Full story: http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/health/dinosaur-tail-trapped-in-amber-trnd/index.html
I’d love proponents of both evolution and ID to tell me how their theories predicted this, along with supporting documentation from before the discovery. Thanks!
Fred Hoyle is not available for comment.
Wow. Obviously God doesn’t exist after all. I’m crushed.
Looks like a male. Sexual selection anyone?
I know how evolution can predict it:
“Evolution predicts we will find dinosaur tails with feathers.”
“Um, but we already know they found a dinosaur tail with feathers.”
“Right, and evolution predicts it!”
Dinosaurs decided it would be cool to fly… they ran and ran for a particular reason and dumb luck decided to cooperate… after millions of years of running for that particular reason the feathers grew…
However, dinosaurs never got to fly because they got too fat for which McFaten Run Through franchise is reportedly responsible…
In other news: I don’t want to live… God doesn’t exist…I wanna die…
phoodoo,
How did evolutionary theory predict it, Phoodoo? What does ID say on the subject?
evolution theory used a common feature of quantum mechanics called backwards causation…
ID says on the theme whatever is necessary….
hope this helps…
ID predicts that if you want to make a flying dinosaur that one way to do so would be to create one with feathers.
Evolution predicts nothing, because evolution can’t plan ahead. What you get is what you get. Maybe it will fortuitously help to contribute to make a feather. Maybe it won’t.
By the way, those “feathers” don’t look like they would contribute much to being able to fly. Is it perhaps a baby bird?
In a word
frontloading ………….on steroids
I guess that is three words 😉
peace
‘Beautiful Feathered Tyrant’ Too Fat to Fly
“A team of Chinese and Canadian scientists announced on Wednesday that farmers had discovered a new species of dinosaur as big as a T-rex, covered in feathers, in a small quarry in northeast China. The dinosaurs, found in a pack of three, are the largest feathered animal ever discovered – alive or extinct.
Paleontologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing named the species Yutyrannus huali, a Latin-Mandarin hybrid, meaning “beautiful feathered tyrant.”
What no one has been able to figure out is why these hulking things had feathers (or, more accurately, baby chick-style fuzz; The BBC offers an artist’s rendering) in the first place: these large carnivores would have been too big to fly.
According to Professor Xu Xing, one of the paleontologists who announced the discovery, a plausible theory states that the feathers served merely as a warm coat, though their spaced-out arrangement would not have been ideal for insulation.
Scientists’ other guess: they were there purely for fashion, darling—a fetching covering designed to attract a mate.
In any event, this impractical feather accessory, coupled with paleontologists’ descriptions of the animals (“beautiful,” “sociable,” “gregarious”) kind of makes these guys sound like the drag queens of the dinosaur world.
On that note, here’s a funny line from Dr. Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at Britain’s Natural History Museum:
“What the discovery shows is that you can still be a pretty big meat-eater and still get away with having feathers.”
Yutyrannus huali: She couldn’t fly, but, damn, she looked fly.”
If it was my call I’d say feathers appearance had something to do with sex… as evolution often predicts…
http://gawker.com/5899321/beautiful-feathered-tyrant-too-fat-to-fly
Mung,
So the prediction of where to find Tiktaalik wasn’t a prediction, because evolution wasn’t thinking “I’ll drop some of these down here for Neil Schubin”?
Some time ago, scientists started proposing that birds were closely related to dinosaurs after examination of several fossils of one of the dinosaur lineages (I don’t remember which).
I wasn’t too convinced, but I thought, I will be more convinced if they find dinosaurs with feathers. Well, that’s a request for more evidence, based on a prediction. Namely, that if some lineage of dinosaurs was related to birds, then there might have been at least some members of such lineage that had feathers, even if incipient, not-that-well–developed, ones.
More anatomical studies, more fossils making the case, a dinosaur was discovered that left imprints of something looking like feathers in the rock where it was trapped, more anatomical studies, more fossils with suggestive anatomies, more with feathers, more with feathers like this, more with feathers like that, etc.
I’m convinced now.
Evolution doesn’t know which accidents are going to take place where. Or when. Or what their effect will be. Or whether they will be beneficial. Things change. Well duh.
So the feathers in the picture are only incipient feathers, not real feathers? How can you tell?
