Genesis chapter 1 has a description of wooden plants
וְעֵ֧ץ "and the tree" in verse 12 can actually PROPERLY be translated "and wood".
quote: The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
Then day 3 ended.
English spore comes from Greek sporos: a sowing, i.e. seed (sown)
From a verb root speiro
speiró: to sow (seed) Original Word: σπείρω Part of Speech: Verb Transliteration: speiró Phonetic Spelling: (spi'-ro) Short Definition: I sow, spread, scatter Definition: I sow, spread, scatter.
The Hebrew word for fruit can mean sperm and yes it can actually mean spore.
"with seed" can actually translate " which its spore(S)"
Possible LITERAL translation
AND WOOD MAKING A SPORE (SPORES) WHICH ITS SPORE(S) (is/are) IN IT
This Science Daily article is discussing the paper by Martone et al. “Discovery of Lignin in Seaweed Reveals Convergent Evolution of Cell-Wall Architecture. Current Biology, 2009; 19 (2): 169.”
The gist of the paper is that:
All land plants evolved from aquatic green algae …Because red and green algae likely diverged more than a billion years ago, the discovery of lignin in red algae suggests that the basic machinery for producing lignin may have existed long before algae moved to land. Alternatively, algae and land plants may have evolved the identical compound independently, after they diverged.
I wonder if this can count as "wooden" stalks existing when algae "stems" were clinging to rocks?
Also.
Can the birds on day 5 (before mammals on day 6) realistically be interpreted as actually existing before reptiles?
Look at this complicated issue.
The genetic information comes first.
BEFORE THE ACTUAL ANIMAL.
quote: NPR Science Friday August 2, 2013 Amy Balanoff American Museum of Natural History ………………………………........ Balanoff “…we looked at animals that were very closely related to Archaeopteryx and Archaeopteryx is …this fossil that’s always been historically…held up as…the transitional species between dinosaurs and the living bird but what we found is that when we looked at Archaeopteryx and we looked at dinosaurs that were very closely related to archaeopteryx that they had brains that were at least as large as the Archaeopteryx brains and in some cases even larger so Archaeopteryx certainly had the capacity to fly at some level and so if Archaeopteryx could fly then by inference these other things had the neurological capacity to fly-not necessarily that they were also taking to the skies but that brain was already there.
Plato “So instead of a chicken and egg, you have a brain or a bird?”
Balanoff “Yea, exactly.”
Plato “First, right. It knew it could fly but it didn’t have the wings or the feathers yet or the knowledge? It knew [or] it had the wiring, are you saying?”
Balanoff “ …Those dinosaurs that …were walking or running on the ground, … they had that capacity, that neurological capacity to fly. …
Plato “ That even makes it, you know, closer, the idea that birds and dinosaurs were the same.”
Balanoff “…that’s born out by other studies, you know, that people looking at the evolutionary history of dinosaurs. There are so many characters that they share …that birds and… the non-avian dinosaurs share in common that it’s not really hotly debated anymore.” …. Plato “So where would you go with your research now? What do you not know or how would you move forward on this? …. Balanoff “There are a few things. What we were looking at specifically was the volume of the brain. The volume of the brain compared to the body size of the animal. But what we’d like to do next is now to look at the shape of the brain to see how the morphology of these different regions are changing along the evolutionary history of birds. …. Plato “Can you use then this brain size and the ability perhaps to fly as a guidepost to the evolution of dinosaurs and evolving from birds [from/with] dinosaurs? Is it helpful at all?
Balanoff “It is helpful but what I think is really interesting about this is that so many of these characters that we thought made up a bird …just keep falling down the evolutionary tree of dinosaurs so , you know, we always thought birds were these things that flew, that had big brains, they had a wishbone, they had feathers and all of these things you find so much earlier in the history of …the non-avian dinosaur lineage that it’s becoming harder and harder to say what exactly a bird is.”
Plato “Yea, because if you go back and you look at the brain casts of other dinosaurs and you see they had it also. …. So the birds that could actually fly or had wings and feathers might be a minority of the birds?”
Balanoff “… birds are so diverse that it’s hard to say they’re a minority but yea they’re not as unique as we thought they once were.” …. Balanoff “There is always something new. …Another thing that we want to do is …add more species too. We’re still not done with-there is a big space between… archaeopteryx and living birds and that needs to be filled in and that’s one of our future areas of research.
