lpetrich

How would one tell an iguana from a non-iguana? What's the essential quality of iguananess?

Duvenoy

Is it not? That is a very bold statment, unless you happen to have the ability to see the future, for millions of years down the road.

How 'bout this, Ed: what if the Marine Iggy is a transitional species, becoming something else right before our very eyes, hmm? It has certaily become a different flavor of iguana and it's highly unlikely that evolution has abandoned it.

Show me how it's not possile.

doov

MrDarwin

On the other hand, I am not the least bit disappointed that Ed has failed to back up his patently outrageous claim that "modern" birds existed alongside Archaeopteryx, because I have come to expect this kind of behavior from creationists. What I do find disappointing is that so many people pretend that evolutionary theory is falsifiable based on empty claims like this.

Ed

I dealt with the fish to amphibian transition early in this thread so I will not cover it again now. See around page 10.

Quote:

duv: Mammal-Like Reptiles As previously stated, a succession of transitional fossils exists that link reptiles (Class Reptilia) and mammals (Class Mammalia). These particular reptiles are classifie as Subclass Synapsida. Presently, this is the best example of th e transformation of one major higher taxon into another. The morphologic changes that took place are well documented by fossils, beginning with animals essentially 100% reptilian and resulting in animals essentially 100% mammalian. Therefore, I have chosen this as the example to summarize in more detail (Table 1, Fig. 1). http://www.gcssepm.org/special/cuffey_05.htm

This also was dealt with earlier in this thread.

Quote:

duv: Recent Findings (Fishes With Legs) Until the 1980s, the fossil record of early tetrapods was essentially limited to Ichthyostega, a Late Devonian tetrapod from eastern Greenland. (Another Greenland form and an Australian form were known only from fragmentary remains.) But the early tetrapod record has expanded dramatically since 1987. Moreover, the fossil record of their fish ancestors has also been greatly enlarged in recent years. These enhanced records, together with findings from other scientific disciplines has engendered a new understanding of how tetrapods evolved. Instead of fish escaping drought, the first tetrapods are now seen as fishes with legs. http://www.mdgekko.com/devonian/Order/new-order.html

This also was covered earlier in this thread.

Quote:

duv: Paleontologists in China have discovered the fossil remains of a four-winged dinosaur with fully developed, modern feathers on both the forelimbs and hind limbs. The new species, Microraptor gui, provides yet more evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and could go a long way to answering a question scientists have puzzled over for close to 100 years: How did a group of ground-dwelling flightless dinosaurs evolve to a feathered animal capable of flying? http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...romaeosaur.html

Since this critter lived 25 million years AFTER archeaopteryx, which was one of the early birds it is unlikely that it is ancestral to birds. In fact it is probably just an unusual gliding bird. Just as there are flying and gliding mammals so also there were probably flying and gliding birds. Also referring to similar feathered dinosaurs: the claim that Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx were dinosaurs rather than birds is made with a certainty far exceeding the evidence. Larry Martin and Alan Feduccia, two experts on bird evolution, and John Ruben, a zoophysiologist, are all convinced these creatures were flightless descendants of earlier flying birds and were more "advanced" than Archaeopteryx. The dating is certainly consistent with that view, as the new fossils are believed to be some 25 million years younger than Archaeopteryx.

Quote:

duv: If you want to falsify evolution, find a mammal fossil in the Devonian strata, or something similar. Piece o’ cake, right? Wrong! The fossils don't exist and even their absence supports the toE because they appear where the ToE predics they will. But The ToE is certainly falsifiable. Just find that out-of-place fossil. doov

Since God created different organisms in different ages such a find is unlikely. Mammals were not created until later. But IF a mammal was found in Devonian strata, I am sure it would be explained away somehow, ie elaborate fraud, upthrust, or etc.

Ed

Because the claim that it is aquatic is being used as strong evidence that it is a transitional form for whales. But in fact even if it was aquatic there are still huge hurdles to be overcome. It may very well be like a platypus and just a mosaic that is not transitional to anything.

Ed

In addtion to Protavis, very recently, another bird of almost the same age as Archaeopteryx was discovered in northeastern China, and named Confuciusornis; Confuciusornis resembles Archaeopteryx in having wing claws, but unlike Archaeopteryx and like modern birds, Confuciusornis lacked teeth.

Jack the Bodiless

From page 10:
MrDarwin's reply:
...So, you did NOT cover it. You digressed into a discussion of the fossil record of modern amphibians, but failed to address the evolution of amphibians from fish via tetrapods.

And now you're lying about having "dealt with" the issue, in order to avoid confronting yet more fossil evidence of tetrapod evolution.
Nope.
Nope.
It doesn't have to be "ancestral to modern birds" to be a transitional form. That's not how evolution works. An archosaur/bird transitional form can evolve into a whole group of transitionals, many of which will be evolutionary "dead-ends". Also, some transitionals will continue to live alongside their descendants (and the descendants of other transitionals). The platypus is a surviving reptile-bird transitional form, but that doesn't mean that modern mammals evolved from the platypus.
This is entirely un-Biblical.
There would have to be EVIDENCE of fraud. And "upthrusts" (I presume you mean "overthrusts") are very obvious.
There are no such "hurdles", and the platypus is a reptile/bird transitional form with a lineage that can be traced back through the fossil record to the therapsids.
Confuciusornis is NOT a "modern" bird. Nor is it a "fully developed bird living before Archaeopteryx".

So you lied.

MrDarwin

There is some uncertainty about the precise age of Confuciusornis, but it lived some time after Archaeopteryx--the question is only how long after. The best estimates now indicate that Confuciusornis lived during the early Cretaceous. (Edited after doing some checking to add that there's no uncertainty after all: the fossils have been confidently dated to early Cretaceous, so Confuciusornis lived many millions of years after Archaeopteryx.)

And that makes it a modern bird... how?

In fact, toothlessness is the only character that Confuciusornis had in common with modern birds (as opposed to Archaeopteryx and other early birds). In other characters it was consistent with the early, transitional, dinosaur-like birds (in fact I might note that several dinosaurs were toothless as well, so this character does not in and of itself make Confuciusornis more like modern birds than like dinosaurs).

So you've gone from claiming that modern birds existed alongside Archaeopteryx, to claiming that a bird slightly more similar to modern birds lived sometime after Archaeopteryx. And this is supposed to disprove evolution???

(Edited to add that I was wrong about toothlessness being the only characteristic of modern birds that Confuciusornis had that Archaeoptyeryx did not, but given the respective ages of their fossils, I think that's even more in favor of evolution than of Ed's original claim that "modern birds" co-existed with Archaeopteryx. Just for fun, here is a photo of an extremely well-preserved specimen of Confuciusornis. Last time I checked, there weren't any modern birds with great big claws like that!)

MrDarwin

Just to make the same clarification that I made with Ed, I really wish people (even paleontologists who should know better) would stop calling early tetrapods "amphibians". They are as different from modern amphibians as they are from modern reptiles. This is why I pointed out that modern amphibians are irrelevant to the fish-to-tetrapod transition: these early transitional creatures were nothing like amphibians unless we stretch the definition of "amphibian" to the point that it becomes entirely meaningless (and thus causes confusion, as it already has in this discussion). Even if modern amphibians didn't exist, it would have no bearing on the transition from fish to tetrapods.

Duvenoy

Mr. D., Juvenile hoatzins of the Amazon, have wing claws, and use them to clamber around in the tree limbs. But they are lost as the bird matures.

I think that this the only one showing this ancient feature.

Interesting, no?

doov