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."

Obviously

[Eightyford]

Obviously God is testing our faith.

Re:Obviously

[JPriest]

I wonder which of the 7 days it was created on.

Re:Obviously

[someone1234]

I agree, God created these funny skeletons much later when he has done with the serious work and thought he might have some fun.

Re:Obviously

[Conanymous Award]

There is also a written record of the creation, where the creator is the Flying Spaghetti Monster [venganza.org]. Now, what makes JHWH the more likely creator? Every time you pull the 'written record' argument, you should be ready to defend your specific mode of creation and creator. I can't see anything special about the judeo-christian creation myth in comparison with the creation myths of other religions. Your faith in this specific creation myth is based on a cultural bias.

There is a record of evolution. It is in our genes. It is beneath our feet. It is everywhere around us in the biosphere.

Re:Obviously

[mpe]

Genesis doesn't cover toe number, reversed toes, or tree perching.

Not to start an arguement or anything, but there is a written record of the creation and none of evolution,

These passages are a very condensed summary (i.e. missing a lot of details) of what happened.
The passage says nothing at all about the how things were done

so I accept intelligent design theory on at least as much evidence AND faith as evolutionist do.

"Intelligent design" is a rehash of some old text which has already been rehashe

President Bush??

[sRev]

Is that you?

Maybe He Is

[quokkapox]

I know you're being facetious, but I think the following idea is important. It's 2005, and religion really needs to catch up with humanity and science. I'm agnostic, but if God existed and wanted to communicate a message to us, wouldn't it make sense to embed any sacred truths in the very fabric of reality?

We're discovering more of them all the time, faster and faster, by studying the properties of the atoms we are made of, the electromagnetic fields that permeate space and time, and the rocks under our f

Re:Maybe He Is

[nysus]

That's the whole point of Neitzshce. We need to be able to stare into the chasm, face it, and overcome it. Life is meaningless. The challenge is to find the meaning.

Re: Maybe He Is

[Black Parrot]

> Life is meaningless. The challenge is to find the meaning.

s/find/create/

Re:Maybe He Is

[TallMatthew]

It's pretty amazing that you would call someone a madman who proposed a philosophy that emphasized reality over mysticism. That's the kind of FUD his writings are often associated with. There's nothing crazy, antisemetic or nihilistic about Nietzsche's work. He died insane; his sister was a Nazi; he posited a world without God and he didn't apologize for it. However, he was a wonderful writer, a brilliant man and had a great sense of humor.

Now only if you could tell us how to deal with the nihlism that

Re:Maybe He Is

[scowling]

Dude. That link you pointed to is full of shit. It misdefines both agnostic and atheist; it's just plain wrong.

Re:Maybe He Is

[Hope Thelps]

The author presumably hasn't formed any belief on whether there are leprechauns because he hasn't finished searching China for them. He also doesn't have a belief either way about the entire pantheon of Greek gods because they might be in the 99% of knowledge he doesn't have and also, hey, they may all be hiding in China. And if asked "do you have a twin sister called Susan Ann Montegue" replies "I don't know, maybe she's been hiding in China all my life!".

Honestly, the depth of intellectual cowardice requi

Re:Maybe He Is

[grolschie]

For instance, you don't have to search the whole of China to prove that a being that is both infinitely merciful and infinitely just doesn't exist. You can prove that it doesn't exist, by definition, just as you can prove that a square-shaped circle does not exist.

When you're ready, I'd like to see this proof that said being does not exist.

Re:Obviously

[Belseth]

No he isn't. Archaeopteryx lived six thousand years ago. I thought you knew that?

Re:Obviously

[Lord Kano]

If you, like me, believe that evolution is the process by which God enacted creation, he's confirming your faith.

LK

Re:Obviously

[Conanymous Award]

Any scientific theory has to conform to the scientific method. It's that simple. And yes, this excludes religious explanations as scientific theories.

view the evidence?

[bobalu]

Good thing there's only one proper way to view the evidence of creation, eh? To say nothing of the life of a charismatic Jewish carpenter who never stopped being Jewish. Any theory that doesn't conform to ancient texts written when men believed in animal sacrifice and the sun revolved around the earth just can't possibly be true, right?

