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."

Comments

Re:Insect

[M. Baranczak]

#3: bats

Re:No you can't recover the DNA

[Naelphin]

The problem with this is that Jurassic Park didn't get its DNA from bone marrow, but from insects trapped in Amber.

I'm not sure how much that changes things, but just pointing out that in the book they do not get it from bones!

Re:Flight Evolved Twice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Squirrels

Why not?

[node 3]

What you've said implies that it's not impossible, just really, really difficult, and extremely unlikely, but you haven't made the case that it's "not possible".

They've found fossils with traces of blood, skin, flesh and feathers.

In terms of half-life, there's got to be some "dino-dna" around somewhere right now. At least, given a large enough mass of extant dinosaur remains.

The real question is just how much raw dino-mass it will take before any usable DNA can be expected to be found. Perhaps it would take many times more mass than that of every dinosaur that ever lived, but perhaps it's small enough that it's probable that in some museum somewhere is a realistically findable and usable strand of DNA.

I most certainly do not know the answer to that, but I'm not convinced you do either, and I suspect are just promoting as fact something that is more a belief on your part without any serious calculation to back it up.

Re:Either that or....

[mcc]

However, scientists do not have all the answers yet. A widely debated example is how the eyeball evolved.

Actually, scientists have a number of feasible explanations of how the eyeball might have evolved; the first hypothetical suggestion of how eye evolution could work was actually offered by Charles Darwin in 1872. This page references several detailed analyses of the subject from 1994; poking on google before I got that link I found a page with couple references to more papers published in 1997, but then lost it. Perhaps you could look for it yourself if you are curious.

The only "controversy" on the subject of the evolution of the eye is that which creationists have attempted to manufacture. Do you have specific problems with any of the published research on this subject since 1994? If not, then what is the problem, exactly?

Or perhaps what you mean by "controversy" is that scientists are still researching the specifics of the mechanisms by which the eye might have evolved, and thus we have multiple papers on the subject? If so, I think you are mischaracterizing as "controversy" what scientists would call "discussion".

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.

Why on earth would you expect this? Perhaps you just have strange expectations.

And last I checked, the arthropod phylum even today offers a wide variation among its members in number of legs. If you are interested in the evolutionary paths that lead to a specific number of limbs, perhaps the phylogeny of the arthropods would be a good place to start looking?

One thing I can say with certainty is to keep an open mind. Evolutionary fanatics clinging to this one theory need to realize how history repeats itself. Our beliefs can and have been turned on their head surprisingly in the past. The world is round.

So let us say someone comes in and says that we should, with certainty, keep an open mind about the idea that maybe the earth is flat after all. "Round earth" fanatics clinging to the theory that the earth is sort of roundish need to realize how history repeats itself; our beliefs can and have been turned on their head surprisingly in the past. Yes, of course all available, non-discredited data and theory we have with which to explain the world around us suggests the earth is a slightly lumpy sphere. But maybe we've just fundamentally misunderstood things about the shape of the earth; there could be possibilities we haven't considered yet.

Do we bother to give this person the time of day?

Or do we just say, screw that, we're going to stay with the round earth theory-- as well as the theory of evolution-- because it explains all the data we have, and no competing theories for that data exist.

Saying "maybe your theory is wrong" is effectively meaningless to someone working in the field of science unless you can immediately answer the question "then what is right?". Theories aren't overturned by "I don't like that theory, give me another". They're overturned only by alternate theories. And no, half a post on slashdot about how maybe space is a looping 3-manifold, and the space photos showing a round earth are an elaborate optical illusion, and we can figure out the details of why this is some other time, don't mean you have an alternate theory. If you cannot form your ideas in terms of falsifiable, rigorously defined models with predictive power, you do not have anything scientists can do anything with.

P.S.: If IHBT then my hat goes off to you.

Re:Lets just go to the basics

[meringuoid]

proove

I never understood this. OK, creationists are by definition not especially bright, but why do they consistently misspell 'prove', and always in the same way?

Perhaps there is some classic, standard work of creationist material that they all memorise and regurgitate as required, and which contains this error of spelling? Has this small mutation of the language propagated itself in this isolated and self-contained colony, and are we seeing a case of linguistic speciation here?

No Kidding. Evolution isn't a line slanting upward

[ianscot]

There's nothing surprising about a trait evolving many different times. The idea that organisms are moving from a more primitive state toward something more advanced is basically all there is to the idea that flight should only have evolved once.

Knowing that things have branched more than once for a given trait isn't just interesting for paleontologists, either. For example, the group of flat worms that include modern tapeworms has evolved parasitism several different times over its history. Knowing that it didn't just happen once lets us find close living relations of tapeworms that aren't parasitic -- so we can develop treatments for tapeworms much more easily, because a lab doesn't need to deal with test worms that are paired with host animals. Viola, better medicines against tapeworms.

It's intuitive to think flight is somehow special because it places extreme physiological demands on the animals that use it, but it's just like any other evolutionary trait. Life is fertile, time is deep. That dinosaurs would maybe develop the trait twice isn't astonishing at all. They were around for a long time, and they maybe had some basic traits (bones with the potential for bird-like light internal structure or something) that made it more likely.

Re:Superman

[kcarlin]

didn't evolve on this planet

So if flight evolves separately on another planet it doesn't count?

Typical terracentric rubbish!

Re:That begs the question ....

[UserGoogol]

Words can have multiple meanings and language evolves. A slippery slope can refer to a logical fallacy where you assume that a small change will inevitably lead to a big change, but it also can mean an inclined surface with an unusually small amount of friction.

Similarly, begging the question can mean implicitly assuming the conclusion to an argument, but it can also mean to urgently request that a question be asked.

Re:Disappointing

[Anonymous Coward]

Then Bash.org came around.