I, too, thought that I read that Huxley had predicted that birds evolved from dinosaurs and that
Archaeopteryx was a confirmation of that. But all the references that I can find now seem to indicate that
Archaeopteryx was discovered first, and Huxley then used
Archaeopteryx to propose the dinosaur ancestry of birds.
From
Wikipedia:
The first complete specimen was announced in 1862, only two years after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, and became a key piece of evidence in debate over evolution.
...
In the 1970s, John Ostrom, following T. H. Huxley's lead in 1868, argued that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs and Archaeopteryx was a critical piece of evidence for this argument....
More explicitly:
In 1868, another renowned British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley interpreted the Archaeopteryx fossil to be a transitional bird having many reptilian features. Using the fossils of Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus, a bird-sized and bird-like dinosaur, Huxley argued that birds and reptiles were descended from common ancestors. Decades later, Huxley's ideas fell out of favor. The recent discovery of many feathered dinosaurs has proven Huxley to have been right.
I could tell you what I've read about evolution, the big-bang, super-universes, quantum foam, and all that stuff. Eventually you'd ask a question I can't answer, then I'd have to go look it up. Even If I had the time for that shit, in the end you'd ask a question science hasn't answered yet. So let's save time and skip ahead to "I don't know." --
jhuger
™ Version 4.2