The fact is we can observe evolution. It's a theory like gravity is a theory, and nothing in it says "God" couldn't have arranged it all if that's what you prefer to believe.

Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[TomHandy]

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

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[Anonymous Coward]

I find your lack of faith in science, disturbing.

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[iggymanz]

most dead things won't form fossils, so likely we won't ever see or know every critter that's ever existed.

By modeling?

[bezuwork's friend]

What about if we find a way to sufficiently model the world and evolution.

It's probably like building running robots. At first, they tried to do it using statically-stable positions. However, running forms are dynamically stable without usually being statically-stable if snapshots are taken.

I'd guess that evolution is also dynamically-stable, in a sense. I.e. you cannot try and establish all the known species at a given time and then infer all the unknown ones - there will be niches that just opened

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[iggymanz]

The interesting thing is that DNA does NOT specify or describe entirely a creature, just as a piece of computer software, say Microsoft Office, means nothing without the context of an x86 processor, a BIOS, various peripherals, etc. DNA provides templates for actions within a context of a cellular system, which we do not fully understand yet.

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.

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[TomHandy]

Well, we all know that the FSM was created using the "divine recipe" by the "divine chef", so I think we're still back to square one here.

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[iggymanz]

"A" Flying Spaghetti Monster??????!!!!!!! You polythestic pagan infidel, there is only ONE True Monstrous Saucy Pasta Meatballed Levitator!

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean UFO's landed here in prehistoric times, and they planted chicken on our planet, to help McDonalds feed the human race? How silly!

The article is about birds. Since when are there any real birds in McDonald's chicken?!

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[Heavyporker]

Well, the Dodo was well suited for its environment BEFORE humans came into it. That said, before someone throws up "Well, chickens aren't perfect either, so there!". Dodos were tasty for humans at that time (the islands they lived on were on shipping routes) and sailors would collect huge piles of eggs to eat on their voyages. See what they did? Absolutely no care for long-term survival - the sailors ate BOTH the birds AND the eggs, in massive numbers. No population's going to survive that. I postulate t

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[millennial]

There are wild chickens on the Hawaiian island of Kauai...

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[millennial]

Both. Some were already there, and some were freed from farms during a hurricane about 15 years back.

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[Hannah E. Davis]

Actually, the modern chicken, while far from "perfect", is supremely adapted to its environment, perhaps moreso than most other animals.

Now, before you write me off as a raving lunatic, hear me out. In order for a species to be "well suited for its environment", it needs to be able to live long enough to breed and thus pass on its genes. That's it, that's all. It doesn't need to be able to live well, live long, prosper, or do any of that. It only needs to avoid going extinct. That's it, that's all.

What

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[WalksOnDirt]

The ancestral species for the domestic chicken is the Jungle Fowl, and it still lives.

See: http://www.geocities.com/hs_wong33/RedJungleFowl.h tml [geocities.com]

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[Lord Kano]

I'm not sure I'd call creatures like the Dodo perfect...

Then you must not be a conservationist. The Dodo is perfect for them. It's an example of the evil of humanity. It was a docile, peaceful, flightless bird that was exterminated because of human greed. BTW, I'm not a conservationist but I'm also a realist.

LK

Re:Still Holes in the Fossil Record

[Guido von Guido]

Most creationists wouldn't be satisfied if God personally handed them a DVD of the past billion years of evolution.

For Freaking Sake

[Bullfish]

Do not turn this into a religious fracas. There has been far too much of this nonsense and frankly all it does is make everyone sound like a bunch of hillbillies.

Blame the creationists

[tehanu]

Hey, it's the creationists who want to impose religion into these sort of issues. I and and practically everyone else would dearly love to keep *religion* seperate from *science*. Unfortunately there are *some* people who don't - to the extent of attempting to redefine the word "science" itself to include astrology and tarot card reading*cough*Kansas*cough*.

So, then

[susano_otter]

What did the Earliest Worm have?

Re:So, then

[JourneyExpertApe]

A dinosaur foot clutching it's neck. Obviously.

Old

[Golias]

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

Damn, slashdot is behind these days.

