. There's a very good article on the topic here.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
One argument against evolution that I have is you don't see all these half developed fossils being dug up. For example, you'd expect to see animals with 1 arm, 2 arms, 3 arms, 10 arms, no arms, half an arm, round arms, and so on for every part of the body while evolution is fine tuning this stuff. As far as I know, this isn't the case.
;)
Well, you know what - organisms just don't develop that way. Evolution isn't about randomly growing an extra arm on your side and waiting for it to evolve into something useful. No, evolution always builds on something that is already a functional part of a functional entity. So when the basic tetrapod (four-legged) 'model' evolved, it got fine-tuned during the evolution of the basal tetrapod's descendants: the legs of an elephant are different from those of a newt. Evolution also does not plan anything ahead. It only happens here and now. The direction is decided by current conditions, which create a certain kind of selective pressure.
To finish with a funny fact: some early tetrapods like Ichthyostega actually had seven or eight digits on their feet!
Theories aren't overturned by "I don't like that theory, give me another". They're overturned only by alternate theories.
theories can be overturned in two ways: By theories that describe the (experimental) data better, or by (new) data that contradicts the theory.
sheesh link an article that explains cool flow visualization techniques, on an interesting subject, and draws interesting conclusions...
But not a single picture. So I did my own digging. Here's one. And another.
4 times at least as there are two unrelated families of bats - fruitbats (tend to be larger/ no sonar etc and the other ones) Both these families of flying mammals evolved separately
IIRC
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Text from the link:
"The mayflies are an order (Ephemeroptera meaning "but for a day wing") of insects that grow up in fresh water, and live very briefly as adults, as little as a few hours but more typically a day or two. About 2,500 species in 23 families are known. Other names for these insects include dayfly, shadfly, fishfly, and Canadian soldier."
From Wikipedia.
- passion
Better question: What the heck is a dinosaur? I can't find a mention of them anywhere in my Bible.
Better check again.