Anchiornis huxleyi: new four-winged feathered dino?

CMI ^ | October 6, 2009 | Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D.

[GodGunsGuts]

Anchiornis huxleyi: new four-winged feathered dino?...

[GodGunsGuts]

Ping!

[mountainlion]

It seems strange to me that the bone hunters find so many one of a kind samples that don’t seem to go anywhere.

[FormerRep]

This was the biggest waste of my time to read. What exactly was the author’s intent? To preach to the choir about what creationists should think? About how to deny the appearance of fossils by saying “Oh - those aren’t feathers (fill in the blank with some other half cocked interpretation).” I’d like, just once - JUST ONCE - to see a scholarly article from any creation organization that actually gives a solid presentation without the standard reactionary BS slathered all over it. GGG, this wasn’t even a good article to stir debate. Anyone reading it would be better off skipping down to the references at the bottom and reading them instead - it’s pretty obvious that the author didn’t bother to read them.

[GodGunsGuts]

You know, the trouble with skating on the thin ice is that there is little or no margin for error.

[rom]

Who’s the dude in the pirate shirt?

[GodGunsGuts]

As usual, you are all heat no light. But the fact that the article has got you all hot under the collar is a pretty good indication that it hit the bullseye.

[count-your-change]

Ahh....but where does Gansus the Peking Duck fit into the picture? Well, maybe not Peking duck but a Chinese waterfowl purported to be 110 million years old and a modern bird in form.

“Every bird living today, from ostriches ... to bald eagles, probably evolved from a Gansus-like ancestor,” Matthew Lamanna of Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh told a news conference.
Peter Dodson, professor of anatomy the University of Pennsylvania, who oversaw the research, said, “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.” www.redorbit.com/news/.../fossils...waterfowl/index.html

So what did Gansus evolve from? Could it be that the so-called feathered dinosaurs were just small flightless birds?

[FormerRep]

“Could it be that the so-called feathered dinosaurs were just small flightless birds?”

A very real possibility.

[count-your-change]

There are notes of caution be given:

“Four-Winged Dinosaurs Found in China, Experts Announce
Hillary Mayell
for National Geographic News
January 22, 2003

“That’s certainly a possibility,(gliding to flying) and very plausible, but interpreting function from a fossil is highly speculative,” he said. “There’s just a lot we aren’t going to know.”
Mark Norell, chairman of the division of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, concurs. “I think you have to be really cautious about inferring biomechanical properties from fossils. However, what these fossils do tell us is that there are some really strange creatures out there, unlike anything around today.
“This shows that people really have to change their conceptions of what dinosaurs are all about,” he said. “They’re incredibly varied, incredibly diverse, and include everything from small feathered creatures to the large dinosaurs people are most familiar with.”

[FormerRep]

A thoughtful statement there. Some bio-mechanics can be discerned from range of motion skeletal constraints but beyond that it’s a bit of fancy. The caution is well placed.

[editor-surveyor]

Translation:

The article blew away whatever remained of your comical belief system.

[FormerRep]

That’s a strange interpretation.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!