Then an issue of mutations and genetic information coming before the actual creature.
quote: Popular Science March 2013 Q: Which came first: the chicken or the egg? …. Chickens, as a species, became chickens through a long, slow process of evolution. At some point, a chicken-like bird produced an offspring that, due to some mutation in its DNA, crossed the threshold from mere chicken likeness into chicken actuality That is to say, a proto-chicken gave birth to a real-life official chicken. And since that real-life official chicken came out of its own egg, we can say that the egg came first. Another way to look at the question would be to ask which came first in evolutionary history. One again, the egg takes precedence. Many characteristics of the modern avian egg-namely an oblong, asymmetrical shape and a hardened shell-were in place before birds diverged from dinosaurs about 150 million years ago. “A lot of the traits that we see in bird eggs evolved prior to birds in theropod dinosaurs,” says Darla Zelenitsky, of the University of Calgary. Another key moment in the history of avian eggs occurred at least 150 million years before that, when a subset of four-limbed vertebrates evolved to produce amniotic eggs. The embryos within the eggs were surrounded by three fluid-filled membranes that provide nourishment, protection, and a way to breathe. The earliest amniotic eggs contained large amounts of yoke, says James R Stewart, a reproductive physiologist at East Tennessee State University. “You still see that in birds, crocodilians, and snakes,” he explains. Like other placental mammals, we humans lost our yoke somewhere along the line, but our eggs still come with a vestigial yolk sac.
Listen to Carl Sagan attempt to give a summary of evolutionary chronology.
He narrowed the Universe's history into 365 days.
The Cosmic Year.
(brackets are my words)
quote: Cosmos EPISODE 2
“By December 1st, green plants had released copious amounts of oxygen and nitrogen into the atmosphere. The sky is made by life.” ….
[Cambrian Explosion was December 15th.]
[Trilobites and squid like creatures were prominent December 18th. ]
[First fish and first vertabrits on December 19th.]
[Then plants on land December 20th.]
[First winged insects December 22.]
[First amphibians December 22. ]
[First trees and reptiles December 23]
….[dinosaurs Christmas eve]
….
“The first mammals emerged on December 26th. The first birds on the following day. But the dinosaurs still dominated the planet [160 million years after they began to exist]”
Perhaps birds were a little earlier than mammals?
I can find a scientist saying (in a Smithsonian article from 7 years ago I have) that birds probably first existed around 250 million years ago, and the article had a feathered dinosaur fossil that dated 190 mya. I will try to find it.
I wonder if there are some possible translations that can have certain parts of scripture be more in line with history (especially with more recent discoveries)?
Deciphering how feathers morphed over the ages from spindly fibers to delicate instruments of flight would shed light on the transition of dinosaurs to birds, and how natural selection forged this complex trait. Few scientists know ancient feathers more intimately than IVPP’s Xu Xing. He has discovered 40 dinosaur species—more than any other living scientist—from all over China. His office at IVPP, across the street from the Beijing Zoo, is cluttered with fossils and casts.
Xu envisions feather evolution as an incremental process. Feathers in their most primitive form were single filaments, resembling quills, that jutted from reptilian skin. These simple structures go way back; even pterodactyls had filaments of sorts. Xu suggests that feather evolution may have gotten started in a common ancestor of pterodactyls and dinosaurs—nearly 240 million years ago, or some 95 million years before Archaeopteryx.
So perhaps 240-250 mya there were birdish creatures.
Combine this issue with flying insects (which existed earlier), and then consider that most reptiles were sort of waterish creatures around the start of the 200 million century (that is to say just after 300 mya)
quote: The earliest known proto-reptiles originated around 312 million years ago during the Carboniferous period, having evolved from advanced reptiliomorph tetrapods that became increasingly adapted to life on dry land. Some early examples include the lizard-like Hylonomus and Casineria
Hylonomus was a reptile, but obviously most "reptiles" 300 million years ago were watery creatures.
quote: Hylonomus (/haɪˈlɒnəməs/; hylo- "forest" + nomos "dweller")[1] is an extinct genus of reptile that lived 312 million years ago during the Late Carboniferous period.[2] It is the earliest unquestionable reptile (Westlothiana is older, but in fact it may have been an amphibian, and Casineria is rather fragmentary). The only species is the type species Hylonomous lyelli.
Birds might not be so much later than the transition period from water creatures to land creatures.
I wonder if birds before land creatures is so much of an absurd anachronism now?
Creationism (especially young earth creationism) is dead as a doornail, when the evidence is taken to account, as a reasonable way of looking at the earth's history.
Evolution is backed up rather strongly (and even the fossil record is pretty good at showing intermediates - especially when it comes to birds and reptiles and humans and transitional ancestors all the way back to chimp like ancestors)
But, is a day age theory type of interpretation of Genesis 1 really so bad?
Sagan did say "green plants" came before even the atmosphere (though there are other theories for the atmosphere like a "big belch" from rocks and BEFORE algae), so he called algae "green plants".
I wonder if it is a good idea to trash Genesis 1 just because Genesis 2 might contradict it and just because YECs want to talk about Evolution and the Big Bang being "Satanic" while vocally and aggressively making very strong accusations against scientists (then there are the science classroom issues).
