FYI: Did Prehistoric Birds Evolve Flight By Falling Out of Trees?

I would have thought the feathers developed first to regulate the body temperature.

There is a lot of safety from the air, to escape land predators and of course the range of hunting broadens. There lots of plusses from flight.

What makes sense to me is.... they learned to fly while chasing prey OR running away from predators. Little jumps, hops with wings allows some gliding capability.

Additionally, birds evolved from fish and some fish instinctively jump out of the water. Just want to keep that in mind.

"Scientists have largely worked out the origin of birds and feathers" Really? I've only read of fossils which definitely had feathers, and fossils which definitely did not have feathers. Where's the intermediate? Where's the mechanism which made feathers?

Just because some guys in white coats settled in their minds that such things exist doesn't mean there has been any observational evidence to support the evolution of feathers.

@mjfr226,

I have witnessed a flying fish in action off the Napali Coast in Kawaii. I could see some birds having evolved from fish. Although I think many birds of prey evolved from dinosaurs such as the velociraptor.

Why don't you be true to scientific methodology and prove that theory. Go climb the roof of your house and fall out of it repeatedly. Make sure to document how repeating your experiment affects your ability to fly over prolonged periods of time, and ability to fly of your children, grand children etc. (that is if you get to that point of having them).

Rom. 1:22 "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools"

I can assure everyone that birds did not evolve directly from fish.

VecTron,
How can you assure this, plus or even minus to your comment? I am just curious.;)

"Possibly. The trees-down (or “arboreal”) hypothesis has been around . . ."; "Researchers guessed . . ."; ". . .developed anatomical evidence strongly suggesting . . ."; ". . .reptilian scales might have evolved . . ."; " . . . may have helped birds . . .".

Now there is some hard science you can sink your teeth into. Evolution is so shot full of gaping holes and wild conjecture, it is embarrasing to hear it called science. Call it what it is; a religion.

please, this article is a lie; birds did not evolve, everyone knows that it was due to Obama and govn't that the birds are able to fly. It has been proven that without Obamacare the birds would not be able to heal their bodies to continue falling out of trees and learning how to fly. He created the shovel-ready jobs that built the environment for the birds to fly. His education policies taught them how to fly green (without using fossil fuels). He has done all this and much more! (with the caveat of placing all the monkeys in debt).

"Researchers guessed that the scales of tree-dwelling Triassic reptiles elongated into feathers, which helped them leap away from predators."

Weren't they already in the trees to evade predators? What predator evolved to become a threat requiring feathers for the tree dwellers?

It's amazing to me that people are using this as a basis to DENY that evolution exists. What we have are dozens and dozens of hard evidence, entire species of flightless and flighted dinosaurs and Dino-birds, fossilized in stone. But only their imprints remain. Judging their behaviors from a snapshot of bones and feathers is next to impossible.

That some asinine individuals would take that understandable uncertainty on the "how" of evolution and then baselessly turn it into an accusation that there is no evolution at all is just reprehensible and ignorant beyond belief. It's like two people looking at a car speeding along. The first observer wonders whether the car is a manual or an automatic, but there are few external clues to this, so the observer is uncertain. The second observer then takes the first observer's uncertainty as irrefutable evidence that the car not only isn't speeding past, but that there is no car at all!

All analogies fail at some level, but I think that the car analogy truly does reflect the depths of the willful idiocy and denial at work here.

---
Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

What if flight wasn't a newly evolved trait in dinosaurs that allowed then to fly, but an old trait from miniscule creatures that evolved larger? The air was always full of micro fauna living, eating, and breeding. What if flight on the macro scale evolved from flight on the micro scale instead of as an after thought? After all, whales evolved from 4 legged land dwellers that originally came from the ocean, so why couldn't dinosaurs lose the ability to fly as they got larger quickly and then regain that ability later?

@ J. James

Your rant would be useful if there was a basis for to believe in the religious dogma of evolution in the first place. But with the lack of any observable evidence for one species turning into another... I hope you get the point here.

@Bagpipes

Have you ever seen gravity pull something to Earth? I have never seen gravity. But based on pieces of information and a timeline of that information, I can conclude that gravity exists.