Bell South

[Hamster Lover]

Actually, a search on Yahoo for the creature was initiated on the Bell South network millions of years ago and since Yahoo did not pay for the "enhanced service" the results are just coming in now. Should have used MSN Search, but then again the only search result for "dinosaur +'will not fly' +crashes" would have been Internet Explorer.

near the ground?

[Bananatree3]

This leads scientists to believe that it was a land based predator.

Even the more better to catch the worm!

So did my first girlfriend...

[cloudturtle]

that's why I got out of computer science.

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?

no, blame the Protestants

[Scudsucker]

The Catholics have, for the most part, accepted evolution. The pope said that science and Christianity can get along just fine, and in most of these disucssions you'll find someone who went to Catholic school, and was taught evolution in science class. No, you can thank Protestants for this one.

Re:no, blame the Protestants

[EiZei]

To be honest just about everyone but american fundies have accepted evolution.

Re:Missing Brink

[Boronx]

God created man on the 7th day.

Does that ever explain a lot.

Re:Missing Brink

[stjobe]

God created man on the 7th day.

And on the 8th day God created rock and roll [oldielyrics.com]

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"

Well, you know what they say...

[SeaDour]

"The early bird stomps the worm!"

This is totally backwards.

[earthbound kid]

You fools! Can't you see? Clearly, this a case where a late dinosaur had a body like bird, not the other way around!

Curiosity about our world - perhaps a wee bit OT

[QuatermassX]

I've been reading Clare Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys and have enjoyed her description of the beginnings of the Royal Society. Composed of the best scientific minds of the day, non-scientist Pepys headed up the society (twice, if memory serves). His bottomless curiosity about the mysteries in the world around him led him to question and converse with people like, say, Newton without actually quite understanding the details.

Reminds me of the best conversations on Slashdot - a collection of exceedingl

As a practicing Catholic...

[plazman30]

I have to say this is cool stuff. Any doubts that God's method of making new species is NOT evoluition is slowly being squashed. God made evolution. It works for him, he leaves it alone and lets it do it's job.

Re:ID

[swimmar132]

I'd rate this troll 3 out of 10 points. Not believable enough, sorry.

Re:ID

[convolvatron]

you're absolutely right. by even admitting that there is
a chain of relations between species (the fossil record),
and then saying that its broken because it has holes, there
is no way that person really holds the belief that all
species were independently created.

Re:ID

[scowling]

So do you also believe that bats are birds, and that rabbits chew their cud?

And are you sure that your god created man on the 6th day and not before he created plants and animals as per Genesis 2?

Re:ID

[scowling]

Are you interpreting the bible such that your god created plants and animals twice? Once before and once after he created man? Heresy.

In any case, evolution and belief in any god are not incompatible -- unless you believe that the bible is literal truth, which I suspect that you do, which is why you so casually ignored my question as to whether or not bats are birds and if rabbits chew their cud.

Your bible contains contradictions and errors; it cannot be said to be infallible. It must therefore be interpret

Re:ID

[scowling]

By the way, I'm sure the next of your contradictions was going to be that insects don't have four feet, and snails do not melt.

You'd be wrong. I don't consider the interpretation of those passages as errors to be compelling. The "bats are birds" and cud-chewing bits, however, are very clearly errors, even in the original language, and provide absolute proof that the bible cannot be considered infallible (your intrpretation of the original Hebrew is incorrect, BTW).

I am not trying to show that the Bible is f

Re:ID

[Dimensio]

When did I say that I actually believed the fossil record? I don't. I believe that God created birds and fish on the 5th day, then mankind on the 6th.

Wait, I thought that you said that you accepted Intelligent Design theory. You are aware that common descent is part of ID, right?

Re:ID

[Dimensio]

Where is common descent part of ID?

Michael Behe, the man who essentially launched the ID movement, accepts common descent of all biological life forms as truth. So does Michael Denton.

Of course, it's not surprising that you would disagree with the authors of ID theory. It's not like creationists are known for ever having a clue as to what they're talking about.

Re:ID

[Scuff]

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.

Re:ID

[Scuff]

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

Re:ID

[scowling]

You can't possibly intelligently discuss evolution based solely on what your high school science teacher taught you. No, evolution does not require a stimulus to drive mutation. Either your science teacher was wrong, was purposefully dumbing it down for you (my high school chemistry teacher never once discussed pi or sigma bonding, for example) or you have misunderstood what he told you.

