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

Insect

[doubtless]

Don't we already have two different types of powered flights? Birds, and Insects?

Dinoaves

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mega-size fossil found in Iran

[lawpoop]

OK, now I'm starting to think this is a hoax -- he says on the site:

"...But is it a dinosaur? Despite my limited knowledge in that area of inquiry, it seems unlikely, for a variety of reasons - but primarily, the condition of the bones suggests a fossil much younger than the Cretaceous Era. It is, based on my understanding of human skeletal remains, possibly even contemporaneous with humans, or at any rate, early hominids. And yet, that is impossible. Unfortunately, proper carbon dating will have to wait - the local government is notoriously shy about allowing any historical or archaeological material out of country for any reason. "

Okay, let's review.

• He's an archaeologist, not a paleontologist. He is comfortable guesstimating what period the bones are from by their condition, yet he doesn't mention the rock strata he found them in. Early hominid fossils do exist, but mostly what archaeologists deal with are unfossilized remains. I'd be surprised by an archaeologist who felt comfortable judging a fossils' age by its condition -- I think you would need a lot of experience with fossils in the ground to do that, and I doubt this guy has much experience with hominid fossils -- they are only found in the rift valley in Africa, and he's in Iran
• You can't carbon date rocks. He has to be smocking crack, or *very* inexperienced with fossils.

Either this is a hoax, or this guy is totally naive when it comes to fossils. Having a bachelors in anthropology, I can say that option #2 is totally plausible.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Why not?

[sam_handelman]

Well, I didn't do the calculations myself:
"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?gen re=article&eissn=1471-2954&volume=272&issue=1558&s page=3

  For what you *can* do with fossil DNA, read this:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/39/13783

Re:At least four to six

[saider]

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.

Re:That begs the question ....

[Zapdos]

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.