Unfortunately it takes a long time to evolve, as denoted by the length of time between fossil records that show significant change. So we won't be able to spoon feed you evolution as it happens.

And to say that evolution is religious dogma is unfair. The Christian religion says that for eternity there was nothing, and then poof, 6k years ago there was everything. Science is saying that they can show much smaller steps than eternity, and narrow "evolution" down to smaller increments, say 10k years each. If someone came around and was able to give a better solution with finer timeframes, perhaps demonstrating observable evidence of something changing every 4k years, I would think the "evolution religion" would be more than happy to refine their "beliefs."
note: I'm making up years in this example.

Science is not always correct. No doubt about it. But it is constantly refined to narrow down to the most likely scenario. That you do not want to take part in this refinement does not make you any better or smarter. I would argue it makes you more afraid of putting yourself in an uncomfortable state of mind.

I believe in God. I do not believe that everything that man has written about God is accurate.

@Bagpipes, it isn't a species turning into another, it is called ADAPTATION. Look at, I'm not trying to offend anyone, African Americans. Africa has an UNGODLY hot climate... during the day. At night, when it is cooler, it would be easier to hunt. Ergo, the black tinge to their skin, camouflage. The Hadza tribe hunt baboons at night, and can just sneak up on the tree they are sitting in, all because of the camo.

Look at whites, coming from regions in the north. For them it wasn't camo, but simply the fact that they had more sun exposure, causing the chromatophores to shrink down, and cause the white tinge.

Adaptation is evolution, not just spontaneously evolving.

(And if I offended anyone, I am deeply sorry and was simply using that as my argument)

Back to the article, I do not understand how an action can result in an evolution.

I can appreciate natural selection, where a mutated reptile (freakishly born with some type of feathers) could have survived longer than their brothers without feathers. This would have encouraged the growth of this winged creature, and so on and so on until it eventually led to birds.

If this is what the article is suggesting happened, I would like to say that it should be worded as such. Writing it in the form of, "these reptiles wanted to fly, so eventually they did" does not help tone down the arguments of those who reject evolution that frequent this site. Because that is ridiculous, just as Capt_Tight_Pants pointed out.

@Toomey, think of this. Maybe the reptile had the featherlets, and the females liked it, they thought it was sexy. SO more featherlets are made, until actual feathers come about.

Now, all this time these reptiles are being hunted, and they are mating, so the reptile adapts to make the feathers useful too. It adapts them along the arms, and uses proto-wings like a spoiler on a car, giving it more traction, and allowing it to jump a lot farther.

Now lets say predators gain these same abilities, or start to. They start being able to catch the ones who have shorter winglets, so the ones with longer winglets start breeding more. they run faster an live longer.

The predators could, this is theoretic, have developed an ambush tactic in the trees, where they glide down quickly and hit the prey in the neck. Well, these reptiles would adapt to go up into the trees as well, so as to see these predators and have safer access to food.

Now the predator has to glide branch to branch, and so it does, etc. etc. etc....

Evolution of flight? I think I have a good idea, and I hope you understand my additions to the theories.

Interesting SgtB, never woulda thought of that.

Question though, the earliest form of reptile (Permian era is as far back as I know) was fully land bound, and lived a little bit like a crocodile, trying to feed on the massive centipedes and dragonflies of the day.

If the birds come from reptiles, could there have been a certain reptile that we don't know about? One that lived alongside this croc like beast?

I suspect the same process of flying squirrels--they glide from tree to tree and birds with feathers probably did that too and eventually it progressed to being able to actually fly short distances to escape predators in the trees.

TeslasDisciple,

This is my point exactly. What you explain makes plenty of sense.

But to just say, "they jumped out of trees, so they grew wings," is to simple to be an explanation of anything. No matter how much I swim, I will not grow gills. So to have the article be as simple as it is, it allows too much room for doubt.

Yes we understand where they were going, but people who do not want to accept such a hypothesis have tremendous ways to reject this claim. Just saying that they are not helping promote the acceptance of science with half-a$$ articles. It's unfortunate that it needs to be done every time, but it obviously still needs to be said.

