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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."
Don't we already have two different types of powered flights? Birds, and Insects?
geek page at KY speaks
This might explain why emus are only found in Australia, which became separated from Gondwana.
End transmission.
We just need to accept that they aren't "terrible lizards" but "terror birds," and change the name from dinosaurs to dinoaves. The name has already been changed from 'dragons', so I think we can manage this.
Which came first, the chicken or the dromeaosaur?
And flight has three other instances, if you don't count flying squirrels and gliding snakes: both major kinds of bats, and the monotreme ptero"saurs" - they were warm-blooded furry and laid eggs. That is a monotreme, like the spiny echidna and duck-bill platypus.
Any ideas what THIS dinosaur is?
You have got to see the size of this thing, possibly hundreds of feet long, and it might have wings as well, or fins and was a sea creature. They dont know how to classify it.
See: http://www.farshores.org/a05verte.htm
Well, they did have feathers
good post.
And you don't even need to find a single strand of dna... lots of pieces will do. It just takes computing power to calculate the original un-broken strand, and then work in the lab to recreate (I'm not saying it's easy).
Example: you can probably guess what these three dna strands came from:
- srethinkoffl
- offlightsevolution
- dinosaurfor
- urforcesrethin
- sevolut
Well, I didn't do the calculations myself:
n re=article&eissn=1471-2954&volume=272&issue=1558&s page=3
"However, kinetic calculations predict that
small fragments of DNA (100-500 bp) will survive for no
more than 10 kyr in temperate regions and for a maximum
of 100 kyr at colder latitudes owing to hydrolytic damage
(Poinar et al. 1996; Smith et al. 2001). Even under ideal
conditions, amplifiable DNA is not thought to survive for
longer than 1 Myr." - see reference below
As to your proposal, if I make enough random DNA out of monomers, eventually one of those artificial chains will form a complete dinosaur chromosome. How, exactly, do you propose that I identify this perfect chromosome from among the population in my (absolutely enormous) sample?
Reference:
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/openurl.asp?ge
For what you *can* do with fossil DNA, read this:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/39/13783
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I'll field this one guys...
Proponents of evolution believe in evolution because it is extremely well supported by evidence. Until some other scientific theory (as in testable, falsifiable, non-philosophy) comes around and supplants it, I don't see this changing.
The fossil record is full of bizarre creatures of practically every shape and size.
Transitional fossils happen to be more rare than other fossils. For every creature partway between species, there lived millions of creatures with a relatively stable gene pool. If you visit a junkyard, do you expect to see tons of prototypes mixed in with the regular cars? Note that this analogy is not intended to illustrate the process of evolution (as cars have intelligent designers), but the relative numbers of stable and transitional entities.
As for the eye, it's a perfect example of something that could have evolved. Did you know that the light receptors in the retina are behind the nerves that carry the message to the brain? The hole in the retina through which that nerve bundle passes creates a blind spot in human vision (and the vision of other mammals). Why would an intelligent designer build such a poorly-conceived device? Note that there is a species of cephalopod (cuttlefish I think) that has eyes built with the nerves/photoreceptors reversed, so it's obvious that eyes built this way function.
Fossilization occurs when carbon atoms are exchanged for silicon.
.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.
Well, of course they didn't use a fossil in Jurassic Park, they used a mummy. Even the Wikipedia article makes this confusion. Old and/or preserved does not mean fossil. Fossil is as you have stated, the replacement of the original tissues by a mineral (say, calcium carbonate or anything else capable of forming sedimentary rock. You don't often find large quantities of silicon in solution. Lots and lots of carbon though, as well as the carbon in the original tissues. Marble, for instance, is more than half CaO, less than 2% SiO2. Why do you think the carbon atoms get replaced by other minerals? What do you think coal is?).
Fossils are a casting. Mummies are the remains of the actual thing. A corpse.
. .
Jurassic Park didn't assume the information in the DNA was intact, although of course it didn't assume it was completely gone either. They spliced the recovered bits together with bits scavanged from frogs (amphibians, go figure), so, in fact, the dinosaurs in Jurassic park were simulated dinosaurs.
The result was still good enough to eat a lawyer, which makes them close enough in my book.
But yeah, the idea is a bit goofy for lots of reasons, just as the idea of Jurassic Park's literary predicessor was a bit goofy. Maybe even Abby Normal.
KFG
Insects tend to evolve much faster then most other multi-cell animal. They Live short and reproduce a lot. Lets take the common house fly who has an average life span is 3 days. So in the course of our life a common house fly family has evolved the equivalent of a half a million years compared to humans. That is why insects are used by Biologists to study evolution, They have short life cycles and we can study effects over time is a short period. So it is not surprising that Insects have walked on earth, flew on earth much earlier then vertebrates. I am sure some people are going to say well if Bugs evolve so much faster then us why aren't they smarter then us? Well it is an issue of survival that effects evolution, because bugs can reproduce so rapidly and have many offspring, their genetic structure will say from generation to generation in spite of low intelligence and being on the bottom of the food chain, so the need for intelligence never gave them much of an edge. While for humans on the other hand who reproduce slowly and have small number of offspring usually 5 is the limit before major health problems insure. In order for us to survive the person who was smarter or more creative tend to live longer then the person who wasn't, concept like Well I can out-run the Jaguar, I don't have claws and teeth like the Jaguar, So I might as well get this big stick with a pointy tip on it and use it as a claw and teeth to kill it from a better distance. V.S. someone who is a little more dense and is like "Ill fight the Jaguar to the death using my bare hands", with 13-16 years before you can reproduce you have plenty of time to be in a life threatening situation to see if you are able to survive the situation. Being more less evolved is an old 19th century concept. We now realize that we evolve at different rates but there is no more or less evolved it is just how well we are evolved for the environment.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Houseflies live for about a month, not 3 days.
There is an organism that does live only three days, but I do not recall which one it is. I think it is a mosquito of some variety.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
If you did that, you'd find the random DNA that happened to be most similar to current living things. There's no reason to think it would be similar to dinosaur DNA.
The DNA in the dinosaur bone (or mosquito), if there is any, is now essentially random - it contains no information content.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Interestingly, the word 'dragon' is used a number of times in the Old Testament. In most instances, the word dinosaur could substitute for dragon and it would fit very nicely. Dinosaurs were called dragons before the word dinosaur was invented in the 1800s. We would not expect to find the word dinosaur in Bibles like the Authorized Version (1611), as it was translated well before the word dinosaur was ever used.
Also, there are many very old history books in various libraries around the world that have detailed records of dragons and their encounters with people. Such as that of English King Morvidus. Surprisingly, many of these descriptions of dragons fit with how modern scientists would describe dinosaurs, even Tyrannosaurus.
Get a free ipod.
Try finding descriptions that fit "how modern scientists would describe dinosaurs" in places other than Creationist sites. Provide links, then watch how someone familiar with dinosaur taxonomy shreds the supposed support for (echo)"Dinosaurs Amongst Men"(/echo).