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Agahnim — Where's the line?
Published: 2010-03-11 10:29:16 +0000 UTC; Views: 6670; Favourites: 99; Downloads: 51
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Description
A diagram for the anti-creationism project I’ve been working on since 2007, which I think is finally getting close to completion. Each of these silhouettes is of one of the transitional fossils between dinosaurs and birds that *EWilloughby has been illustrating for the project. (Thanks to her for making the silhouettes.)The point that this diagram is making should be pretty self-explanatory. According to creationism, birds and dinosaurs are two separate “kinds”, with a clear division between them. Yet instead of these animals being clustered into “birdlike” and “dinosaur-like”, they’re actually arranged on more of a continuum from one to the other. So if there must be an anatomical boundary somewhere between “dinosaur kind” and “bird kind”, then where is it?
The Prattmaster seems to be having some trouble figuring it out also.
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Comments: 45
Between large Theropods and smaller Theropods maybe ?
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Ken Spam would put between the flight and non-flight feathered dinosaurs.
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The latest from Answers in Genesis is that dinosaurs ate birds, therefore birds couldn't possibly have evolved from dinosaurs. Not sure that helps them with this little problem, though.
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Lions eat zebras so zebras cannot be mammals, according to them
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And according to Ray Comfort, they all eat steak, which is what they lived on after the Ark landed in the desolated wastes of the flooded earth. All of them. All the animals. Including the herbivorous ones. Just on the 5 excess cows they had. Not the dinosaurs, obviously. But all the rest. Just on the cows. They ate steak. They survived on steak. From the excess cows. Now I need to sit down and stare at a wall...
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That means that the cow is the only animal according to AiG logic lol
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Great project, splendid diagram. Keep up the good work!
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Sounds like an interesting project. I would love to see it when completed
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This goes straight into my faves because it's completely true XD It's even better when they can't agree on which ones are 100% bird or 100% dinosaur.
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Hey Prattmaster, Here's a solution: Set the class Theropoda as "Bird-like" and the other Dinosaurs "Dinosaur-like".
And on a Personal note, Theropods, due to the fact that they're the most diverse should've been a class of Archosaur of their own and the Sauropodomorphs, Ornithopods and Heterodontosaurs, Thyreophora, Pachycephalosaurs and Ceratops as "Dinosaurs".
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....That makes no sense. Just because a group is diverse doesn't mean that it's not related to other animals. By that logic, beetles aren't really insects, and hadrosaurs aren't ornithopods.
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you should have added protoavis in there......
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but protoavis is a poorly interpreted chimera!
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You do realize that dinosaur tracks look extremely similar to bird tracks, right?
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That comment was written quite a while back. I can't say I still stand by it. That said, I do recognize they are similar in many respects, however don't birds have a backwards facing toe that non-avian dinosaurs (to my knowledge) lack?
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No, other dinosaurs do have it. Confuciusornis is a good example of this.
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Creationuts can't even give a solid definition of exactly what a "kind" even is and it's used in many of their arguments against evolution. We see new species emerging and they say that it's still a part of its respective genus "kind". When a new genus emerges, they say it's still part of the next higher taxonomic grouping.
This fallacy is called "Moving the Goal Post" and it's used when they resort to dismissive tactics against science. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't add any real weight to their claims and its exact definition completely falls apart when pitted against heavy scientific scrutiny.
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I say there isn't aline, the only reason we sperate them is because of how different they can be at times.
Great work though
f+
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A bird has no visible fingers (despite the chicks of Hoatzin).
But this is a very bad definition if Terror-birds really had claws.
But all extant Dinosaurs are birds 
Um... I'll say "Birds are Dinosaurs, but Dinosaurs aren't Birds"
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It's easy - those that can sing are birds! Just listen to the sound
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Does he sound like a bird?
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Du hast nur singen gesagt
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ja... dann ist er doch ein Vogel
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Ah, the elusive "kind", that can mean whatever the creationist wants it to mean.