Edit: too, not to in the first sentence of the second paragraph.

Nice catch Toomey!

@ToomeyND

Sorry, gravity is a theory that is testable and its effects observable in the here and now.

The millions of years in the fossil record are not observations, they are interpretations.

You're right I shouldn't have said evolution is religious dogma, I should have said Darwinism is religious dogma. Evolution is a loosely defined mechanism to explain changes over time in general. Darwinism goes so far as to actually believe that there is a linkage of small changes from any one species on the mythological 'tree of life' to any other species on it. Even though the sciences of irreducible complexity, phylogenetics, etc. Have proven that it isn't possible.

BTW There are many scientists out there who do not believe in Darwinism, or naturalism. Science is a process to test scientific models, it doesn't tell a story in and of itself. Its a false dichotomy stating that you either believe in science or religion.

@TeslasDisciple

Those featherlets have no observed evidence to give reason to believe in their existence. When you want to talk about real science and not some mythical 'just so' stories please add to the conversation.

Darwinism is a racist lie and has been disproven (Asian, Blacks are lesser species). But still it is religious dogma for all the satanic yale skull and bones alumni. There is a difference between adaptation and evolution. A bird might adapt to their environment through selective breeding to become larger or smaller. But it won’t evolve into a fish! Or vice versa. There is no record of a “missing link” or any species evolving. Millions of years of fossil records and no transitional species EVER found. Evolution is a joke.

Also nowhere in the bible does it say the earth is “6000 years old”. That was an interpretation by the church, just like the earth being flat when for thousands of years previous it was known to be a globe.

@Bagpipes, try this one on for size

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/photogalleries/100127-feathered-dinosaurs-color-past-pigment-pictures/#/sinosauropteryx-feather-close-up-dinosaur-color_12397_600x450.jpg

And they "have no observable evidence" how...?

@ALH, look up the evolution of the whale.

Just humor me, please.

When you do, post the site you went to.

And as the final nail in the coffin, Bagpipes, evolution IS testable. Try ants. Give them a certain environment and they will adapt. Raise the toxicity level of the environment they live in, slowly of course, and you will likely see a change in the DNA that takes into account a toxin resistance.

How about the fact that the acacia tree has both thorns AND poisons? They had spines first, and that is why most gazelle have longer tongues. After the spines didn't work, the trees developed heavy alkaline chemicals into their leaves, and they also developed a chemical early warning system to other trees, telling them to increase production of the poisons. The gazelle evolved to have a higher immunity to the toxins, and also learned, innately, to eat from downwind to up.

Want to trade blows? Bring it.

D13, I know that flight is adaptation, but I thought it was more due to survival of the fittest instead of environment. Environment does have a factor, but more so on food and how it is obtained. For example, if the reptile (I'm just gonna call it a friggin proto-bird, don't like it? Fine) proto-bid was evading the predators in the trees, then it would adapt to eat what was in the trees. So they would, in an effort to escape ground predators, jump from branch to branch, meaning that the ones who could not jump far enough hit the tree and broke their neck, meaning no offspring for you.

That is where environment comes in.

And yes, it is a quarrel. He wants to be uppity, and I prefer to let those people know that they are being uppity little twerps. Thank you, come again.

Well thank you D13, that means quite a lot from one in your standing. And I have a hard time letting nimrods go unassailed.

And I do pick my battles, I pick the ones I am most unlikely to win, so that if I do I astound every one. And if I don't, I choose a lesser opponent until I can challenge the greater.

Actually, I hold you in high regards, no sarcasm.

And the same with aldron, I battled with him over the Texan Sheriffs office UAV's

And if you remember Leonardo da Vinci:

"I find that simplicity is by far the most complex thing on Earth"

@TeslasDisciple

Nice fossilized feathers. Now if you want to produce some observable evidence that feathers ever evolved produce an intermediate. We already knew fossilized feathers existed.

I'm not talking about small adaptations. I could point to the many breeds of dogs we got on earth if I was interestead in that. I want evidence that one species became a totally different species, or that an irreducibly complex system was formed where one didn't exist before.

