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Earliest Bird Had Feet Like Dinosaur
aychamo writes "A 150-million-year-old fossil of Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, may put to rest any scientific doubt that theropods gave rise to modern birds. From the article: '[A new fossil] presents important new details of the skull morphology [shape and function] of the earliest known bird, showing also that the skull of Archaeopteryx is much more similar to that of nonavian theropod dinosaurs than previously thought.' In the new fossil, the foot looks more like that of the four-toed foot of Velociraptor and its other nonwinged theropod relatives. The specimen also clearly lacks a reversed toe. Because Archaeopteryx lacked this stabilizing toe, it almost certainly did not habitually perch in trees. This leads scientists to believe that it was a land based predator."
please don't call ID a scientific theory, since it meets none of the criteria. It is not accepted by anyone except fundamentalists. Really, even the catholic church agrees that ID is not science, and that evolution happens. It must be difficult to be that backwards.
Here's a brief technical look at the theory by the University of California - Berkeley's
Museum of Paleontology : http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/avians.html
Of interest are twenty proposed characteristics "the first birds shared [...] with
many coelurosaurian dinosaurs." Take a look and see what you think.
-Shawn
You see, a theory is created by observing natural phenomena and evidence, forming a hypothesis as to why it happens or acts that way, testing it, then letting the scientific community corroborate your tests, and continue testing whenever new evidence comes along to refine or disprove it.
On the other hand, ID was created by replacing the word 'god' with the term 'intelligent designer'
Evolution has a great deal of evidence supporting it, from fossil records, to DNA similarities in similar species, to the fact that farmers or scientists can selectively breed plants, fruit flies, or anything with a short period between generations to selectively breed certain traits.
On the other hand, creationism has a series of books that are thousands of years old, and some rhetoric about fossil records being put there to trick us.
perhaps you'd like to take a look at the wikipedia pages on scientific theory or scientific method to find out what a theory actually consists of.
What it is saying is that the archeopterix has features that are VERY similar to a dinosaur's, yet very similar to a bird as well. Therefore this is the ever-so-elusive "transitional species" that creationists have been asking for (others exist, but this is one that they would almost always point to). Though it was already essentially proven that this was indeed a transitional species, this provides even MORE evidence and is therefore the proverbial "icing on the cake."
To answer your question about birds and archaeopteryxes (spelling?) coexisting, I would ask you the following: how come we haven't found ANY fossils of modern birds? If they were to have coexisted, there should be SOME fossils of modern birds that could be dated to that period. All modern birds, however, have been found to be from more recent times and, as time goes on, their features depart linearly from that of the archaeopteryx. So, while it may be possible that they existed at the same time, such a situation would mean that ALL of the scientific evidence that we currently have would be wrong and that the pattern of developement would be a total coincidence. That, quite frankly, I have a hard time believing.
Also, note that IANAB (I am not a biologist). Please correct me if I have facts incorrect.
Ride the skies