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Are birds really evovled dinosaurs? What evidence is there for or aginst this idea. My biology teacher said this like it was a fact.

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ORIGINAL: futuredocter37

Are birds really evovled dinosaurs? What evidence is there for or aginst this idea. My biology teacher said this like it was a fact.

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ORIGINAL: futuredocter37

Wouldn't it be different saying that birds are descended from dinosaurs, from saying that birds are dinosaurs. I mean if you believe people evovled from gorillas or apes, we are not either of those we are different. Birds are not dinosaurs, even if birds descended from dinosaurs, they couldn't be same could they????

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Kevin Padian's testimony at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.

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Some of this is just nomenclature, really. As wiki puts it:
"There is an almost universal consensus among paleontologists that birds are the descendants of theropod dinosaurs. Using the strict cladistical definition that all descendants of a single common ancestor must be included in a group for that group to be natural, birds are dinosaurs and dinosaurs are, therefore, not extinct. Birds are classified by most paleontologists as belonging to the subgroup Maniraptora, which are coelurosaurs, which are theropods, which are saurischians, which are dinosaurs"

Similarly, humans are members of the great apes.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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Kevin Padian's testimony at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.

Why is it evolutionists can't answer a simple question without the requisite slam on other view points?

Pitiful.

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I must be missing something. That's a link to expert testimony presented at a trial that addresses futuredoctor's the question. Where's the slam?

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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Some of this is just nomenclature, really. As wiki puts it:
"There is an almost universal consensus among paleontologists that birds are the descendants of theropod dinosaurs. Using the strict cladistical definition that all descendants of a single common ancestor must be included in a group for that group to be natural, birds are dinosaurs and dinosaurs are, therefore, not extinct. Birds are classified by most paleontologists as belonging to the subgroup Maniraptora, which are coelurosaurs, which are theropods, which are saurischians, which are dinosaurs"

Similarly, humans are members of the great apes.

I am very struck by the fact that much biology is the product of arbitrary classification rather than actual evidence, or objective distinctions.

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How is it arbitrary? Support your claim.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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I must be missing something. That's a link to expert testimony presented at a trial that addresses futuredoctor's the question. Where's the slam?

It's a commentary on Pandas from the Kitzmiller trial - the question was simple, and evolutionist can't answer simple questions without trying to slip in corollary issues.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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How is it arbitrary? Support your claim.

It's arbitrary - the product of subjective consideration of fossil evidence. Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing to the objective evidence by which paleontologist can measure the relationship between dinosaurs and birds. There is none.

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I posted the link because it's a discussion (under oath) of the origin of birds that is accessible to the layperson, with some nice illustrations, by a leading authority on the evolution of birds and the origin of bird flight. The fact that the testimony is ultimately directed against Pandas and the scientific status of ID is a lagniappe.

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The objective evidence for the classification (phylogeny) of birds comes primarily from cladistic studies these days, which are based on evidence and objective distinctions, and there are numerous published papers on the subject. Probably the classic paper in the field is:

Gauthier, J., 1986. Saurischian monophyly and the origin of birds. In: K. Padian, ed. The Origin of Birds and the Evolution of Flight. Memoirs California Academy of Sciences 8. pp. 1–55

which I couldn't find online. A more recent overview is:

Senter, P., 2007. A NEW LOOK AT THE PHYLOGENY OF COELUROSAURIA (DINOSAURIA: THEROPODA), Journal of Systematic Palaeontology (2007), 5: 429-463 (abstract)

The Wikipedia link I posted above provides much more information on this topic.

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Indeed, the debate about dinosaur feathers is still somewhat contested

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Not really.

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Really

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More doubts:

"Amazing" Dino Fossil Found With Skin, Tissue in China"

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No, not really. All the palaeontologists who I 'know' through forums and mailing lists think that this research is rubbish. There are a handful of people who believe that the 'protofeathers' on Sinosauropteryx fossils are collagen. They are the palaeontologists Lingham-Soliar, Xiaolin Wang and ornithologist Alan Feduccia. They make a vocal argument, but the evidence of feathered dinosaurs is not even somewhat contested. They make an argument that Sinosauropteryx wasn't feathered, by no means disproving the dozen other fossils of feathered dinosaurs.

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That was one of the worst science articles I've ever read.

What does Psittacosaurus have to do with feathers on dinosaurs, let alone theropod dinosaurs? No responsible palaeontologist has ever said that the structures on Psittacosaurus were 'feathers' nor were they homologous to theropod dinosaur feathers.

If the paper is right, then Psittacosaurus did not have bristle-like structures, they instead had collagen fibres. Nothing to do with feathers.

Oh, and the paper itself doesn't say anything about the 'feathers' or lack of such. Presumably NG just put in the author's opinions without bothering to read the paper and realising that the author is going off-topic from his very own paper.

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Why don't you just say, "Wah!!! I don't like it, so it doesn't count!", it would be shorter, and convey your apparent meaning.

While I appreciate attacking style, appeals to authority, and various other fallacies you have invoked, none of them reduce the doubt cast on the presumed 'dinosaur feather' by these findings.

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Mature and relevant to the point. I like it.

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Even if you think Scutus’s argument is presented poorly, he’s still right that the bristles on psittacosaurs not being the same structures as bird feathers isn’t relevant to the origin of birds. Since their discovery, psittacosaurs have been considered about as far removed from the ancestors of birds as it’s possible for any dinosaur to be—they have always been classified in ornithischia, one of the two major orders into which dinosaurs are divited, while the dinosaurs considered to be bird ancestors belong to the other order, saurischia. The authors of the NG article may as well have said that the lack of feathers in Stegosaurus or Triceratops cast doubt on the relationship between dinosaurs and birds.

Even when psittacosaur quills were first described, the scientists studying them stated that there was no reason to believe they were homologous to the primitive feathers found on theropods. The citation for this is Mayr, Gerald, Peters, D. Stephan, Plodowski, Gerhard & Vogel, Olaf. (2002) in the journal Naturwissenschaften. The NG article is taking something paleontologists have known for the past six years, and then presenting it as though it were some major disproof of the accepted understanding of dinosaurs.

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I think the point is that what is often taken for 'proto-feathers' may very well be simple the rotted dermal collagens in the the integumental structure of the skin of dinosaurs - and that when we actually get a good fosslization of dinosaur skin, as is the case with the psittacosaur, it looks nothing like the skin one would expect on a feathered animal.

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That being said, I don't have a particular problem with dinosaurs having feathers - I just think there is a lot of irrational interpretation going around, and part of that is based on certain misguided notions about how birds arose.

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As I said, paleontologists have never expected the skin of psittacosaurs to look as though it was feathered. They’ve made this clear since the quills were described in 2002.

As for whether the feathers that paleontologists say actually are feathers could be something similar, In several cases the feathers are well-enough preserved that it’s more or less impossible for them to have been anything else. For example, on Jinfengopteryx, it’s visible under a microscope that these feathers contain rows of barbs attached to a central rachis, which isn’t something that could have resulted just from decomposing collagen.

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I’d also recommend you reading what I posted about this here, as well as the essay I wrote at another forum that I linked to there. My comments there were mostly intended for Raptorman, but I’d be interested to know what other creationists have to say about them also.