Winged Dinosaur

Wonder how creationists will explain this one?
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Fossil of 4-Winged Dinosaur Casts Light on Birds and Flight
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, NYTimes



Scientists in China have found the fossils of a feathered creature, identified as a small dinosaur, that they say casts new light on the origin of birds and their ability to fly.

With two sets of wings, one on the forelimbs and the other on its legs, it was a strange-looking animal, something like a scaled-up, three-foot-long dragonfly, but with feathers. All four wings were covered with feathers arranged in a pattern similar to that on modern birds. Even its long tail was fringed with feathers.

Reporting the discovery in today's issue of the journal Nature, the Chinese paleontologists said the animal probably used its four wings to glide from tree to tree, much as flying squirrels do today. This represented, they said, a previously unknown intermediate stage in the evolution of birds and flight.

"The significance of the new fossils is far beyond the strange appearance," the leader of the discovery team, Dr. Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, said in a statement. "It brings important information to the long-debated issue of avian flight origin."

Some scientists said the new evidence could yield the answer to the question of how birds first took to flight: from the ground up, or from the trees down? Did some fleet reptiles flap their feathered forelimbs to run faster and faster, until they became airborne? Or did some tree-dwelling reptiles glide through the forest canopy, eventually turning the experience into powered flight?

Only a week ago, other scientists had advanced indirect evidence that seemed to support the ground-up hypothesis. Observations of chukar partridges, a modern flightless bird, suggested that flight may have evolved in two-legged dinosaurs that flapped their feathered forelimbs to get better traction in climbing slopes.

But Dr. Richard O. Prum, an ornithologist at the University of Kansas, said the four-winged dinosaur, which lived about 125 million years ago, "provides striking support for the arboreal-gliding hypothesis of the origin of bird flight."

"Clearly these were bizarre creatures and an important discovery," said Dr. Mark A. Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. But he said it was premature to speculate on the implications of the wings for early bird flight.

The discovery team wrote that the "forelimb and the leg feathers would make a perfect aerofoil together." The team said the findings were important for understanding how ancestors of birds, widely thought to be dinosaurs, "first learned to glide by taking advantage of gravity before flapping flight was acquired in birds."

Even though he disputes the predominant view of a direct link between dinosaurs and birds, Dr. Alan Feduccia, an ornithologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, called the newfound fossil "a new kind of animal that we've never seen before." Its characteristics, he said, "argue against a ground-up origin of flight."

Dr. Xu's team noted that the presence of feathers on the legs would be a hindrance to running fast. It thus "provides negative evidence for the ground-up hypothesis."

In an accompanying article in Nature, Dr. Prum cautioned that "substantial questions remain" concerning how the fossil animal used its four wings and whether its shoulders and wings would have sustained powered flight.

Dr. Xu said the new fossil represented a distinct species of the small predatory dinosaurs known as dromaeosaurs. It has been given the name Microraptor gui, honoring the Chinese paleontologist Gu Zhiwei.

The outlines of four feathered wings, the Chinese scientists said, showed clearly in all six specimens found. The specimens were uncovered recently in Liaoning, a fossil-rich province of northeastern China. Each creature was about three feet long from head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size of a pigeon's.

The Chinese scientists said it was hard to imagine from some of the fossil remains that these little animals were ground dwellers and could run fast on two legs, as postulated in the ground-up theory.

The Liaoning fossil beds have yielded much of the evidence for feathered dinosaurs and a dinosaur-bird link. Last year, other Chinese scientists reported finding a larger, unnamed dromaeosaur with modern-type feathers on its forelimbs.

Stephen Czerkas, director of the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, Utah, said recently that this evidence suggested that winged dromaeosaurs might have been able to fly. In that case, he argued, the dromaeosaurs were not dinosaurs but birds.

As long ago as 1915, an American naturalist, William Beebe, conceived of the idea that perhaps the earliest birds had four wings. The notion came to him from studying what appeared to be vestiges of such a configuration on young chicks. He was wrong about this particular evidence, but may have been prescient after all. Microraptor gui, Dr. Prum said, "looks as if it could have glided straight out of Beebe's notebooks."