Do you even understand what I am asking or are you that lost in the Darwinian dogma?

If feathers have always existed we should expect feathers to be in the fossil record. If feathers evolved from non feathers overtime then we should expect intermediates to be in the fossil record.

Where are these intermediates?

Thank you D13, I was busy, or else I would have slapped some info into the brick wall.

Why talk about feathers? Because the article states

"What’s wrong with the story? Scientists have largely worked out the origin of birds and feathers, two thirds of what Prum calls the “holy trinity” of evolutionary ornithology"

Which as I have pointed out is an untrue statement.

We have no observable evidence telling us anything but some things had feathers and other things didn't, and no intermediates have been found so there is no reason to date to believe there are any.

Figuring out the mechanism for when birds first jumped out of trees and learned to fly is a snipe hunt (ha! snipe! it's a bird.... it's funny). But seriously why ask a question like "how did birds learn to fly" if we have no evidence that they never could? Or that they ever had to learn this.

@Bagpipes100

You do know that it's not just fosiles that suport evolution, but gentics, comparative anatomy, and a few others forms of evidence?

Here's a good video for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0zpk0lPFU&list=PL0C606FE36BEDAC75&index=6&feature=plpp_video

@bagpipes
You want intermediates? Fortunately, there ARE intermediates! We have found dozens of dinosaur species, represented by hundreds of individual fossils, with feathers of a veritable mosaic of stages of modernity and primitiveness, ranging from simple fluffy filaments to highly advanced fully-formed flight feathers.

But, naturally, you don't care that they actually do exist, because your (double)standard of proof is so impossibly high, absolutely NOTHING would ever convince you that birds did, in fact, evolve from therapod dinosaurs as all the genetics and fossils suggest. You know how I know that nothing can ever convince you? Because EVERYTHING points to birds evolving from dinosaurs, and if ABSOLUTELY ALL THE EVIDENCE THERE IS IN THE WORLD isn't enough to convince you, then it's only logical that there is nothing that will.

Funny, I bet you don't apply anywhere near the amount of blatant denial to something critical of evolution, do you? And I also bet you don't apply that stubborn, bad-faith "skepticism" to your God either.

---
Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

@J. James.

The only time things are as certain about Darwinisim as you are is when you've already assumed what you're trying to prove.

1. I don't think they have conclusively shown what you say. All other explanations need to be thrown out first.

2. Phylogenetics alone has debunked Darwinism because it has shown there is no tree of evolutionary life. As the tree of life formed is dependent on the metric used (DNA, Proteins, ect). Where as, if all things had common ancestry the tree formed would be metric independent (that's mathematical law....stronger than science).

@kokofan50

Common design also explains (and probably better) genetics and comparitive anatomy.

You can't say that just because those things haven't disproven (though they have done that) Darwinism doesn't mean that they support Darwinism. Because under that logic they support anything they don't disprove.

Philosophy of science and logic win the day again. I suggest the cult of Darwin here do some more studying.

@Bagpipes,

To your point number 1. I cannot prove that gravity exists because I haven't ruled out that there is a giant invisible tennis racket that swats everything back to earth when they try to leave. You can't disprove everything. Any other explanations for what has happened in the changing of living organisms should be brought forth and tested. Until one of them makes more sense than evolution, evolution will be what people consider truth.

Evolution is like a 10,000 piece puzzle. Once you fit enough of the pieces together, you can see the overall picture. We will probably never have all of the pieces, but we have more than enough to see the big picture. You can't disprove evolution by removing a few pieces claiming they don't fit. You have to re-arrange all the pieces and fit them together so that they show a completely different picture.

I have yet to see a competing theory that even comes close to explaining how the variety of life we have here on planet Earth came into being. If you are the type of person that is satisfied with the, "God made it that way" explanation, that is fine. But if everyone was satisfied with that answer, then there would be no computers, no internet, and no web site for us to discuss evolution on.

@Bagpipes
That is the most astonishing crock of BS I've seen this week. And your incredulity has absolutely no bearing on the fact that they do exist.