Evolution is, simply, the change in allele frequencies in a population from one generation to the next. Natural selection

Re:ID

[Nexus Seven]

The bacteria is mutating all of the time. Some of the bacteria mutate into drug-resistant forms, some don't. When the drugs are applied, the drug-resistant bacteria survives, the rest die. Now the drug resistant form multiplies and becomes prevalent.

It's called natural selection and is a central tenet of evolution.

Re:ID

[TheLink]

"Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it."

I believe the importance

Re:ID

[Guido von Guido]

What the science camp has faith in is simply that the universe operates according to consistent and predictable rules. Unfortunately for ID, there's no "there" there. Most of the scientists who support ID don't actually do research about ID. Michael Behe wrote Darwin's Black Box almost ten years ago. There's a couple of philosophy books by William Dembski. There's a bunch of books attacking evolution by folks like law professor Phil Johnson or Jonathon Wells. Yet none of these people have any experiments a

Re:ID

[Guido von Guido]

...and unfortunately for me I forgot to preview. User error...

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.

Re:ID

[AuMatar]

You're either using really subtle humor for a text based medium, or an absolute idiot.

Re:ID

[shmlco]

An INTELLIGENT designer reuses his code base.

Re:ID

[Hannah E. Davis]

While the majority of mutations are indeed bad, there are plenty that are relatively harmless.

For example, have you ever seen a cat (or other creature) with extra toes? That's an example of a minor mutation which, although it does no good that I know of, also does no harm to the creature. There are plenty of others like this as well, as well as mutations that cause only a small amount of harm but provide the mutated creature with some sort of protection against death or disease. In this latter category y

Re:ID

[scowling]

You take the data from a scientific experiment and plot it out on a graph and then derive a curve from those plotted points. Then you try the experiment again and again and again. Eventually, you should be able to predict where on that curve the data will fall.

You don't need to determine every point on that curve. In fact, it is impossible to plot every point on that curve; there will always be gaps.

We have hundreds of millions of data points supporting evolution. This latest discovery, in an analogous way,

Re:ID

[scowling]

Because more people are saying that it is a scientific theory.

More people can call it whatever they like; it's still not a scientific theory, because it is not falsifiable. "Those people" do not get to decide that the scientific method is inadequate. The ID theory will never be peer-reviewed science. It is not a scientific theory.

I invite you to read the Wikipedia entry on the scientific method. [wikipedia.org]

Were falsifiability no longer necessary for the scientific method, then "The Universe was created last Tuesday wil

Re:ID

[scowling]

And, predictably, the Christian retreats from the fight, bruised and bloodied.

I have read more on science, theology and rhetoric than you have probably read about everything in total. I have invited you to read a very simple encyclopedia on the nature of the scientific method; it isn't a trick, it's an honest attempt to educate you on something about which you have more than adequately shown your ignorance.

Religious faith is not incompatible with the fact of evolution -- and it is a fact. ID is completely i

Re:ID

[caenorhabditas]

Wait wait... you have an accepted scientific theory of ID? Please, please tell me. I'd love to hear it, as would any other scientist.

On the other hand, you're probably just full of shit like all the rest of the IDiots. A scientific theory of ID doesn't exist. People much more respected in the "field" of ID than you (ie, Michael Behe) have completely and utterly failed to come up with a scientific theory of ID without changing the meaning of science so drastically that astrology and homeopathy also fall un

Re: ID

[Black Parrot]

> It's impossible to have a good mutation *specifically* where and when you need it.

That's why stuff goes extinct.

Re:ID

[smallpaul]

The parent post is factually incorrect but it isn't flamebait. It should not be modded down so far.

Re:ID

[Hannah E. Davis]

How's this then: what if the chance of the first piece falling into place was incredibly slim, but with each successive correctly-placed piece, the probability of the next piece correctly falling into place became higher? What if there were billions and billions of proto-cars, and the only ones who got to the next step were the ones who already had previous steps right? This changes the probability a fair bit, doesn't it?

The theory of evolution does not suggest that it all happened at once, not does it suggest that nature got it right the first time, or even that it was one simple linear progression from ooze to human being. The fossil record is littered with failures, and even our own bodies show plenty of "false starts".