 

Creationists believe that there are no fossils that show evolutionary transition. Each fossil is a stand alone being and God simply didn't like some of his creations and withdrew them from the world and replaced them with others. To Creationists, admitting to any transitional fossils is to accept evolution and to accept evolution means that man has simian relations. Some Creationists believe God put fossils in the ground to test man's faith. The most extreme form of Creationism holds that the earth is not very old, there's no such thing as evolution, and all geologic events (like the Grand Canyon) happened in the last few thousand years because the dates in the Bible do not allow for timeframes beyond a few thousand years.

Madmax--No. One can believe in God and believe that He created the world without being a Creationist... and there's nothing simple about Creationism... it's based on twisted logic and convoluted thinking.

Of course, there's always the possibility of fakery, but Nature seems to accept the findings and I would be more skeptical if there were only one fossil, but there are six. It would be tough to fake one fossil, but six would be almost impossible. Still, there's no harm in waiting for further study.

Here's a photo of one of the actual fossils and a rundown on where they was discovered:
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Fossils from the Liaoning beds in China tell a tale of feathered dinosaurs.

23 January 2003
Henry Gee

The Liaoning Beds date from the Early Cretaceous period between abound 124 million and 145 million years Their abundant fossils are renowned for their spectacular preservation of soft tissues, such as fur and feathers, which would not normally fossilize well.

The beds have enabled palaeontologists to study the evolution of early birds, mammals and dinosaurs in unprecedented detail. Six of the known genera of so-called feathered dinosaurs were found there.

China's feathered dinosaurs are diverse in size, likely habit and appearance. They were all theropods - a large group of two-legged, mainly carnivorous dinosaurs that included such fearsome creatures as Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus, as well as the most likely ancestors of birds.

The first feathered dinosaur to be described was Sinosauropteryx1 in 1998. Sinosauropteryx had long, quill-like fibres, which some researchers dismissed as having nothing to do with feathers.

This question was resolved later that year with the discovery of Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx2. These small dinosaurs were also covered with quill-like fibres, but had veined, birdlike feathers in fringes on the forearms or tail (Caudipteryx) or in a tail-tuft alone (Protarchaeopteryx).

These two dinosaurs were thought to be closely related both to Velociraptor and to birds. But Caudipteryx, at least, is now believed to belong to a group of specialized theropods related to the unusual beaked dinosaur Oviraptor, which is rather remote from the direct lineage of birds.

The diversity of feathered dinosaurs was accented by the 1999 discovery of quill-like fibres in the relatively large dinosaur Beipiaosaurus3, a member of the rather sloth-like vegetarian theropods called therizinosaurs. This showed that feather-like fibres are an ancient feature of dinosaurs, and may have covered theropods for millions of years before the appearance of birds or flight.

But the specific link with birds was reinforced by the report, in the same year, of Sinornithosaurus4, a member of the subgroup of theropods known as dromaeosaurs. These are thought by many to represent some of the closest relatives of birds among dinosaurs.

Sinornithosaurus did not have veined feathers. But a still-unnamed dromaeosaur much like it does bear fringes of feathers, including on its hindlimbs5.

Then, last year, came Microraptor a very small and primitive dromaeosaur with a fibre-like covering and distinct signs of having lived in trees6.

This week's announcement of Microraptor gui shows that true, birdlike feathers were a feature of primitive dromaeosaurs long before birds appear in the fossil record, and suggests that hindwings were lost early in the evolution of powered flight7.



References
Chen, P.-J., Dong, Z.-M. & Zhen, S.-N. An exceptionally well-preserved theropod dinosaur from the Yixian Formation of China. Nature, 391, 147 - 152, (2002).
Qiang, J., Currie, P. , Norell, M. A. & Shu-An, J. Two feathered dinosaurs from northeastern China. Nature, 393, 753 - 761, (1998).
Xu, X., Tang, Z. & Wang, X.-L. A therizinosauroid dinosaur with integumentary structures from China. Nature, 399, 350 - 354, (1999).
Xu, X., Wang, X.-L. & Wu, X.-C. A dromaeosaurid dinosaur with a filamentous integument from the Yixian Formation of China. Nature, 401, 262 - 266, (1999).
Norell, M. et al. 'Modern' feathers on a non-avian dinosaur. Nature, 416, 36 - 37, (2002).
Xu, X., Zhou, Z. & Wang, X. The smallest known non-avian theropod dinosaur. Nature, 408, 705 - 708, (2000).
Xu, X. et al. Four-winged dinosaurs from China. Nature, 421, 335 - 340, (2003).