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4-Winged Proto-Bird Unearthed In China; Predates Archaeopteryx
Wired reports on a find described September 24 in a note at Nature and the day after at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology: a dinosaur fossil bearing true feathers on four limbs. The fossil was discovered in northeastern China, in strata believed to have been deposited between 151 million and 161 million years ago. If that estimate is correct, the newly discovered Anchiornis huxleyi is at least one million years older than the believed age of the more famous winged dinosaur Archaeopteryx.
8-Winged Meta-Bird?
riverrun, past Eve and Adamâ(TM)s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recircul
like a year ago on Nova.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/microraptor/program.html
And from the documentary, it was obvious that the discovery had been made some time prior to the making of the show.
So this is old news. I guess dinosaur news travels slowly.
*Yawn* wake me when they find a Yeti....
so i guess two wings didn't do the job of flight for this proto birds
It could also be a dead end in development.
Sometimes evolutionary traits come up early then the creature dies out only to be "re-evolved" later.
There sometimes seems to be a misunderstanding in evolution. Concepts the strongest survives, or evolution will only get better and better. Doesn't always fall true. One minor disadvantage could kill you out, allowing the weak creature to exist and thrive without your presence. Or even good traits that get killed off only to come back again.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"I am a dinosouar"
And I've got the primative writing skills to prove it!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I also remember watching that document and was fascinated. However, a few wordings from TFA are interesting.
In fact it does refer to the microraptor (which parent's link is about). "A similar configuration has been seen in other feathered dinosaurs, including Microraptor* (SN: 1/27/07, p. 53) and Archaeopteryx (SN: 9/23/06, p. 197)." So they know it is similar to earlier findings.
"...is the oldest known to have sported feathers and is estimated to be between 1 million and 11 million years older than Archaeopteryx, the first known bird..."
So they have found yet another feathered, four winged dinosaur. All such findings help us understand more of them. In addition, this one appears to be older than the previous findings which again gives us a bit better image of what happened and when. I'm interested to see how this thing is different from microraptor. So they seem to have made findings that are nothing revolutionary but give us again a bit better image of what has happened, how and when. Probably some news sources misinterpreted that to mean much more than it does
(*: Should not be confused with mircoraptor, which is a type of predator mostly residing in IRC chatrooms and preying on teenagers)
who are you? that kid from Jurassic Park who keeps asking about "that other guy's" book?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Grandparent was correct. That's the ancient spelling.
Kind Regards,
Cthulhu.
You know the rule; if it tastes like chicken it probably isn't.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
"Fuck it, we're going to five wings."
Anyone find it a little amusing that a species found in a totalitarian country is given the specific name huxleyi?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
did you ever think why these so-called missing links are dead and buried in the ground? god killed them, that's why. doesn't that teach you anything? THEY AREN'T HERE ANYMORE. don't you wonder why that is and why you shouldn't dig this stuff up? god killed them fair and square. who gives you the right to mess around with god's intention?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not that this is really relevant, but if the margin of error was about 5 million years, how are they confident to say that it was 1 million year older?
Where are all the transitional species?
This is an old, tired anti-evolutionary argument. The answer is that every single fossil we find is a transitional species. Unfortunately fossilization is an incredibly unlikely event, and a fossil surviving for tens of millions of years and then happening to be uncovered even more incredibly unlikely, so the fossil record simply doesn't contain every species that ever existed. We may never find the real ancestor of all modern birds, just cousins of it like Archaeopteryx. So what? The fact that birds evolved from dinosaurs is irrefutable.
The problem is the date for feathers keeps getting pushed back and there have even been early lizards found with what appear to be feathers.
I assume you're referring to Longisquama. There is good reason to doubt that those structures were even real, let alone feathers.
One massive gap is if birds evolved from dinosaurs where are all the tree dwelling dinos?
What are you talking about? First, the division between "bird" and "dinosaur" is entirely arbitrary. Birds, in a very real sense, ARE dinosaurs. We just draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say the things on one side are dinosaurs and the things on the other side are birds, but there's no hard and fast reason to draw the line at any particular spot. Archaeopteryx really doesn't look all that different from the raptors that came before it, and still has a very dinosaur-like head and no beak. Is it a bird?
Early birds were likely ground dwellers, just like the raptors they evolved from. We don't know precisely when tree-dwelling evolved, because we don't have enough fossils to be able to tell. I fail to see how this is a "massive gap"; it's a minor question at best.
Odds are birds branched off very early on and were a separate line of evolution so saying birds evolved from dinosaurs is kind of like saying we evolved from chimpanzee.s
Nonsense. Saying birds evolved from Archaeopteryx would be like saying we evolved from chimps -- not all that far wrong, but wrong. Saying birds evolved from dinosaurs is like saying we evolved from primates. Dinosaurs are a very, very big group, and there is absolutely no doubt that birds evolved from them.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
The really depressing thing is the article comments. It seems the Creationists found out about the article, and are pinging the bejeezus out of it in the comments.
My personal favorite bit of ignorance starts like this:
am nor a scientist or even an academic of any kind but as I understand it and please tell me if I am wrong but for a Theory to become fact it has to ...
