A perfectly preserved fossil of a feathered creature that lived 150 million years ago has provided further evidence to show that modern birds originate from dinosaurs.
The fossil is a complete skeleton of an Archaeopteryx and shows that it had features common to birds and a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods.
Scientists said the feet of the fossilised Archaeopteryx were anatomically almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs, which pointed to a common ancestry for both groups.
Archaeopteryx had many bird-like features, such as feathered wings and a wishbone, but it also had distinctly reptilian traits, including jaws with teeth, a bony tail and claws on its fingers.
Lies, damned lies! How dare you besmirch legitimate theoscientific inquiry with your schmevolution? Bastards.
Several fossils excavated in China have shown that some dinosaurs also grew feathered wings, which led scientists to suggest that perhaps birds are a living group of specialised dinosaurs.
The latest work on Archaeopteryx, the first specimen of which was discovered just two years after Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859, lends further support to the dinosaur origin of birds. Gerald Mayr of the Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, and his colleagues describe details of their investigation into the 10th and best-preserved specimen of Archaeopteryx in the journal Science.
It will be interesting to see if ID and especially young-earth creationists use the eyes and brains and sense of reason that their God supposedly gave them, and think about this latest addition to the veritable mountain of evidence at hand.
Wait. Scratch that. It won't be interesting at all. We all know exactly what their response will be, starting with "LA LA LA" and ending with "I CAN'T HEEEAAR YOU!".
The foot is better preserved than any previous Archaeopteryx specimen. It shows a hyper-extendible second toe, rather like the killer claw of Velociraptor, the vicious theropod dinosaur depicted in the film Jurassic Park.
"These observations provide further evidence for the theropod ancestry of birds," the scientists say. The hyper-extendible second toe blurs the distinction between this ancient bird and the theropod dinosaurs, which brings both closer together as a group, they say.
The theropod dinosaurs ate meat and hunted on two legs, using the claws on their forelimbs to grasp and manipulate their prey.
One theory is that some theropods grew feathers for insulation, but these were useful for escaping from larger predators because flapping feathered forelimbs helped the animals to run and jump. This behaviour eventually resulted in gliding and powered flight.
There's that word again -- "theory". They don't know that it was or wasn't on Noah's ark. Perhaps it was there on the afternoon the Grand Canyon was carved by the Great Flood. Schmience is tricksy that way.
The Natural History Museum in London owns the first Archaeopteryx specimen to have been discovered, which it bought for £750 in 1862. Now, it is probably the most expensive fossil the museum possesses.
Twenty years ago, some scientists claimed that the fossil was a fraud made by sticking feathers into cement around a fossil reptile. But museum scientists soon proved the fossil genuine.
Heh. Faking a piece of evidence sounds exactly like what a dedicated young-earther would do to "prove" his point; in fact, Levantine hucksters are notorious for faking artifacts that were supposedly owned by Christ. You may remember the guy in Israel that got busted a few years back for claiming an ossuary to be that of Jesus' brother.
Maybe that's why the young-earthers are so quick to claim fakery of actual scientific evidence -- because they really would do such a thing to bamboozle the faithful. They've been doing it all along.
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