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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."
"small dinosaur with a long, slender snout and wing-like limbs"
... who said pigs couldn't fly?
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Don't we already have two different types of powered flights? Birds, and Insects?
geek page at KY speaks
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.
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.
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 hate to break it to you, but IRC commands don't work on Slashdot.
It's just God messing with our heads.
Didn't you read that bit in the bible? In Genesis? In that footnote 4 or 5 pages in?
"And the Lord brought forth the remains of many, many varied animals and plants, different to what existed on the newly-fashioned earth. And lo, He crafted a fossil record that suggested they did indeed exist far in the past, and planted it so that men of Science, with their need to understand with Hard Facts and Reason and Logic, would have something to explain the Creation with. For the Lord looks after all His children, even those of little Faith."
It's all in there people. You just have to read and interpret it a little bit.
And change a few words here and there. And possibly fragment and rearrage sections. But it's all in there.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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
No, fool, he was trying to save time and effort by typing "/me" instead of "I".
"...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.
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Evolution is nothing but a theory, just as is gravity. Theory means "not true". The real basis for flight is God's divine will expressed through specific cases where He suspends Intelligent Falling. Flight is one of the most clear examples that proves Intelligent Falling, and that the "theory" of gravity is just bunk foisted on us by a bunch of scientists who want to destroy God.
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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.
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".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?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.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
Not at all. Birds, capable of real powered flight, are known from lower Cretaceous already (even upper Jurassic, if you count Archaeopteryx, which might infact come from a relic island population). Check out what has been found and is still being found from Liaoning, China. I study vertebrate paleontology and I'm not aware of any earlier bird-like creatures than middle or upper Jurassic. Can you give a reference? Longisquama might have had feathers (many paleontologists don't agree), but otherwise it's not very bird-like. Feathers might even have been a trait that many reptiles of certain kind had in those times.
The evidence for birds evolving from dinosaurs (and actually being dinosaurs) is nowadays overwhelming. The anatomical similarities between birds and maniraptoran dinosaurs are as obvious as those of apes and humans. Genera like Buitreraptor (a dromaeosaur) are actually very strong candidates of being secondarily flightless creatures (meaning, their ancestors had the ability to fly but reverted to flightlessness). Also, this new find also makes it clear that an earlier find, Rahonavis from Madagascar, is actually a dromaeosaur, and Rahonavis is generally considered having been capable of flight. Thus, we have a flying dromaeosaur! These are fantastic finds, and our picture of the evolution of birds becomes clearer by every one of them. And it is a very controversial field of study, we are probably still in for quite many suprises in near future. But that's what makes all of this so interesting.
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.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.