Posted on 06/15/2006 11:39:26 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
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Another gap filled. Good find.
You look, you find.
Two more gaps opened.
Mini-gaps. Not micro-gaps. Still, every new find is an opportunity to recycle the legend of Piltdown Man.
I read about this earlier, but this article makes more sense! Thanks for the post
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MR DUCKS.
MR NOT.
OSAR.
CM WANGS.
LIB!
MR DUCKS.
"Gansus likely behaved much like its modern relatives..." It's possible that's because they were created, not evolved? ;-)
Excellent research.
I was hoping for nano-gaps, but whatever. Anyway, you don't have to reach back to Piltdown. Once upon a time, some Chinese farmer jammed two new (and real) fossil bird progenitors together to make one, but instead of one fossil and two gaps, you got two fossils and three gaps when people realized what he did. This is evidence that all fossil evidence of bird evolution is fake. Or something.
Yes. It's the "Pierre the Bridge Builder" interpretation.
"Gansus is very close to a modern bird and helps fill in the big gap between clearly non-modern birds and the explosion of early birds that marked the Cretaceous period, the final era of the Dinosaur Age," said Peter Dodson, professor of anatomy at Penns School of Veterinary Medicine and professor in Penns Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. "Gansus is the oldest example of the nearly modern birds that branched off of the trunk of the family tree that began with the famous proto-bird Archaeopteryx."
"helps fill in the big gap"
ok
1) then in laymans terms, is this an example of fossil record of intermediate speciation?
2) is there any indication of what happened to the heads?
"Gansus is something of a lost species, originally described from a fossil leg found in 1983, but since largely ignored by science. The five specimens described by Dodson and his colleagues had many of the anatomical traits of modern birds, including feathers, bone structure and webbed feet, although every specimen lacked a skull."
apparently, these fossils were fragments, and were assembled by the authors...
3) are you satisified with their conclusions?
Yes, a small mink-like creature subsided only upon the heads of these birds, thus it is extremely unlikely we will ever find an intact specimen.
(The above was a joke.)
Thanks for the ping!
So they find a 115 million-year-old duck, and that somehow fills a gap? We have ducks now, with the same features they found in this fossil. The entire article gave no reason why we should think this bird was any different other than in size from modern birds, and they even call it a "near-modern" bird.
And then there's the little problem of not actually having the bird's head.
I haven't read the original paper, so I don't know. What I posted was only a press release. What's your opinion?
Maybe they didn't have heads, and heads evolved later.
Amazing, you read the actual journal article? That's an achievement considering it hasn't shown up on the web yet. *drums fingers impatiently*
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