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From: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Prediction or Observation?  II
Message-ID: <480@psivax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 31-May-85 17:13:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: psivax.480
Posted: Fri May 31 17:13:28 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 2-Jun-85 20:40:18 EDT
References: <1127@uwmacc.UUCP> <133@utastro.UUCP>
Reply-To: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Distribution: net
Organization: Pacesetter Systems Inc., Sylmar, CA
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In article <133@utastro.UUCP> ethan@utastro.UUCP (Ethan Vishniac) writes:
>> 
>   As for those bird fossils, could you give a reference to that?  (I think
>you already did earlier but I've lost it.)  There are at least two important
>points to keep in mind with them.  First, in what sense were the fossils
>"modern"?  Someone else has already commented that other paleotologists
>think they are probably pterosaurs.  The difference between birds and
>pterosaurs are sufficiently numerous that I'm tempted to believe that the
>fossils are extremely fragmentary and "modern" means that the bones are
>hollow and fragile.  Second, archeopteryx could coexist with its descendants
>as  long as it didn't directly compete with them.  The only real impossibility
>is that its descendants couldn't predate it.
>
	I am  the one who wrote about the alternate identification of
these fossils(based on an article in a recent issue of one of the
Linnean Society journals). Pauls reference was to a science newspaper
that is by reporters not scientists. And yes the fossils were *very*
fragmentary, and quite small - there was a photo of one of them in
the Science News article. Its supposed modernity was, I believe, in
the structure of the (few) joints among the specimens.

P.S. Paul, if you will show me an early Triassic bird fossil that is
*clearly* a bird(perhaps a skull), I might seriously doubt evolution:
late Jurassic is simply not that much of a difference from current
evidence, and does not involve birds *predating* thier hypothetical
ancestors.
-- 

				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

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