Re:ID

[millennial]

What's more, some of those false starts may just be a future organ that hasn't fully evolved yet, or hasn't yet evolved out of existence because of a replacement organ.

Unlike a car...

[Errandboy of Doom]

...we have lots of obvious design flaws. The useless appendix, birth canals that struggle to accomodate our ridiculously oversized crania, eyes that can only see three colors with no ultraviolet or infrared or ability to detect polarization of light like some other creatures, we're crappy runners and swimmers. We'd be great walkers, except that we have oddly angled knees that makes them destined to deteriorate. Despite all these obstacles to other means of travel, we get no flight. Perhaps most importan

Re:Unlike a car...

[MalachiConstant]

Unlike a car, we have lots of obvious design flaws.

Spoken like a man who has never owned a Fiero.

Re:Unlike a car...

[shawb]

I've heard that the oddly shaped knees thing is related more to the unnatural position that shoes put our feet in. Then again I've heard a lot of crackpot theories before.

But it really wouldn't matter anyways, all evolution "strives to do" is ensure that you are fit enough that your offspring have offspring. If the knees are good enough to get you to, say, 30 years old, then you would probably have grandchildren if you are going to breed at all (not the case in modern society, but in primitive man I wo

Re:Unlike a car...

[scowling]

Now I'm know you're just trolling. That is an astonshingly, gobsmackingly stupid question; it assumes that under evolutionary theory that all existing species are already perfect and that no more evolution is occurring. Evolutionary theory makes no such claim.

Instead, I'll turn it around: there are flaws in our evolutionary ancestors that are not present to the same degree in modern humans. Those flaws did 'evolve out'. And other flaws 'evolved in'; for example, the human sinus cavities are extremely ineffi

Re:ID

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I do know the theory of evolution and the theory of probability ...

Your argument shows quite clearly that you don't know the theory of evolution. Hint: the dumbed-down, strawman version you present here is standard creationist propaganda.

And for that matter, "I know probability theory" (Keanu says: Whoa!) is a pretty ambitious statement. If you haven't (at least) studied it intensively at the graduate level, you probably don't have the first clue. Very very smart people spend their entire working lives

Re:ID

[Dimensio]

What I do know is that standard evolutionist propaganda is to present some theory that requires a PhD in biology to understand.

If you consider it "propaganda" that only someone who has actually studied a scientific field extensively can fully understand a theory within that field, you might as well reject all of science.

Re:ID

[scowling]

I refer you to this primer [talkorigins.org] on how the probability for spontaneous generation of of life only appears to be so high as to be impossible, and why the "airplane parts in a hurricans" analogy is just plain ridiculous.

Re:ID

[Morky]

You just confirmed the post you responded to. I don't think you've actually read anything about the theory of evolution. Otherwise you wouldn't assume that science is saying that a single random mutation could convert base molecules into complex organisms, as your analogy seems to state. Yes most mutations are probably bad, and tend to cause the organism not to reproduce. What about a mutation, for instance, that increases the number of rods in the retina? All IDers like to say that such and such is "imposs

Re:ID

[caenorhabditas]

Anytime someone refers to amino acids in an origin-of-life debate, that's a red flag for "Person doesn't know what he/she's talking about". Here's a hint: Take a biochemistry class. Learn about RNA world hypothesis.

Re:ID

[scowling]

I invite you to read this explanation of probability in abiogenetic theory [talkorigins.org]. It pops every one of your bubbles.

Re:ID

[caenorhabditas]

"A degree," huh? That's one helluva convincing argument. Why, I think my science teacher has a degree, too. In fact, all of my science teachers had degrees. And they taught things a lot more specialized than "science," things like "Fundamental Genetics," "Molecular Genetics," "Evolution," "Developmental Biology," "Bioinformatics" and "Biochemistry." And guess what, all of them taught evolutionary theory. In fact, if you collect all of the Ph.D's who believe in ID and all of the Ph.D's named "Steve" who agre

Re:It's on Slashdot

[badasscat]

Well, as it says flat-out in big, bold type at the Museum of Natural History in NYC,

BIRDS ARE DINOSAURS.

