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A Tale of Beaks

5 August 2020
Biology

The link was sent in by Robert – go to https://crev.info/2020/08/scientists-retract-dino-bird-paper/ … which takes us back to a small fossil found in amber. It was originally thought to be a lizard, but diminutive. Then, some months ago it was re-identified in a Nature paper with a dinosaur that was bird like. Now, it has gone back to being a lizard – and its row of teeth play a major part in that decision. As it is preserved in amber the fossil is small and a magnifying glass or microscope is required. The author of the piece, at what is a Creationist web site, goes on to imply palaeontologists were keen to think in terms of evolutionary connections between dinosaurs and birds, seeing what they wanted to see rather than what was really there. Birds evolving from certain kinds of dinosaurs is a very attractive idea that is being pushed to the limits at the moment. A few years ago and nary a mention. It is also a notion that has solved, for mainstream, contrarian questions about the bones of dinosaurs and their weight (the big variety of dinosaurs). Birds have bones that are porous but light – in order for them to lift off the ground. The current view is that dinosaurs had a similar bone structure, enabling them to move fast when hunting prey, or lift their long necks and equally hefty tails. Rather than defying gravity they had evolved to accommodate it. This story has popped up a couple of times over the last four months. It has popped up again as Nature has retracted the article that suggested it was bird like rather than a lizard.

On a similar note of fossil survival go to www.heritagedaily.com/2020/07/palaeontologists-prove-bird-ovary-tissue-c… … Palaeontologists prove bird ovary tissue can be preserved in fossils. Again, the  idea of the survival of soft tissue in rock fossils, which no doubt crev.info will bring up in a future blog post. The idea that the ovaries of birds can be preserved in a fossilised state would challenge uniformitarian processes – and yet palaeontologists can show it has happened. Fossilisation is supposed to take place slowly which means soft  tissue would have quickly rotted away. In order to survive it presumably has to buried in suitable sediments very quickly – and the sediments themselves buried. That requires a catastrophic explanation – a flash flood, volcanic eruption, or tsunami wave might be proposed by a half uniformitarian pretend catastrophist (and no doubt on occasion this did occur). Immediate burial is required, and possibly other factors to achieve instant fossilisation, although not universally a requirement.

The article also raises another complication for mainstream. Birds have only a single ovary. In contrast, the so called bird like dinosaur from which they are thought to have evolved, the oviraptorosaurs (divide it into three and it makes sense), had two ovaries. The implication here is that birds dropped one of the ovaries at a later stage of evolution – possibly to save on weight and enable flight. It seems like a bit of backward evolution. It will be interesting to see what crev.info make of that. They of course assume all the animals, including dinosaurs and birds, were made at the same time (and did not evolve as in the biological tree).

A further point of interest is that the article dates the loss of the bird ovary at 120 million years ago (roughly the transition from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous). Are they saying birds existed in the dinosaur era = the last gasp Cretaceous? If so we have both mammals and birds living in what looks more and more like a catastrophist laying down of sediments (whether in one deposition event, or several). This is only possible if the K/T event is defined by the geology and not by a thin line of iridium. Sediments were laid down both sides of the iridium. I don't suppose that idea will catch on and crev.info would define it all as belonging to Noah's watery trip on the ocean. However, it is not certain that Noah was an earthling. The Flood myth may be all about events in the sky

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