As for phylogenetics DISproving evolution, excuse me, but what on earth have you been smoking? Line up genetic, phylogenetic, and fossil-based trees of life and they align PERFECTLY, with no exceptions. There is absolutely no explanation for this except that evolution MUST be true, barring some obscene farcical ass-rape of Occam's razor, like Satan did it to fool people or something.

---
Always defer to facts rather than philosophy.

The problem with evolution is that it is hard for people to think about the slow changes and great time scales involved. People also think that evolution is heading in some direction and will culminate in the most fit creatures which are what we see today. In reality everything is evolving in all kinds of different directions at the same time, and the environment, food sources, mating behavior, and predators determine which descendents reproduce the most. When the environmental pressures change, the group of creatures that are the most successful reproducers also changes.

Also, the concept of species is really just a human idea to help categorize life forms. We like to think that only creatures within the same species can mate successfully, but the truth is really not that black-and-white. Creatures from different species can mate and produce fertile offspring, just at lower probabilities than for creatures within the same species. Even creatures within the same species cannot always mate successfully, leading to divisions that down the generations lead to divergent species. Can a Dachshund mate with a German Shepherd? We think that Dachshunds and German Shepherds are the result of humans deliberately controlling the mating habits of the dog ancestors, but other natural environmental factors cause the same type of species divergence when, for example a population of creatures gets divided by a flood, and they migrate to regions with different climates in search of food. The successful ones in a cold region will be different from the successful ones in a hot region.

And the idea that humans are the pinnacle of evolution is nonsense too. Everything in the world continues to evolve, including us. Come back in 50 million years and all the plants and animals will be different (except for cockroaches, they never change), and humans' descendents a million generations into the future will be entirely different from the humans of today, and they probably won't be just one set of human descendents. The descendents that live in the polar regions will be different from the ones that live in the tropics, and the ones that live in the high mountains will be different from the ones that live on the coast.

The world is always changing. Geological and climate forces alone have reshaped the Earth many times. If life did not evolve it would not be able to survive.

@HBillyRufus

Agree with every word. Well said.

@D13

Personally, I don't see how big bang supports or disproves God.

However, your statement is a perfect example how the human mind is constantly trying to shoehorn God into reality. Whenever it finds something in nature that is unknown,, ironic or beautiful it anthropomorphizes the phenomenon into the actions of an all powerful god.

From what I've studied of Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods (Weather was hot and "muggy"), flying and feathered dinosaurs evolved mostly likely due to a combination of:

*High winds due to heat exchange between inland oceans and air.

*More effective predation of aquatic life.

*More effective migration during weather changes.

*More effective nesting away from predators.

*More effective mating habits in trees and mountains where there were more high winds

There there was a "de-evolution" of flightless birds which is another story.

@Bagpipes100

"Common design also explains (and probably better) genetics and comparitive anatomy," no it can't!!! That arument is invalid becuase it's a fallicy. That fallicy is talked about in the video and how it's wrong. So, I'm saying you a an ill informed moron who doesn't want to learn how he's wrong.

@Bagpipes100

Sorry forgot to add this. Sicence isn't what won the fight for your mind, and the fact that the most well suported thoery in history is being questioned by people, like you, only using falicies to question it is a sign science has a long way to till it has won the battle.

TO EVERYONE WHO SAYS THAT EVOLUTION IS FAKE AND UNPROVABLE:

An article was recently posted here on PopSci about fruit flies. Researchers put fruit flies in containers and flashed lights at the flies. Whenever there were 2 or 4 flashes, the containers were shaken.

Any animal that could count would brace for a shake whenever 2 or 4 light flashes happened.

However, it took 40 generations for the flies to evolve enough intelligence to count to four and brace for the shaking. That is pretty much incontrovertible evidence in favor of the theory of evolution.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-07/last-breed-fruit-flies-can-count-four

I believe evolution of life is real.
I believe spontanous changes to life occur.
I also believe, we have had visitors from above tweaking with animal life on Earth too, exspecially the humans.
I think all 3 are true.;)

Quoting D13:
"However, in 160 million years, not one dinosaur produced a cave drawing or a written language that we can tell. So, oddly evolution does have some weird gaps that provide a reasonable logical pattern."