They make no bones about it. It actually gave me chills when I first saw that. They also had a logical and easy to understand rationale for why it's not accurate to say "birds descended from dinosaurs" either; that birds are dinosaurs. (Unfortunately I don't recall what it was right now, but I remember they used an analogy that was similar to "just as man is not 'descended from' mammals, birds have not 'descended from' dinosaurs. Humans are mammals that have evolved over millions of years, just as birds are highly evolved dinosaurs.")

From what I've read, this is becoming a popular - if not the prevailing - belief among scientists at the moment.

"Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?"

[lostraven]

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 [berkeley.edu]

Of interest are twenty proposed characteristics "the first birds shared [...] with
many coelurosaurian dinosaurs." Take a look and see what you think.

-Shawn

Re:"Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?"

[Sensible Clod]

Well, *all* birds share more than twenty characteristics with you and me, such as: eyes (2); feet (2); DNA, amino acids...in short, birds and dinosaurs might be said to be as similar as humans are to rats [bbc.co.uk]. So, humans are obviously rats, then, right?

Or maybe just you are. Get real.

Re:"Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?"

[shawb]

Those twenty things are shared by early birds and coelurosaurian dinosaurs are generally not found among other organisms. Other organisms may have a very small set of these features, but nowhere near all twenty. This is standard practice for taxonomy.

Re:"Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?"

[Sensible Clod]

Well done. Now then, do you know how many things rats and humans have in common that are not generally found in other organisms? Hint: the number is so high that rats are practically irreplaceable when it comes to doing 'human-oriented' tests on animals. About the only other animal with so many shared 'rare' characteristics is the pig -- not what the hypothesis of evolution predicts.

Re:"Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?"

[Sensible Clod]

Regardless of the (questionable) reliability of such dating methods, just how large a portion of fossils are dated that way? Not enough to really be sure. (Very expensive.)

Oh, and the fossil evidence: not all that grand [lakesideschool.org] (pg. 1-2).

Re:It's on Slashdot

[Hannah E. Davis]

When I was in elementary school, I had a project that involved drawing a bird skeleton -- I think I was making a poster, and as a burgeoning artist, I wanted to try copying a picture in a bird book that I had. It took an awfully long time, but by the end of it, I was quite familiar with the bone structure. I don't remember what kind of bird it was, but probably a peregrine falcon since I know I did a project on them.

A few days later, I went to the local nature museum where they have a dinosaur exhibit. I

Re:It's on Slashdot

[Leontes]

This is true. That exhibit at the museum is so tweet. In fact, their entire exhibit (the dinosaur wing), demonstrates, in my mind, rather concretely the beautiful reasonable progression of evolutionary history, not to parrot the scientific view.
Birds are therapod dinosaurs. I can't understand why there is such a flap about this. You can see exactly who they are related to and other evolutionary steps at the exhibit. Stunning, mind-expanding. Let the idea seed your imagination. Migrate from ignoranc

Re:It's on Slashdot

[ozbird]

In fact, their entire exhibit (the dinosaur wing) ...

Birds with dinosaur feet, dinosaur wings - the link is complete! ;)

As a birdwatcher, I find it strange that anyone could think that birds are not dinosaurs. Why is that? Is it simply a case of humans wanting to believe that mammals are better than dinosaurs because we live today and they don't?

A similar scrawl from ye olde Slashe Pointe, 1258

[Sensible Clod]

Well, as it saith flat-out in bigge, bolde tipe at the Museume of the Historie of Nature in Londone,

THE WORLD IS FLAT.

They makest no bones about it. Faith, it gave me chills when I first chanced to see that. They also had a logical and easy to understand rationale for why it be not correcte to say "the world appeareth as though flat" either; that the world is flat. (I recall not juste what it was hither, but I remember they used an analogie nigh similar to "juste as the seas are not 'appearing to be of water', the world is not 'appearing to be flat'. The world is totally flat of its owne, juste as the seas are totally water of their owne.)

From what I've read, this hath been coming to be a popular - if not the prevailing - belief amongst scientistes at the hither and nowe.

Re:hmmm...

[Mike Markley]

Or the earliest birds had dinosaurs that were like feet.

Re:Is this really news?

[vishbar]

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 bir