And of course birds are related to dinosaurs. They are also related to humans. And cats. And plants.
Mung,
But if evolution happened, shouldn’t we able to predict (interpolate) based on known records and putative mechanism?
Entropy,
Wow! If gazz reads this he is going to get aroused…
If I had known you had scientific evidence like you just presented here, I would’ve left and never came back… tell us more Mr. Science….
I’m not sure I can trust the wishful thinking of some guy who is still looking for his inner fish.
So he was lucky then? He randomly picked a spot and found what he wanted?
I didn’t say anything about the feathers in the picture. “Even if” means that if we didn’t find “perfect” feathers we might find incipient ones.
That’s is why I said “closely related” not just “related.”
Just for clarification, I’m not a proponent of evolution. Darwin and Wallace, sure. But me? I live in a time when proposing evolution would be like proposing gravitation.
I made a thread on dinosaurs and birds some time ago on TSZ.
Anyways it does help creationism as i see it.
First the first conclusion should be that these “dinos’ with feathers have feathers and anatomy like birds because THEY ARE BIRDS.
why not? Well becaue a old classification system was created where they imagined fossils of creatures constituted a dinosaur group.
Yet YEC would tend to say, I insist, there are no such divisions in nature called dinosaurs. not reptiles or mammals by the way.
I strongly suggest these KINDS of creatures, called dinosaurs, are simply great or small ground birds within a spectrum of diversity.
they have feathers because they first were flying creatures. then , after the fall, took to the ground.
this happened with our Ostriches, Moas, Enmus, and terror birds of S america(extinct) and very common in the fossil record.
so a t rex and gang really are just ground birds, with teeth, in a spectrum of diversity.
its all been a classification system error that with time will discover heaps pf more feathery ground birds now called dinosaurs.
They probably didn’t roar, like in fiction stories, but squawked or mimicked .
so possibly a t-rex could speak like your parrot. In fact doubt since i think all birds can speak.
Every so often, Byers produces a pearl.
You can’t make a prediction if you don’t have a theory and some data points to apply your theory to, and predict new data points on the basis of.
Before the discovery of feathered dinosaurs, birds and dinosaurs were nevertheless thought to share common descent. In other words, that birds evolved form dinosaurs. Since no (unambigously) feathered dinosaur fossils were known at the time, but birds had feathers, it was thought that feathers would have evolved concomitantly with the evolution of birds from dinosaurs.
This leads to a prediction, because if birds really did evolve from dinosaurs and feathers with them, there should have once existed dinosaurs with feathers.
Such predicted fossils were subsequently found.
In contrast we have ID, which… predicts nothing in particular. There could be mammals with feathers, there could be snakes with feathers, there could be insects with feathers. There’s absolutely no reason to expect that feathers be restricted to a clade of genetically and anatomically similar organisms. A designer could simply take all the genes for making feathers and transfer them to an entirely different clade. Flying squirrels with feathers, why not? Arctic elephants with feathers? Sure thing buddy. Cats with feathers? That’d be cool. ID predicts nothing, but is ad-hoc compatible with all imaginable observations as “that’s what the inscrutable designer wanted to design”. You can’t even make any statements about relative probabilities.
That’s why evolution is science, and ID is not.
/thread
A trait shared by a number of bottomfeeders. 😀
The original Cell article is A Feathered Dinosaur Tail with Primitive Plumage Trapped in Mid-Cretaceous Amber
And his prediction of the time frame turns out was all wrong.
But you conveniently dismiss that fact. Because you are a skeptic.
Not sure I understand. I do not believe evolutionary theory “predicted” (non-avialan) dinosaurs with feathers. If I recall correctly, there has been a long-standing debate whether birds were a sister group to dinosaur reptiles or that they should be nesting within it. In my understanding, it was the discovery of feathered non-avialan dinosaurs that resolved this debate in favor of the latter.
Correct?
Corneel,
Well, they might not have predicted it BEFORE, but they do now!
The great thing about science is that its predictions can change.
Cool. I don’t know why people think evolution’s lacking foresight is a problem. Of course it would not ‘know’ that feathers would provide a massively useful feature that would allow the establishment of a significant clade of (mostly) airborne creatures. Same, for that matter, goes for the forearms on which flight feathers are borne, or the musculature that enables their flapping. We can see with hindsight how useful they are, but that does not mean their origination requires foresight.