*raaaaaaaaz*! Thanks for playing.
Loving Troll Father, we thank you for this cornucopia of naivete,
And for all your blessings of the easily duped to us.
Lord Troll Jesus, come and be our guest,
And take your place at this trollish table of bounty.
Holy Troll Spirit, as the trolled fool feeds our trollish pride,
So we pray you would nourish our trollish souls. Amen.
so beeth the prayer of the troll upon a successful catch
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You miss the poster's point. He isn't saying that evolution didn't happen. He is positing that he believes the divergence happened WAY sooner than what the 'consensus' claims. He believes that having feathers and not having feathers is a large enough evolutionary gap, and we have enough fossils from the currently believed deliverance period, that if the time line were correct, we would see a lot of intermediary fossils.
To poster isn't saying that birds didn't evolve from dinosaurs. He is saying that he believes that by just saying 'evolved from dinosaurs' implies that it happened towards the middle or end of their existence as opposed to the beginning. This leads to many people making a perfectly reasonable but incorrect conclusion as to when it happened, while adding nothing to those that correctly understand the statement. Since, if the divergence happened as early as the poster believes, basically all complex animals evolved from 'dinosours'. Since the statement adds nothing for those who are not confused by it, but gives the wrong conclusion to people who are confused by it, from a pragmatic standpoint, it is wrong.
Of course, it being right or wrong depends on when birds actually first appeared. I'm not arguing that. I'm just pointing out that you are misunderstanding the parent poster.
Archaeopteryx really doesn't look all that different from the raptors that came before it, and still has a very dinosaur-like head and no beak. Is it a bird?
Back in the 1970s, when (Yale professor) John Ostrom was reviving the old debate over the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, he brought up a funny and informative piece of evidence: He pointed out that we actually had more Archaeopterix fossils than we thought. There were found in museums in Europe, classified as small dinosaurs.
He suggested that we not treat this as a misclassification at all, but rather as a tacit acknowledgement that those fossils were primitive birds and dinosaurs.
He also said that we need more such fossils, but I suppose everyone agreed with that. The basic problem here is that birds just don't fossilize very well.
I saw an example of this a few years ago. Due to my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have long had pet birds, mostly small parrots. Several of our cockatiels (and one friends') have been buried in a small raised strawberry/flower bed in the backyard. One spring, I decided to dig it up and sift out the rocks and roots of some large weeds (e.g., creeping bellflowers). I used a screen that was easily capable of separating out objects the size of their largest bones (skull, breastbone, etc). I found lots of small pebbles and roots, but no bones at all. In only a few years, their bones and beaks had been completely reduced to topsoil.
We lost two more of our small feathered friends last winter, both older than the 15 years they are expected to live, and they're buried in the center of the same bed. In a year or two, they'll be part of the soil, leaving behind no fossil evidence that they ever existed.
It takes some special, rare conditions for a bird to be turned into a fossil. Their adaptations for flight include very light, hollow bones. It's no mystery at all why the fossil record is so sparse.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
... in beijing 10 ... archaeological site... fossilized remains proving that China was actually the birthplace of the human race.
Actually, with only a small amount of rephrasing, that's not much in conflict with one of the two competing theories of human development. One is the "Out of Africa" theory, that Africa has always been the center of human development, with people and their genes moving out of Africa, but rarely the other direction. The other is the "multi-center" theory, that people spread from Africa originally, but the slow flow of people and genes was essentially random, with a low level mixing in all directions.
There isn't any conclusive evidence. But everything that's known about humans at any stage is that most groups have always produced travellers, and travel along the coasts of the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean goes back as far as we can collect evidence of humans. Sailors have always been pretty good at gene mixing.
So most of the votes are with the "multi-center" theory. This would mean that there hasn't been a true center of humanity for at least tens of thousands of years, and maybe hundreds of thousands. Under this theory, each human gene variant has an origin, and our species is the sum of all these variants, each of which spread from wherever it first appeared. The oldest human settlements in the plains of eastern China would easily qualify as one "birthplace" of our species, along with the other centers in Africa and Europe.
The evidence about the Americas is much weaker. There seem to have been several major influxes of people through Alaska some 11,000 to 13,000 years ago. Knowing how humans build and use boats, it's unlikely that that was all the migration, and there were probably occasional travellers going both directions all the time, but we essentially have no specific evidence of it, only a few interesting "funny" remains. So the Americas may have been an outlier that provided little or no gene input to the rest of humanity before 500 years ago; we don't know.
But it is fairly well accepted that humans evolved first in Africa, spread out, formed a number of population centers, and have been mixing and exchanging genetic material ever since. So every major population center that existed, say, 50,000 years ago should be considered a "birthplace" of our species, in the sense that some useful genetic variation developed there and spread in the usual ways.
The only problem with the Chinese claim is that the word "the" in "the birthplace of the human race" implies uniqueness. China can't have been the only origin of humanity, though they are almost certainly an important "one of many" origins.
To get back on topic, China (especially Liáoníng) is also the origin of most of the avian fossils that we now have. There have been other important avian fossils in South America, and a few elsewhere.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.