Stephen Jay Gould said that Genesis 1 got the rough order of life correct.
So perhaps 240-250 mya there were birdish creatures.
These 'birdish creatures' couldn't fly; and lived on land. And they would not have been birdish.
All that is being discussed here is the idea that feathers, all of the various quills and things discovered on fossil dinosaurs, and the fuzzy stuff that covered some pterosaurs, are all evolved from the same thing. That's something palaeontologists argue about. Some think pterosaur fuzz evolved separately. Some think ornithischian quills evolved separately as well.
But, if Xu Xing is right, all that means is that the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs already possessed some kind of integument that later evolved into pterosaur fuzz and proto-feathers. It didn't have feathers, though, and wasn't a bird.
I wonder if birds before land creatures is so much of an absurd anachronism now?
So perhaps 240-250 mya there were birdish creatures.
These 'birdish creatures' couldn't fly; and lived on land. And they would not have been birdish.
All that is being discussed here is the idea that feathers, all of the various quills and things discovered on fossil dinosaurs, and the fuzzy stuff that covered some pterosaurs, are all evolved from the same thing. That's something palaeontologists argue about. Some think pterosaur fuzz evolved separately. Some think ornithischian quills evolved separately as well.
But, if Xu Xing is right, all that means is that the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs already possessed some kind of integument that later evolved into pterosaur fuzz and proto-feathers. It didn't have feathers, though, and wasn't a bird.
There was also a mention of these types of things evolving more than once throughout history. (which seems a lot more possible than lignin evolving separately).
We know that Pterosaurs had a lot in common with birds, and appeared suddenly. And before 200 million years ago..
Pterosaurs appear very suddenly in the fossil record, and their ancestry is very poorly understood. They are close relatives of dinosaurs, but what precisely did they evolve from? Perhaps the most likely candidate so far is a small archosaur from the Lossiemouth Sandstone of Scotland known as Scleromochlus. It has a skull similar to those of pterosaurs and it may have been arboreal. It is also possible that Scleromochlus was a glider, a mode of life that could have given rise to pterosaur flight. However, the proportions of its limbs (long legs and short arms) are exactly opposite the condition in pterosaurs. Until more evidence comes to light, the origin of pterosaurs will remain a major unknown.
The earliest known true pterosaur is Eudimorphodon. It was first identified in ~220 million year old rocks from Northern Italy. Since then, it has also been identified in Austria, Luxembourg, Greenland, and possibly Texas. There are three other known genera of Triassic pterosaur (Austriadactylus, Peteinosaurus, and Preondactylus), all from Central Europe. All were fairly small and probably subsisted on fish and insects.
The idea is that all birds came from big bulky dinosaurs and it might be true.
But perhaps it was much smaller (and earlier) dinosaurs that also had these features?
Most creatures (including the early amphibianish reptiles) during the 300/290 million years ago period were aquatic (or mixed aquatic/land), and I would remind you that sometimes things are found earlier than expected.
There was a monkey type fossil found that dated to 47 million years ago, and before that discovery (roughly) a decade ago, nobody would have placed anything so old.
Browse Scientists Debut A 47 Million-Year-Old Monkey Fossil latest photos. View images and find out more about Scientists Debut A 47 Million-Year-Old Monkey …
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People view the 47 million year old fossilized remains of a primate is seen at the American Museum of Natural History May 19, 2009 in New York City. “Ida” is the ... .
Fossil find may be monkey, human ancestor - UPI.com
A University of Michigan professor says the discovery of a 47 million-year-old fossil may be from a primate species related to humans, apes and monkeys. .
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A 47 million-year-old monkey fossil which hung for decades in obscurity on the wall of a collector may be the missing link between ancient primates and modern man.
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There was also a mention of these types of things evolving more than once throughout history. (which seems a lot more possible than lignin evolving separately).
We know that Pterosaurs had a lot in common with birds, and appeared suddenly. And before 200 million years ago..
Pterosaurs did stuff in common with birds; in the sense that they were also flying animals; and in that they appear to be the closest known relatives of dinosaurs (which birds, of course, are).
Pterosaurs and dinosaurs both appear before 200 million years ago, but I'm not sure why you consider this significant. Both groups first appear during the Triassic (which lasted from about 250-200 million years). You seem to be assuming that 'amphibian' means an animal which lives in water; but even today we have amphibians that live in deserts. At a time when the only terrestrial vertebrates were 'amphibians' (which in this sense just means non-amniote - ie; not part of the group including reptiles, birds and mammals), there would be less competition in fully terrestrial ecosystems. Whether or not something is a 'reptile' does not tell us whether it lived in dry conditions.
