MrDarwin

I haven't seen the actual article yet, but yet another feathered dinosaur has turned up:

from <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49200-2002Mar6.html" target="_blank">Scientists Uncover Chinese Dinosaur
</a>

Sooner or later they're going to turn up an actual dinosaur-bird transitional fossil...

[ March 06, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

MrDarwin

Here's another article based on the same press release:

<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020306/ap_on_sc/feathered_dinosaur_2&cid=624" target="_blank">Scientists Uncover Chinese Dinosaur
</a>

Kevin Dorner

<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/03/06/feathered.dinosaur/index.html" target="_blank">And another one from CNN</a>

randman

"Sooner or later they're going to turn up an actual dinosaur-bird transitional fossil..."
Now, I thought you guys have been claiming they already have found an actual transitional fossil.
Please understand this is why I can't beleive in evolution. I can't tell you how often things are presented as a fact, when the reality is everyone knows it is an overstatement.
An "actual" donosaur-bird transitional fossil, eh?

tgamble

we (or rather they, as in scientists) have.

I think the remark was meant as humor actually.

Just what do you think a transitional fossil should look like?

Kevin Dorner

randman: And when one like Archaeopteryx does turn up, you'll say it a) isn't transitional just because or b) it's fake, because since one fossil was faked a hundred years ago, therefore they all are. If you really wanted to understand, you'd be at the library reading, instead of here saying that because a discovery made this week hasn't been reviewed enough to have complete confidence in it, that this somehow undoes two hundred years of discoveries that have been. Yes yes, been there done that. Yawn. Personally, I don't believe the sun exists... convince me otherwise. We're only fifty percent confident because it's only visible half the time. Not enough to call it a "fact."

James AD

QUOTE]Originally posted by MrDarwin:
<strong>Sooner or later they're going to turn up an actual dinosaur-bird transitional fossil...</strong>[/QUOTE]

Are you trying tease out the creationists, who don't understand the concept?

Vorkosigan

Exciting news! Can't wait til someone finds a tyrannosaur with the feathers still on.

Michael

luvluv

Guys I sometimes cannot tell when you are kidding, so do you believe that this was an actual bird-dino or not?

And also, I'm not trying to be cute or anything, but I had heard that the original winged dinosaur was not real. Is that true? Where could I read about that?

MrDarwin

What both the creationists and the evolutionary biologists who are opposed to the dinosaur-bird link have to answer is, why were early birds so different from modern birds, and so similar to dinosaurs that without feathers they are essentially indistinguishable from dinosaurs? And why are we finding dinosaurs with feather-like structures? (If as Feduccia et al. claim the so-called feathered dinosaurs are really secondarily flightless birds, they still have the similarity between theropod dinosaurs and early birds to contend with.)

Here's my own take on the dinosaur-bird controversy: with all this talk of birds evolving from dinosaurs, and therefore birds are dinosaurs, somebody is going to finally figure out that it's the other way around, that the theropod dinosaurs actually evolved from early birds that lost the ability to fly and got really big (anybody ever wonder why Tyrannosaurus had such ridiculously small arms?).