Birds and Reptiles

Hi, Faith24. First off, the theory of evolution doesn’t say either way. Neither of the two options are a violation of the theory of evolution, because the theory of evolution is about how evolution happens, not about what sequence of events happened.As an example, compare it to the theory of combustion, which describes how a gas-powered engine propels a vehicle. This theory says nothing about where the vehicle powered by combustion goes. All it says is how the engine works, not what is accomplished with it.The Theory of Evolution is just the description of how the evolutionary engine works. Birds evolving from dinosaurs or birds evolving from some other group is just a description of where the evolutionary vehicle took the lineage using that engine.If dinosaurs did not evolve from birds, then this is a misconception of the evidence, not a misconception of the theory.----- That’s the question, isn’t it?The line between what is a bird and what is a dinosaur is not distinct, so, in many cases, you can’t tell if it’s a bird or not.----- First, in case you didn’t notice, you have to bend your knees while walking or running, too.Second, not all birds have fixed thigh bone. Ostriches do not have fixed thigh bones, yet ostriches breathe like birds, and all indications are that ostriches breathe just fine.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Arachnophilia. This seems highly unrealistic. Scutes clearly predate feathers in the fossil record. I think they even predate the diapsid-synapsid split, so it seems unlikely that feathers predated that.I'm also highly skeptical because apparently none of the cited work by Alan Brush demonstrating that scutes happen when feather development is suppressed were published or peer-reviewed.Also, I'm not sure that a developmental pathway defaulting to a certain end product is really evidence that that end product is the primitive condition. I'm no geneticist, though, so I could be wrong.I could be convinced, however, if they could cause crocodilians to develop feathers instead of scutes using the same techniques.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, DrJones."SM" stands for "scientific method": I'm not sure where it started, but people were using it in Does ID follow the scientific method?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Buz. Not true.Birds and dinosaurs share similar limb configurations, postures, feathers, jaws, wrist bones, scales and scutes, etc.The only thing I can think of in which dinosaurs are more like modern reptiles than birds is that they have long tails. Everything else that dinosaurs and modern reptiles have in common, they also have in common with birds.Maybe somebody else knows something that I don't, so I'll leave it to someone more knowledgeable than myself to correct me if I need correction.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Buzsaw. All birds are oviparous too. And crocodiles are also more related to birds than they are to other reptiles. Birds also have no fur. Birds are reptiles. And, even if they're not, you can't use the point you're trying to prove as evidence for the point you're trying to prove. Birds are also land-dwellers. So, paleontologists say dinosaurs are the ancestors of birds because... they are the best candidate they can find?And this is your argument for why dinosaurs are not the ancestors of birds? [qs=Buzsaw]small similar appearing heads and swishy tails, unlike birds.If you look closer at the actual shape of the skulls bones, dinosaur skull bones more closely resemble bird skull bones than lizard skull bones. Also, there are dinosaurs that have beaks! Scientific record cites evolution as reason for leg differences and size. What? You mean reptiles and dinosaurs lived at the same time and place, whereas birds didn't?If so, you're wrong. There used to be many birds with teeth, the last of which survived until 3.5 million years ago, during the Ice Ages. And, there are dinosaurs that have no teeth! And, snakes have very different teeth from dinosaurs and crocodiles!And, that part about similar bone structures is wrong. Nonsense. Theropod dinosaurs looked a lot more like birds than like iguanas: they had feathers and stood up on two legs, had long necks and even incubated their eggs like birds.-----This stuff is all absurd, Buzsaw! What little of it is true doesn't show that dinosaurs are more like other reptiles than they are like birds.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, arachnophilia. This is actually a term I had forgotten: thanks for the refresher course. I was tempted to talk about diapsids, but... meh, you've got to pick your battles.I tend to avoid the sciencespeak entirely with Buzsaw.----- Actually, I was picturing oviraptorids when I wrote that. Now that I think about it, it is kind of a disingenuous comment, given the homology implications. I probably should have avoided that.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Buz. I agree that you are entitled to your opinion, but it's a very poor debate strategy to just maintain that your points are validIf you don't want to debate, that's fine: just tell me and I'll back off.But, if your intention is not to debate your opinions, but to simply maintain them, then why are you posting them on a debate forum?

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Robert. What's so profound about overall appearance?The less attention to you pay to detail, the more different things may look alike.You're essentially arguing that it makes more sense to draw conclusions while squinting one's eyes than it does to draw conclusions after a careful, thorough observation.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Robert. Right. So, like I just said, you advocate looking at vague, overall "likeness" and ignoring in-depth detail. Or, as I shall now rephrase it, you advocate watching YouTube videos instead of running cladistic analyses with codified characters.----- And, "profound anatomical structures" are due to assemblages of smaller parts. A pile of pebbles can look a lot like a pile of beans. But, relatedness is more than just similarity of the overall "pile": it's similarity of the parts from which the overall pile is generated. Thylacine parts are essentially marsupial parts assembled into a dog-like pile.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Boof. They're all their own "kinds" of placental mammals, of course. For some inane reason, Robert has decided that letting marsupials be related to one another would be admitting the veracity of evolution, while having them be related instead to similar placental mammals would not.And, by the way, platypus aren't marsupials; they're monotremes.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.