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."

Comments

Given this new information, is it possible...

[JavaNPerl]

that early birds did not catch the worm?

Re:ID

[ajdlinux]

And then what's the probability of the proteins combining to form a lifeform. Then what's the probability that it will mutate. And over billions of years we get humans. I have whole books that say why evolution is false. I have evidence from my science teacher, who has a degree etc., that it is false. Now, of course I'm guessing you all believe the big bang theory too. So why do we have colliding galaxies?

Is this really news?

[b4k3d b34nz]

I'm not quite sure that this article is really all that informative or new. I thought it was pretty much commonly accepted that the Archaeopteryx was a bird. Forgive me for not believing in evolution (which I guess is why this article was posted), but it seems like it was a bird that existed a long time ago, and then died.

The conclusion of the article is that the archaeopteryx is the ancestor of modern birds. Can someone reasonably explain why the archaeopteryx and modern birds couldn't have just existed at the same time, except the archaeopteryx went extinct?