Archaeopteryx and Dino-Bird Evolution

I feel so loved...Someone who cares: And such a loss to art history, too.If Rodin had been in town the museum wouldn't have had to hire that grad student. Everyone knows about the big bucks to be made in paleontology.What they don't realize is that we really do need the money. Professional sculptors are expensive. And a lot of work to boot. You have no idea how hard it is to imprint a feather on limestone without damaging the adjacent reptile bones, and then getting the bubbles and grain to match so no one can tell under museum lighting. This kind of thing really keeps us busy.And we're talking about a small fossil. I thought I'd never get those otter legs attached to our whale skeleton... Has anyone ever told you you have an amazing eye for art? Actually we do.We have Hesperornis by William Henry Rinehart and Compsognathus by Evelyn Beatrice Longman. We're especially proud of our Velociraptor, an original by Camille Claudel.The museum recently acquired a number of new pieces, of course, including a Microraptor and Protoavis by the renowned Chinese sculptor Liu Zhengde. You're telling me it's a dinosaur with fake feathers.... unless the feathers are real, and then it's just a bird?Well, if the feathers on this Microraptor are real I want my money back. I paid for a genuine Liu.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

It may interest you to know that the Archaeopteryx fossils are regarded as genuine even by the hard-core creationists at Answers in Genesis. They list your 'hoax' assertion near the top of their Arguments we think creationists should NOT use.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Archaeopteryx is back in the news again. Canadian Nick Longrich reports in the journal Paleobiology that the long feathers on the creature's hind legs were indeed flight feathers, making Archie a four-winged flyer like Microraptor gui.Their dinosaurian hind legs could not be splayed for flight. This suggests that four-winged dino-birds held their feet close to their bodies and used their rear flight feathers as stabilizers in a configuration similar to that used by the Wright brothers in the first airplanes.

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Microraptor in flight
(LiveScience)

__Links are all to LiveScience.
Todd Marshall is the artist of the Archaeopteryx image that provided the detail I use for my avatar.
The full-size image appears at LiveScience in the series 'Avian Ancestors.'

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

A graphic accompanies the article that shows the configuration of Archie's leg feathers. No, they are not exactly like Microraptor's. In fact, the graphic makes the difference obvious. The interesting thing is that the involvement of leg feathers in flight appears not to be the exception in the earliest birds, but the rule.The news is the publication of a study confirming the function of the leg feathers in flight. There is a catalog of features one expects to find on flight feathers and these fill the bill. It represents a further filling in of the picture. It is not that Archie sported long feathers on its legs and body that might have served a flight function. That's where we were before.Naturally, all of this becomes more fodder for the debate about whether avian flight evolved from the ground up or the trees down.Interesting stuff! _Edited by Archer Opterix, : Clarity.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.