But in the Permian, there were lots of uncontroversial amniotes, and some of them lived in deserts.
There was a monkey type fossil found that dated to 47 million years ago, and before that discovery (roughly) a decade ago, nobody would have placed anything so old.
There are several problems with this:
First, it's not true to claim that "nobody would have placed anything so old". Algeripithecus was published in Nature as the oldest known monkey back in 1992; with a reported age between 46 and 50 million years. Now, that was controversial then and still is now, but the idea that a 47-million year old monkey was something no one had expected is simply media hype (more on that in a minute). In the 1992 paper, the authors wrote that their find "confirms predictions about the great antiquity of Simiiformes" - ie. people were expecting to find a monkey that old. Some models of primate evolution should have much older monkeys than this.
Second, the find you're describing is not a monkey. The discoverers received a lot of criticism in the scientific community for the way they released their find via marketing to the media; creating a load of hyperbole and hype about a conclusion which, when it was eventually published, didn't stand up to criticism.
Neither of those points were particularly important to this argument, but I had to make them because I'm a pedant. The key point is that, although fossils sometimes are indeed found which mean groups of animals must have been around longer than we thought, this is not relevant to your point. Birds evolved from terrestrial animals; so they could not have predated them.
quote: Pterosaurs did stuff in common with birds; in the sense that they were also flying animals; and in that they appear to be the closest known relatives of dinosaurs (which birds, of course, are).
They had more in common with birds than you make it sound, and especially a lot more in common with archaeopteryx.
Pterosaur bones were hollow and air-filled, like the bones of birds. They had a keeled breastbone that was developed for the attachment of flight muscles and an enlarged brain that shows specialised features associated with flight.
see this:
quote: Pterosaurs, the earliest flying vertebrates, first appeared in the fossil record around 228 million years ago. Almost all have been found to have long tails and short skulls, necks and hands. According to the study, some time during the Jurassic period, pterosaurs underwent a “body plan reorganization” that resulted in the origin of the more advanced pterodactyloids, which appeared 60 million years later.
But for decades an incomplete fossil record kept the pterodactyloid’s origins a mystery, forming a wide gap between giant flying reptile and its closest pterosaur relative. Without that link, researchers’ understanding of the pterodactyloid was stunted, leaving many questions about the creature’s and evolution unanswered.
Then, in 2001, an international team — that included Andres, George Washington University biology professor James Clark, and Xu Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — found pterodactyloid fossil remains in the mud pits of northwest China.
And they had a common ancestor that predated the dinosaurs.
quote:
Whenever a story about pterosaurs makes it into mainstream news outlets, it is almost inevitable the flying archosaurs are going to be mistakenly called “dinosaurs” by at least one source. .... It might be easy to brush off my complaint as a case of paleo-pedantry, but word choice matters. “Dinosaur” is a word for a specific group of creatures united by shared characteristics and which had their own evolutionary history—it is not a catch-all term for anything reptilian and prehistoric. Calling a pterosaur a dinosaur is an error of the same order of magnitude as saying that our species is a marsupial, but to understand why we need to flesh out the evolutionary relationships of these animals ....
Let’s start from the bottom and work our way up. The Archosauria is a diverse group of reptiles which contains two major subsections: crocodiles and their close relatives (collectively called crurotarsans or pseudosuchians) are on one side of the split, and dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and their closest relatives (called avemetatarsalians) on the other. For our purposes here, we’re concerned with the second group.
Looking at the Avemetatarsalia (see the diagram above), a major split is apparent at the base of this group. On the one side are the dinosaurs and their closest relatives, and on the other are pterosaurs and animals more closely related to them than dinosaurs. Both pterosaurs and dinosaurs are distinct groups that shared a common ancestor, and so to call a pterosaur a dinosaur is to ignore this major divergence in the evolution of both groups. A pterosaur is no more a dinosaur than a goldfish is a shark.
It has a four-chambered heart and two ventricles, an unusual trait among extant reptiles, and both a left and right aorta which are connected by a hole called the Foramen of Panizza. Like birds and mammals, crocodilians have heart valves that direct blood flow in a single direction through the heart chambers.
quote:
Why do crocodiles have a four-chambered heart? - Quora
Reptiles tend to have a three chambered heart i.e,they have a common ventricle because of incompletely developed septum.But crocodile inspire of being a reptile has a completely developed septum due to which the ventricle is divided into right and left … .
A crocodile's heart may help it digest large, bony meals. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Like mammal and bird hearts, a crocodile's heart is a muscle that pumps blood. .
Crocodiles have four chambered heart same as birds and mammals involving two ventricles and two auricles. Its an exception in the reptile family as the reptiles have ... .
