Replies

When researchers put its celebrity bones under the microscope recently, though, they discovered that this icon of evolution might not have been a bird at all.”

"recently"????

How long has that fossil been around and someone is just getting around to examining it that closely?

Shades of Piltdown Man.

How long has that fossil been around and someone is just getting around to examining it that closely?

If you read the article, you'd have seen that they took tiny chips of the fossil bones and put them under the microscope. People were reluctant to take chips of the bones before to avoid damaging them.

Shades of Piltdown Man.

Piltdown Man was a hoax, as you well know. Do you have any reason to think Archaeopteryx is a hoax, or are you just slinging mud as usual?

I did find this interesting bit of news. So I wonder how Archeopteryx fits into the picture now?

“The detail in their (Gansus) preservation, such as the bone structure and even foot webbing, indicates the animals were well adapted to an aquatic existence. Scientists say Gansus is the oldest known member of the group that includes modern birds. They believe this makes its story a critical one in understanding the evolution of avian species.
“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, US, told a news conference on Thursday.
Gansus yumenensis was first described from a fossil leg found in 1983. The new finds, however, give scientists an almost complete view of the animal. All they lack now is an example of a skull. The specimens come from a quarry near the town of Changma, in China's Gansu Province, about 2,000km (1,200 miles) west of Beijing. Co-author Jerald Harris, of Dixie State College of Utah, said the animal was very modern in its appearance.
“If you took most of the bones in its body, including famous pieces like the breastbone and the wishbone, and put them next to those of a modern bird, you'd have a lot of difficulty telling them apart,” he told the BBC Radio 4’s Leading Edge programme.
“Gansus would probably have looked very much like a grebe or a diver, or certain kinds of ducks. It had webbed feet and it had fairly powerful legs. We can tell that from looking at the bones in the knee area. This tells us it was a very well-adapted diving or swimming-type bird.”
palaeosbios.blogspot.com/.../waterfowl-fossil-makes-splash.html

And this from NatGeo:

“.......According to the researchers, Gansus is the oldest clearly established member of the subclass Ornithurae, the group most closely related to modern birds.
The Gansus fossils are only 10 to 15 million years younger than the “feathered dinosaurs” discovered a decade ago at Liaoning, in western China.............
news.nationalgeographic.com/.../060615-dinosaurs_2.html -