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--Original Message- From: siriraks arrathrakorn
<arrathrakorn@yahoo.com>Date: 05 November 1998 19:40 >After I have read some papers. I see that many fossils have feather >and may be origin of bird. This is what many people say. But many people are often wrong! But they are living in difference time and >difference place. Yes - they come after the first bird. Not just some of them but all of them. This means probably the origin is the other way round - these feathered dinos are *descendants* of birds. >So, may be. >Archaeopteryx is may not the bird origin. But they are much more >flying organism in the past and only some of them advance than other. None. None found yet. None existed. Birdlike - yes. Arborial - yes. Hairy and bristly - yes. Feathered - no. >But it not make them derived to bird. In the past may have feather >evolution more than one time. And only some of them led to bird. This is not what I think because there were two very big explosions, both just after the first bird known: other birds, and bird-like dinosaurs. I would expect this - feathers give an animal great advantages no other animal has, and drives evolution in new directions. Feathers are extremely specialised - difficult to evolve. They took a long time to appear (certainly a long time to appear in the fossil record). You would expect the biggest explosion in birds to happen just after the first feather. The biggest explosion we see appears just after the first fossil feather. This time, we are lucky - we *do* see the important event in evolution. Feathers evolved once - around the time of _Archaeopteryx_. All birds are descended from a very close relative to _Archaeopteryx_. Many so-called "dinosaurs" are also. The fact that cladistics doesn't agree with this will be evidence that cladistics is bad (when proof appears). John V Jackson jjackson@interalpha.co.uk (not a palaeontologist, and sometimes wrong, but not on this!) |