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Why the dinosaur-to-bird line, rather than the primate-to-homo-sapiens line? Surely the [link] "missing link" portions of the latter are adequately filled in with transitional fossils now?
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My project includes an essay about human origins also, which covers pre-human fossils in a good deal of depth. (That essay was written by ~keesey .) But my own essay for the project is about the origin of birds, so this transition is what’s relevant for it.
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Oh-- I've seen :keesey 's work before. That oblique view of the hominid family tree is very distinctive. Good stuff.
So, what organization is organizing these great projects?
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The answer to that is kind of complicated. In the most general sense, it’s just a group of people I know who all care about this topic, but I also think of this group as a continuation of an anti-creationism community that I ran in 2005 and 2006 along with Torsten van der Lubbe, a German paleontologist. Once the book resulting from this project is ready to be published, I’m hoping to formally revive this community, which was called Feathers and Claws. But it’s probably inaccurate to say that Feathers and Claws is actually “organizing” the project, since Feathers and Claws hasn’t really existed since 2006, and probably won’t exist again until the project is finished.
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Saying "more dinosaur-like" when you mean "less bird-like" is completely ridiculous. Or is that your point?
(The line goes between Archaeopteryx and Microraptor. Sure, it's completely arbitrary, but the word "bird" isn't defined by anything if not conventional usage.)
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In the essay that this image will be part of, I don’t refer to birds as being a type of dinosaur; I just refer to birds and dinosaurs as two groups that are related to one another. This isn’t because I disagree with calling birds a type of dinosaur, it’s because I don’t want to make my essay confusing to creationists. Since the main point of the essay is to prove that birds and dinosaurs are related, I shouldn’t use terminology in it that assumes readers believe this already.
I also mention in the essay that classification-wise the line is drawn right before Archaeopteryx, but that anatomically there’s more in common between Microraptor and Archaeopteryx than there is between several other pairs of animals that appear next to each other in this sequence.
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Okay, I think I understand.
Why is Nqwebasaurus on your chart? Most people have never heard of it, and it's certainly not as basal as Coelophysis. At one time Nqwebasaurus was condsidered a potential compsognathid, like Sinosauropteryx, though I am not sure if that is still the case.
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I included Nqwebasaurus on the chart because my essay discusses it elsewhere, and this diagram is limited to animals covered by my essay. Covering it in the essay was Keesey’s suggestion, since it’s a good example of a theropod that’s slightly more basal than Sinosauropteryx.
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Why not good old Allosaurus?
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Are you suggesting Allosaurus as another example of a theropod that’s slightly more basal than Sinosauropteryx? I guess Allosaurus is an example of this also, but all of its size-related adaptations would make comparing it to Sinosauropteryx kind of difficult for most of the people who’ll be reading my book.
The original version of my essay used Scipionyx for this, but Keesey thought Nqwebasaurus was a better suggestion.
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From the silhouettes it is hard to tell, but just out of curiosity under what criteria did you determine Sinornithosaurus as more birdlike than Anichiornis? I don't know a lot of specific details in this area.
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According to Gregory Paul in Dinosaurs of the Air, dromaeosaurids had several characteristics associated with flight that aren’t found in troodontids or any other group of nonavian dinosaurs. (This is part of his reason for suggesting that dromaeosaurids, but not troodontids, were secondarily flightless.) If you own a copy of that book, he lists some of these characteristics on pages 225-227.
He identifies 38.25 of these characteristics for dromaeosaurids, but only 17.5 for troodontids. Fractional numbers are for characteristics that are present on some but not all members of these families.
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However, considering basal troodontids were quite similar to archeopterygids, I suppose this view changed, specially with the ddiscovery of forms like Jifengopteryx and Anchiornis
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Have you read Dinosaurs of the Air? Even though Jinfengopteryx and Anchiornis hadn’t been discovered yet when that book was published, all of the ways Greg Paul points out that troodontids are less birdlike than dromaeosaurids certainly seem like they apply to those two genera also.
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The line is that species that survived the flood are birds, and those that didn't are dinosaurs.
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