Did crocodiles always have 4 part heart, or did they …
Did crocodiles always have 4 part heart, ... don’t have a four chambered heart. ... it means that when the crocodile is underwater it’s heart rate can slow ... .
How many chambers does a crocodile's heart have?? | …
Nov 24, 2007 · Best Answer: Crocodiles have structurally speaking fully separated four-chambered hearts, but have strangely enough several features that allow the mixing of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood, so that the crocodile circulatory system can function as though it had a three-chambered heart.
Crocodilians, like mammals and birds, have a four-chambered heart (two atria and two separate ventricles). In the three-chambered reptile heart, blood destined for the lungs (deoxygenated blood) can mix in the partly divided ventricle with blood destined to go out to the body (oxygenated blood from the lungs).
How much is known about this common ancestor that predates the dinosaur?
How much has been found?
How much can be said?
quote: What was the common ancestor of all dinosaurs?
Laura Cooper, Biologist-in-training, autistic, feminist.
Answered Dec 26, 2014
All dinosaurs are, along with crocodiles, pterosaurs, avian dinosaurs (aka birds) and others archosaurs. They are also members of the group Dinosauriformes, which includes dinosaurs and their closest possible non-dinosaur relatives. The non-dinosaur Dinosauriformes became extinct in the Triassic and only the true Dinosaurs remained. Therefore, the last common ancestor of all dinosaurs would have a Dinosauriformes from the Mid Triassic. It is likely that this creature would have looked a little like this:
....
This is the 235 million year old Lagosuchus, and it together with Marasuchus is believed to be close to the transitional form between cold blooded reptiles and warm blooded true dinosaurs. Dinosaur Institute Origin of Dinosaurs | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
We can rarely say for sure that we have found the last common ancestor of anything, as it is so hard to recognize a last common ancestor and it is unlikely that we have found the fossil of the last member of a species, before the species evolved into another one.(it can be estimated using molecular clocks, but that doesn't tell you the species of the organism), but an organism similar to Lagosuchus is probably something like that last common ancestor.
quote: Dinosauriformes is a clade of archosaurian reptiles that include the dinosaurs and their most immediate relatives. All dinosauriformes are distinguished by several features, such as shortened forelimbs and a partially to fully perforated acetabulum, the hole in the hip socket traditionally used to define dinosaurs. The oldest known member is Asilisaurus, dating to about 245 million years ago in the Anisian age of the middle Triassic period
Much is missing, and links galore from before and after ( not to mention endless horizontal links like a chin linked fence)
Caffeine writes:
quote:
Pterosaurs and dinosaurs both appear before 200 million years ago, but I'm not sure why you consider this significant. Both groups first appear during the Triassic (which lasted from about 250-200 million years). You seem to be assuming that 'amphibian' means an animal which lives in water; but even today we have amphibians that live in deserts. At a time when the only terrestrial vertebrates were 'amphibians' (which in this sense just means non-amniote - ie; not part of the group including reptiles, birds and mammals), there would be less competition in fully terrestrial ecosystems. Whether or not something is a 'reptile' does not tell us whether it lived in dry conditions.
But in the Permian, there were lots of uncontroversial amniotes, and some of them lived in deserts.
Look at the Carboniferous period, which had lots of acidic forests, in which bird-like bones would dissolve.
quote: Tetrapods[edit]
Carboniferous amphibians were diverse and common by the middle of the period, more so than they are today; some were as long as 6 meters, and those fully terrestrial as adults had scaly skin.[29] They included a number of basal tetrapod groups classified in early books under the Labyrinthodontia. These had long bodies, a head covered with bony plates and generally weak or undeveloped limbs. The largest were over 2 meters long. They were accompanied by an assemblage of smaller amphibians included under the Lepospondyli, often only about 15 cm (6 in) long. Some Carboniferous amphibians were aquatic and lived in rivers (Loxomma, Eogyrinus, Proterogyrinus); others may have been semi-aquatic (Ophiderpeton, Amphibamus, Hyloplesion) or terrestrial (Dendrerpeton, Tuditanus, Anthracosaurus).
The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse slowed the evolution of amphibians who could not survive as well in the cooler, drier conditions. Reptiles, however, prospered due to specific key adaptations.[11] One of the greatest evolutionary innovations of the Carboniferous was the amniote egg, which allowed the laying of eggs in a dry environment, allowing for the further exploitation of the land by certain tetrapods. These included the earliest sauropsid reptiles (Hylonomus), and the earliest known synapsid (Archaeothyris). These small lizard-like animals quickly gave rise to many descendants, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Reptiles underwent a major evolutionary radiation in response to the drier climate that preceded the rainforest collapse.[11][30] By the end of the Carboniferous period, amniotes had already diversified into a number of groups, including protorothyridids, captorhinids, araeoscelids, and several families of pelycosaurs.