"WE HAVE A PROBLEM HOUSTON" ...Time.
"weird gaps" ain't the half of it:

Based upon the presently, observable evidence, our sun's diameter is shrinking at the rate of 5 feet per hour (receding from us at the rate of 2.5 feet per hour). They've established this fact over the past hundred years. I can only assume through simple logic (they actually don't state a reason for this phenomenon), that the cause would be because of its' rate of fuel consumption, you know...Cause and Effect. So, given this observable fact, and if you do the math (assuming of course all things linear, and therefor a constant): just 20 million years ago the surface of the sun would be right here where we stand (REAL observable evolution in action). Where do they get these numbers, millions...billions of years in reference to biological evolution, from? Also keep in mind, that there is only a relatively narrow band around the sun that is life friendly ...DOH!

Oh, and BTW, the fact of evolution is not up for debate. It IS a provable, observable FACT...no doubt about it!

The problem being: Darwinian (macro-evolution...NOT observed) vs Intelligent Design (micro-evolution, a.k.a adaptability to ones' inviro...observed) As for me, I'll put my money on ID, simply because, it is: SO IN YOUR FACE! All one has to do to see, is pull one's head out of one's ass, AND LOOK! ...simple really. If I have offended anyone by this statement, I DO apologize, but really...

@55rebel

"So, given this observable fact, and if you do the math (assuming of course all things linear, and therefore a constant): just 20 million years ago the surface of the sun would be right here where we stand"

At least you admit you're making a massive assumption in the linearity of this event... but why then did you go on and state it anyways? Did you do any research to see if there is an understanding of how the sun expands and contracts? Do we know if it's cyclic, exponential? I hope you didn’t intend the calculation itself to have any bearing or consequence in serious discussion.

As you say, this rate has been deduced over the last century, lets say it has been relatively constant for 100 years (which is unlikely)... many estimates of the sun's age stand at 4.5 Billion years. So what you've presented is a data set comprising 0.000000022% of the full event, and presented that as the constant rate for the entire duration of the event. Even without sufficient data to determine, through pure observation of your isolated data value (i.e. rate at which the sun's diameter recedes), simply looking at the processes by which the sun operates (nuclear fusion) strongly indicates a non-linear event, possibly with cyclic staged rates and periods with little to no change. But still, you've presented a linear assumption on a grossly inadequate data set with the hopes of supporting what statement?

I apologize for picking you out, I've long ago learned to tune out the noise of folks arguing back and forth over evolution, but such blatantly poor assumptions on extremely limited data sets without and consideration of available information on the well-known dynamics that likely drive the system you are considering is maddening and dangerous to the layman’s understanding of any scientific process. Applying this approach, you could manipulate a measurable and verifiable data set to say literally ANYTHING.

For instance, perhaps I decide to visit the city of Hiroshima to study the effect of nuclear weapons. I take some measurements of radiation doses for a month, compile the data and find that the radiation levels are very low, and reducing at what looks to me like a constant rate. I could at that point make the assumption that the decay is therefore constant, and back calculate to 1945 and wonder what all the fuss about nuclear weapons is about, with such low radiation levels right after detonation! Of course, I didn’t bother to do any background research to find that radiological decay is exponential, or that dilution and environmental diffusion greatly affect the initial decay which is not accounted for in my linear model.

I’ve encountered this sort of baseless, reckless assumption leading to completely irresponsible conclusions and a total misunderstanding of a scientific principal/concept at least a dozen times, and just could not help but point it out...

Reptilian Scales to Bird Feathers? What?
Evolution isn't "evolving" it's Naturally selecting a feature out of a Species or a varience in a species comming more common
Dinosaurs were neither Mammal or Reptile or Fish or bird...they were among the "Master Species" that had the potential to specialize out into birds or mammals or reptiles or fish by selectivley loosing their other features they didn't need to survive to adopt to enviroment/conditons
Mating is a major "need to survive" so that getting prettier feathers to pose like a peacock then noticing you can "fly" when you are strutting for a mate or trying to get away from others of your sex in mating riturals sounds plausible as a possible driver to fly