Feathers are dual purpose (at least). They provide insulation as well as flight. Birds don’t only have them on their forearms. So, is it impossible to imagine that this could have been their initial function (ie, the reason for their initial retention)? When waved, an armful of such feathers happens to provide air resistance – also useful in tails, for balance.
No, it wasn’t. Rather, it is you who is mistaken about what the fossil represents.
You think it represents the first transition to land, rather than a transitional tetrapod.
It had actually been suspected for a while, even prior to the discovery of tiktaalik, and the later discovered tetrapod trackways from poland, that the first transition to land took place before the ages of known transitional fossils, because there were already numerous trackways known exhibiting transitional morphology, predating the fossil “series” incorporating tiktaalik, panderichtus, acanthostega and so on.
Haha, I do not even disagree with that. But let’s be fair here: the prediction that birds nested (no pun intended) within dinosaurs did not come from the blue but came from anatomical similarities that were already made in the late 19th century, way before the discovery of feathered dinosaurs (besides Archaeopteryx). In that context, feathers on non-avialan dinosaurs make perfect sense; Those dinosaurs share a feathered common ancestor with modern birds.
From intelligent design we infer … what?
Well I guess Shubin never predicted and discovered Tiktaalik then.
Fake news everyone.
You mean dinosaurs descended from birds?
No, how did you get that?
It’s perfectly clear from this thread that all the IDC’s are simply Joe Gallien. I mean, they literally are. They are reduced to saying the things he’s been saying for literally years. They have nothing else. It turns out Joe G was a great predictor of where all the other IDC’s would eventually wind up.
You all know by now the futility of engaging with Joe G.
Take a look at your future selves Mung, phoodoo, J-Mac et al: https://intelligentreasoning.blogspot.co.uk/
Haha Jesus Fucking Christ that blog gave me a collapsed lung from laughing. That is some industrial-strength subnormal encephalization on display there.
TristanM,
I predict the great earthquake of 1906 will happen in 1924!
Perhaps, but we are looking for the explanation why feathers occur on theropods incapable of flight. Could ID predict that? I say no.
I predict you’ll say something else stupid.
ID also predicts (or at least should) that if you want to make a flying mammal that one way to do so would be to create one with feathers.
And yet bats simply have fur.
Glen Davidson
Well, not as such, but it was long suspected that feathers evolved for insulation (although display is a possibility, probably one that could be found in the literature) well before they were adapted for flight. So if birds are more or less understood to begin with adaptations for flight (I suspect that this is the case), their flightless ancestors presumably evolved feathers.
If birds’ ancestors were flightless dinosaurs, those particular ancestors (and their close relatives) should have feathers, then. To be sure, it’s not impossible that feathers evolved for flight and then were used for insulation, but can’t we at least state that this seems a rather less likely scenario than that feathers already existed for some reason and then flight evolved to make use of them?
Glen Davidson
Tristan.
GlenDavidson,
And yet we have no examples of modern animals using feathers for insulation.
Evolution probably predicts that too.
Penguins
The amazing thing is that evolution repeatedly produces things by accident that are unnecessary and superfluous when they arise but will turn out to be critical and brilliant from an engineering perspective later on.
It’s especially amazing given the supposed ruthless power of natural selection to remove anything that is unnecessary and superfluous.
peace
Geese.
Kind of the point of down coats.
Phoodoo showing how little he knows, yet again.
Glen Davidson
Wow, you simply had to ignore how useful feathers were prior to flight to come to an utterly false conclusion that such structures were unnecessary and superfluous.
Creationists are always amazing, almost never in a good way.
Glen Davidson
Interesting that I never heard of such a power. One of those “common sense” things only non-materialists can access via their amazingly rich metaphysics?
GlenDavidson,
You allowed filthywhatever to sell you a loaded argument.
Apparently lots of dinos got along just fine with out feathers. Even dinos existing in the same time and place as the feathered ones
Lots of animals get along with out feathers as insulation today as well. Some would say fur is a better insulation and it’s certainly simpler than feathers.
peace