The Archaeothyris type (from 306 million years ago) is a point of interest, and birds might have evolved from a common ancestor, that dated much earlier.
The origin of birds ... He was therefore forced to rule out dinosaurs as bird ancestors ... The successful extraction of ancient DNA from dinosaur fossils ... Research history · Phylogeny · Features linking ... · Debates · Footnotes .
Late in the period, the diapsid reptiles split into two main lineages, the archosaurs (ancestors of crocodiles and dinosaurs) and the lepidosaurs (predecessors of modern tuataras, lizards, and snakes). First reptiles · Rise of Dinosaurs · The four orders of ... .
Pulmonary anatomy in the Nile crocodile and the ... - PeerJ
... and caudally to cranially in the dorsobronchi in the lungs of Nile crocodiles. ... The lungs of birds have long been known to ... in the fossil record with an ...
also put into engines:
archaeopteryx sac tubular lung
Archaeopteryx has a sac lung like the dinosaurs commonly said to be in their direct line ( sauropod therapod).
PaulK said:
quote: The idea is that birds evolved from small theropod dinosaurs.
This was a criticism of my comment which indicated that Dinosaurs weren't ancestors
I said:
quote: The idea is that all birds came from big bulky dinosaurs and it might be true
Here is an expert:
quote: FROM THE FEBRUARY 2003 ISSUE
Ornithologist and Evolutionary Biologist Alan Feduccia—Plucking Apart the Dino-Birds
By Kathy A. Svitil|Saturday, February 01, 2003
Many of today's paleontologists say birds are dinosaurs—specifically, the surviving members of a group called theropods. But is it true? Alan Feduccia, an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, doesn't think so. He and a handful of other skeptics argue that birds evolved from an early dinosaur ancestor, making them only slightly closer relatives of T. rex than lizards are. Feduccia shared his views with Discover associate editor Kathy A. Svitil.
Why don't you think birds are descended from dinosaurs? First, the time line is all wrong. These alleged dinosaurian ancestors of birds occur 25 million to 80 million years after Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird. Second, by the time you get to dinosaurs, you are dealing with fairly large, earthbound creatures, which means they would have had to evolve flight from the ground up, rather than from the trees down. Evolving flight from the ground up is biophysically implausible.
Third, many of the features of birds and dinosaurs—the hands and teeth for example—don't match. The theropod dinosaur hand consists of the thumb and the next two fingers. The bird hand is made up of the middle three fingers. You can't just flip a switch to go from one type of hand to the other. Of course, it doesn't matter what line of evidence you come up with, you are automatically wrong if it is anything contrary to the dinosaurian origins of birds.
What do you think the first birds were like? I envision a hypothetical proto-bird as a rather small, arboreal creature, the size of a small lizard and weighing less than a couple of pounds, with feathers or proto-feathers. It would have used all four legs to jump from branch to branch and parachute, and then began gliding and active flight.
Some recent dinosaur fossils from China have a downy, featherlike covering. Doesn't that prove a link between dinosaurs and birds? People have accepted that these filamentous structures—dino fuzz—represent proto-feathers. But these things do not resemble feathers, and I don't think they have anything to do with feathers. To me, they look like preserved skin fibers.
The difference between feathers and scales is very, very small. You can transform bird scutes [the scales on bird feet] into feathers with the application of bone morphogenic protein. So while people imagining models for the evolution of feathers feel that filaments must be an intermediate step between scales and feathers, you really don't need that stage.
What about all the other evidence for feathered dinosaurs? When we see actual feathers preserved on specimens, we need to carefully determine if we are looking at secondarily flightless birds that have retained feathers and only superficially resemble dinosaurs, or if the specimens are in fact related to dinosaurs.
quote:Is there anything that would convince you birds really did evolve from dinosaurs? At the time period when birds are thought to have evolved, there are plenty of theropod dinosaurs, but they do not have the key birdlike features. Finding a feathered dinosaur that lived earlier, during the late Triassic, would be very convincing. Until we discover the critical specimens, the issue will never be laid to rest.
I would ask about the heart issue.
Can crocodiles hearts (which are like birds) be said to resemble the dinosaurs PaulK mentioned as ancestors?
Can Crocodiles (I'm thinking of their ancestors) be said to be in a vertical line that dates AFTER the dinosaurs PaulK mentioned?
Or.
Can Crocodiles (ancestors) be said to be in a horizontal line with the dinosaurs PaulK mentioned?
(They seem to be in a vertical line that pre-dates PaulK's theropod dinosaurs.)
Parallel issues to help illustrate my point:
(Butterfly issue)
quote:
Visiting a colleague in Germany in 2012, Boston College Research Professor Paul K. Strother was examining soil samples for pollen, spores, pieces of plants and insect legs - organic debris that might otherwise have been considered "pond scum" when it was trapped in sediment during cataclysmic earth events 200 million years ago.
