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

Obviously

[Eightyford]

Obviously God is testing our faith.

Old

[Golias]

Wow. Talk about old news. This happened millions of years ago!

Damn, slashdot is behind these days.

Missing Brink

[saskboy]

While this "bird dinosaur" may appear to be a sort of "missing link" in the evolution of pre-bird species into birds, this in no way indicates that "evolution" exists. It simply shows that God Intelligently Designed dinosaurs to perform foot donation transplants to now extinct bird species. The birds' incescent preening of their natural feet, drove them to the brink of vanity and demanded the more robust dino feet be transplanted. The species is now extinct because vanity is a sin.

-/OK I had a hard time keeping a straight face while typing that, how do ID supporters manage to lay that BS on the rest of us without cracking up?

Re:ID

[AuMatar]

There's a fossil gap between you and your parents. No matter how hard I looked, I could not find the "missing link" between you. Therefor, they are not really your parents. You must have come about by spontaneous generation.

Quote

[zaguar]

I forgot who said it, but there is a quote that runs somewhat like this.

"ID supporters say that there is a gap between *species A* and *species B*. But once a species between A and B is found, ID supporters say now there are 2 gaps"

Re: Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[Black Parrot]

> Come on, this doesn't prove anything at all. Until we can find fossils for every single stage between this and modern birds, you clearly can't prove anything, and there are still holes.

FYI, science isn't in the business of proving stuff. It's in the business of explaining stuff. And birds as descendants of dinosaurs is the best explanation on the table right now.

> Modern birds could have still popped up independently, intelligently designed and perfect.

Yes, but invoking magic as an explanation is useless, because it's compatible with anything you can imagine. Even stuff you can't imagine, for that matter! It has absolutely no value as an explanation for anything.