The slides of rock samples drilled in the German countryside included some material that looked familiar to Strother, a Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences researcher at Boston College's Weston Observatory, who studies the origin and early evolution of land plants. What he saw were features similar to those found in insect wings.
The wrinkle was that these types of moths and butterflies - known as Lepidoptera - were long posited to have evolved 50 to 70 million years later, during the Cretaceous period when the first flowering plants emerged as their prime food source.
"The consensus has been that insects followed flowers," said Strother, a co-author of "A Triassic-Jurassic window into the evolution of Lepidoptera," a new report published today in Science Advances. "But that would be 50 million years later than what the wings were saying. It was odd to say the least, that there would be butterflies before there were flowers."
Five years later, Strother and colleagues from natural history museums in Germany and a university in the Netherlands have developed a scientific case showing the Lepidoptera evolved earlier than previously established - emerging during the Jurassic period.
Absent flowers, the researchers report, primitive moths and butterflies, known as the Glossata, developed the physical attributes - namely the sucking proboscis - to find nutrition by drawing off water droplets from the tips of immature gymnosperm seeds.
"What we've found is that these butterflies and moths with mouth parts were feeding on pollen droplets of gymnosperm seeds - from conifers related to pines, seed plants without fruits and flowers. They were feeding off the cone-borne seeds - mainly as a source of water," said Strother.
Even Charles Darwin called the mysterious evolution of flowering plants "an abominable mystery." Scientists have reckoned that flowering plants preceded the insects that fed off of them. But researchers have gradually started to piece together evidence that moths and butterflies existed earlier than the Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago
quote: The key point is that, although fossils sometimes are indeed found which mean groups of animals must have been around longer than we thought, this is not relevant to your point. Birds evolved from terrestrial animals; so they could not have predated them.
But flying reptiles might have been marine (or from the environment)
And during a time when almost all non-insect life was still marine.
quote: The metacarpal bone allowed a broader wingspan that proved more useful for the terrestrial environment where the specimen was found. It changed how the ancient beast walked and flew in its surroundings, Andres said, and allowed more wing shapes that were good for adapting to various environments.
The fossil fragments also challenged a long-held hypothesis that the pterodactyloid originated and thrived in marine environments.
Clark said that researchers hypothesized that pterodactyloids were mainly a marine group because they leaned heavily on specimens found in marine environments. Turns out, Clark explained, this was because the pterodactyloid’s brittle skeletons can be easily preserved in quiet, unhurried waters along a seashore.
On land, the large, hollow bones of a pterodactyloid face being crushed under millions of years of sediment build-up or disturbed by energetic rivers that can easily chew things up, Clark added.
All dinosaurs are, along with crocodiles, pterosaurs, avian dinosaurs (aka birds) and others archosaurs. They are also members of the group Dinosauriformes, which ... .
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Crocodiles are the closest living relatives of the birds, sharing a common ancestor that lived around 240 million years ago and also gave rise to the dinosaurs.
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Scientists Reconstruct Genome of Common Ancestor of Crocodiles, Birds, Dinosaurs. Dec. 11, 2014 — Crocodiles are the closest living relatives of birds, sharing a common ancestor that lived around 240 million years ago and also gave rise to the dinosaurs. A new study of crocodilian genomes reveals ... .
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Crocodiles are a close living relatives of birds, but compared to their feathered cousins, they are stuck in the past, scientists claim. Both groups of animals share a common ancestor that lived around 240 million years ago, and also gave rise to the dinosaurs
Why ? It won’t tell you anything useful about when birds appeared.
quote: How does this relate to the Sauropod theory?
What “Sauropod theory” ? And how is it relevant ? Sauropods don’t have anything to do with bird evolution, other than being dinosaurs.
But to go back to the actual topic, if you just pick pairs of things out of context Genesis ought to be right nearly half the time by pure chance. Without indulging in creative reinterpretations. So really you are arguing that Genesis is remarkably inaccurate. Thinking beats googling for irrelevancies.
I'm not really too sure what you're trying to say here. Modern birds evolved from relatively big brained dino's. Dino's which also had feathers. I'm not too sure why you think that it's a problem for evolutionary theory.
They had more in common with birds than you make it sound, and especially a lot more in common with archaeopteryx.
That's a lot of copy and paste to say the same as I did. The features you mention like hollow bones are common to dinosaurs - it's not something birds specifically share with pterosaurs.
I'm unsure of the point of the rest of what you write. Birds do share features with crocodiles through common ancestry, but I don't really get why that is significant. It's not like they share things with crocodiles that they don't share with other dinosaurs; in case you were trying to use this to suggest that they weren't dinosaurs. We don't have any extinct dinosaur hearts, of course, but there's no reason to assume they wouldn't be four-chambered.
Look at the Carboniferous period, which had lots of acidic forests, in which bird-like bones would dissolve.
So what you're getting at is that birds may have been around for more than 300 million years; and simply left no fossil evidence for most of that time.
Thing is, this doesn't only require birds to have been around for such a long time without leaving any evidence. Birds are not a sister group to dinosaurs, or anything - though even that would pose problems. Birds are deeply nested within dinosaurs; and your scenario requires all sorts of dinosaur lineages to also have been around since the Carboniferous without leaving a hint of a trace anywhere; along, of course, with the ancestors of crocodiles and mammal.
Basically, you need most terrestrial vertebrates to be living in secret for tens of millions of years, before suddenly all deciding to start being fossilised in the Late Permian. This is unlikely.
Now, you posted some comments from Alan Feduccia suggesting that birds may not be dinosaurs. Feduccia is wrong - his claim that "the issue will never be laid to rest" is laughable and a bit sad; since it was already laid to rest long ago. He, for some reason, refused to accept the fact that he was wrong and has sadly gone totally off the rails in trying to defend an indefensible position.
Birds [i]are[i/] theropod dinosaurs - the similarities are not few or suggestive; they are conclusive.; and cladistic analyses always find birds to be nestled deeply within theropods. Feduccia's sad derailment from reality when it comes to his blind spot can be seen in his changing view of paravians - dinosaurs most closely related to modern birds. He has at different times insisted that Microraptor was clearly a dinosaur and disputed the obvious similarities to birds; and then later that it's clearly a bird and not a theropod dinosaur. You'd think the fact that even he finds it hard to tell the difference would be a clue, but no.
Thing is, though, even if Feduccia was not obviously wrong; or even if these long ghost lineages of every group of amniotes existed, this would not really help you. If Feduccia's interpretation of bird origins is correct - they still evolved from terrestrial animals. If we simply move evolution back a hundred million years or so, hiding somewhere, birds still evolved from terrestrial animals. I am at a loss to understand how you think birds evolved from swimming animals.
and don't get the relevance of the fact that we no longer consider pterodactyls to be seabird analogues.
The jury is still out.
No, it's not. I'm not sure what your point is about the pterodactyls; unless you're just trying to make the general point that we don't know everything and interpretations change. That is, of course, true, but that doesn't mean every absurdist scenario someone can dream up is plausible. You're not defending a controversial interpretation of the evidence. You're defending a wild, half-baked idea which you haven't clearly articulated, that is not supported by anyone anywhere; on account of the fact that there is no hint of any evidence suggesting it may be true.
With regards to this:
I would ask about the heart issue.
Can crocodiles hearts (which are like birds) be said to resemble the dinosaurs PaulK mentioned as ancestors?
Can Crocodiles (I'm thinking of their ancestors) be said to be in a vertical line that dates AFTER the dinosaurs PaulK mentioned?
Or.
Can Crocodiles (ancestors) be said to be in a horizontal line with the dinosaurs PaulK mentioned?
(They seem to be in a vertical line that pre-dates PaulK's theropod dinosaurs.)
We don't have any dinosaur hearts (excluding those of birds, of course), and I don't understand what the rest of this means.
The theropods came AFTER the 245-235 million "common ancestor".
And I deny that this 240 million year old (Dinosauriformes) "common ancestor" really dated BEFORE birds (and the line that led to Crocodiles).
I think there is a major issue with the Crocodile heart (which is like birds), and there was, I suspect, common ancestor to both (300 million years ago?) which had hearts like birds/crocodiles on the one hand while it would later split off into other lines (with typical reptile hearts) like the LATER (in my opinion and speculation) "240 million year old common ancestor", which is only a "so-called common ancestor" birds.
Dinosauriformes came AFTER birds and crocodiles already existed.
Birds branched off (around 275 million years ago) and BECAME the line that would lead to bigger Dinosauriformes. The birds and the ancestor of the Dinosauriformes went in different directions.
Dinosauriformes (ended 235 million years ago in the record) DID LEAD TO THEROPOD DINOSAURS.
Theropod dinosaurs (which started 230 million years ago) did not lead to birds (not the ones today anyway and not Archaeopteryx).
The Theropod dinosaurs maintained the EARLIER sac type lung (which reptiles later all had tubular lungs") as did the Sauropod dinosaurs.
Birds did not get anything from Theropod dinosaurs.
THEY DID NOT EVEN POST DATE THE DINOSAURIFORMES (which is the current view I guess)
Sauropods started 231 million years ago.
Dinosauriformes was 245-335 million years ago (though probably a fair ways earlier in date ACTUALLY).
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